Nangang Bottle Cap Factory

Nangang Bottlecap Factory

南港瓶蓋工廠 

The Nangang Bottlecap Factory was built in 1941 while Taiwan was under Japanese occupation. It started off as a cork factory, then was converted to a bottle cap factory before ultimately closing in 2004. The factory was subsequently opened as a legal place for street art and became a popular venue for filming movies and videos as well as for various club nights. However, recently, the factory has been closed off with gates and barbed wire and the factory is scheduled for partial demolition this summer to make way for a new road. The other Sunday, the factory was briefly opened up for a few hours while some government officials surveyed the area, giving me the excellent opportunity to go inside and check it out!

The factory felt like some kind of bizarre post-apocalyptic ruins. The whole outside area of the factory is covered in vegetation, with plants surrounding and climbing up the old cement buildings. The factory is littered with broken panes of glass, empty spray paint bottles and huge piles of unidentifiable garbage. As you explore the site, you can walk through abandoned bathrooms with broken mirrors and even see some machinery which was used in the original factory. Most importantly, the whole area is also covered from head to toe with graffiti from numerous prominent Taiwanese street artists. The factory is split up into multiple buildings, three of which consist of multiple floors, and the whole area has the feel of some kind of art museum, where each room and floor brings you different styles of graffiti and artwork to appreciate.

Walking around the factory was a really incredible experience and it's a real shame that the government plans to tear it down, especially when there are numerous other factories in the city which have been converted into artistic and commercial spaces. I spent a few hours walking around the factory, taking hundreds of pictures and thought I'd share some of my favourite things I saw!

There were a couple of buildings near the entrance which were completely covered on the outside in artwork. 

This building had a nice old wooden floor and some wooden beams in the ceiling, which I think I remember reading somewhere are of historical significance...

Walking around the crumbling buildings and the residues of human activity really made the whole experience feel as if I were part of some post-apocalyptic movie or video game.

One of my favourite pieces of graffiti I saw.

This one looked as if the grey walls were burning away to reveal a vibrant world of colour behind them.

As you can see, parts of the building were in disrepair, with the ceiling peeling away and the floor covered in garbage and broken wood.

You could walk on the roof of three of the buildings, which gave an amazing, oddly peaceful opportunity to view the streets of the city and the mountains and Taipei 101 in the horizon.

One of the smaller buildings on the grounds of the factory.

This wall was completely covered in pictures of barbed wire and reminded me of the outside gates of the factory.

Max and Leila?

A number of rooms had these pieces of machinery in them, left over from the building's time as a factory. 

One of the factory buildings with Taipei 101 in the background. Fortunately these weren't the only stairs available to go up the different floors as they looked pretty terrifying... (I did venture out onto one of them before a fear of heights kicked in and quickly went back inside to find the less narrow staircases.)

'Be Kind' (also, Didi is rad, apparently...)

One of the rooms had this huge wooden boat which was covered in tiny squares of pictures which looked like they were cut from newspapers or something. The boat itself was falling apart, and the whole back of it had collapsed, but you could catch a glimpse of its glory days from the front.

These silhouette pictures decorating the boarded up windows made this room pretty striking when you walked in.

The combination of the crumbling buildings and the overgrown vegetation could be pretty beautiful.

I thought this style of artwork was a lot of fun and the last building I went into seemed to have a bunch of pictures from this artist, Candy Bird.

Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the crates?

This room had these cool looking twisted pipes which zig zagged their way from wall to wall.

One final view of the city from the rooftop of the last building I explored. The vibrant colours splattered across the walls definitely made a nice contrast to the more drab buildings which filled the area surrounding the factory.

So that's the Nangang Bottle Cap Factory! Sorry if I went a little overboard on the number of pictures, but it really was an amazing place, and it was hard to narrow them down. It's a huge shame that the government plans to start demolishing the building, so I thought I'd document as much as I could in case the buildings and the graffiti within are lost. 

There are however, some people working hard to try to keep the factory open. Whether or not they are successful...

(But here's hoping they will be!)