Jiufen and Jinguashi

This weekend, inspired by my just having watched A City of Sadness, I went on a day trip into Northern New Taipei City to explore the towns of Jiufen and Jinguashi. Jiufen is a town famous amongst tourists and Taiwanese people as being both the location in which a City of Sadness (a highly acclaimed Taiwanese film) was filmed and for being the town which inspired Hayao Miyazaki's depiction of the spirit world in his famous film, Spirited Away. Jiufen and Jinguashi are both towns which thrived as gold mining centres during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan in the 1930's. Eventually the gold ran out, but the town now serve as a great monument to the Japanese occupation of Taiwan due to the Japanese architecture which remains in the city.

So after a short train journey followed by and even shorter bus ride, we arrived at our first stop in Jinguashi, home to the Gold Ecological Park. This park contained both restored buildings from the time of Japanese occupation as well various museums on Taiwan's history of gold mining.

Our very first stop was a restored four posted Japanese house, providing us with a great opportunity to experience traditional Japanese architecture and design, tatami mats and all! Unsurprisingly, part of this architecture entailed me having to bend forward significantly when walking through the doorways... 

After having a look at the house, we went to have lunch at a restaurant which offered a 'miner's lunchbox', which though expensive, is fairly renowned, so we felt we had to give it a try!

The lunchbox came wrapped up in this floral cloth, and the lunchbox itself was a metal box with a miner engraved on the front. The food itself (Japanese Katsu Curry) was a little disappointing and we were initially annoyed at the high cost of the meal and left a little unsatisfied. However, after a little bit of time walking around the park, we realised that the reason for the relatively high cost of the lunchbox meal was that we were meant to have kept the lunch boxes! So we eventually returned and I managed to explain the situation to the restaurant with my broken Chinese and we left feeling a little better about the expense.

The park also had a chalet built for the Japanese crown prince in anticipation of his visit to Taiwan. Apparently the prince never actually made it to Jinguashi, but the building and its grounds were still attractive to look around.

Some paths designed to replicate the mining tracks of Jinguashi's past.

The area was filled with monuments to the town's mining past!

There was a museum on the history of gold and gold mining.

The area also had a great view of the town below, including a temple with a large golden statue on top. I did read the name of the statue, but I've forgotten it now...

The natural scenery of the park was also beautiful, and had a great view of both the mountains and the sea. Luckily for us, it was also a very warm and sunny day, with few clouds in site!

The ecological park also had a small mining tunnel which you could enter for 50 NTD.

Inside, it tried to replicate the gold mines and some lifesize figurines of miners, demonstrating the mining process.

The ecological village also had a short walk up a mountain to the remains of a Shinto Temple from the Japanese Occupation.

As you can see, the views were pretty great!

After we had our fill of Jinguashi, we then got on a quick bus journey to the neighbouring town of Jiufen. Jiufen definitely had a much more touristy feel and consisted mostly of a long hughstreet filled with Taiwanese and Japanese tourists as well as shops and stalls selling food and souvenirs.

We saw these pastries for sale at a lot of shops and designed to buy some taro (a sweet, purple potato like root vegetable which is often used in Chinese deserts) pastries and they tasted delicious!

Some of the many souvenirs on offer along the main street.

The street is also renowned for the great number of red lanterns decorating it.

Near the end of the street, we found a restaurant to have dinner at, where I had a pork belly and rice dish, along with some sweet pork buns. It turned out that these buns were chah shah bao, which were one of my favourite kinds of Chiense food before I came to Taiwan. This was the first time I'd seen them, so I was able to mark down the name of them as well as the characters, which was a big plus!

After eating, we looked around the town a little more and saw this great looking tea house.

A view of the town from above.

Just as we were about to leave, we also found this very cool museum which was filled with all sorts of bizarre and grotesque clay masks. The man there told us that they had been made by an artists over the course of the thirty years and that over 1,500 masks were on display. The museum itself just consisted of a few rooms with the masks covering every bit of available wall space. The whole thing was pretty spectacular, and it was a lot of fun looking at the individual masks, all of which had distinct features and personalities!

Finally, just before we left, I decided to try some of the taro balls which Jiufen was famous for. I managed to get a picture of them being made before the woman in the picture directed me to the sign above her which distinctly said no photographs. 

The taro balls themselves were pretty good (although not my favourite kind of desert) and came in a sort of syrupy soup over ice. When I had eaten this, and with the sun setting quickly, we decided to call it a day and promptly caught a bus heading back into the city.