Jiufen
Coordinates: 25 ° 6 ' N , 121 ° 51' E
Jiufen , also Jioufen or Chiufen ( Chinese 九份 , Pinyin Jiǔfèn , W.-G. Chiu 3 -fen 4 ), is a mountain town in the Ruifang district of New Taipei City in northern Taiwan . It is located about 10 km east of Keelung near the northeast coast of Taiwan on the East China Sea .
history
During the beginning of the Qing Dynasty , the place consisted of nine households. Supply deliveries came by sea, each of which the place requested "nine parts". Jiufen ("nine parts" in Chinese) later became the name of the place.
Jiufen was a secluded place until 1893 when gold was discovered near it. The subsequent gold rush let the place quickly grow into a city and reached its peak under the Japanese rule . You can still find traces of the Japanese past, such as B. the crown prince's chalet in the nearby village of Jinguashi ( 金瓜石 ), which was built by the mining company Tanaka in anticipation of the visit of the Japanese crown prince . In the 1930s, gold mining decreased and copper mining increased. During the Second World War , the Kinkaseki prisoner-of-war camp was established in Jinguashi, in which around 1000 Allied (mainly British) prisoners of war from Singapore were interned, who had to work under inhumane conditions in the nearby copper mine. A third of the prisoners of war did not survive the war. Ore production decreased after World War II until the mine was finally closed in 1971. Jiufen quickly lost its importance and was temporarily forgotten.
tourism
Jiufen was brought back to life in 1989 when director Hou Hsiao-hsien made a box-office hit with his film The City of Sadness . This film dealt for the first time with the so-called incident of February 28, 1947 - the bloody crackdown on unrest in the Taiwanese population by the newly arrived national Chinese. This incident was previously considered a taboo subject and was hardly discussed in public. The nostalgic film scenes that were shot in Jiufen, as well as the subsequent media coverage, led to a boom in the early 1990s, as the city attracted numerous tourists. Several cafés in the Chinese retro style, tea houses and souvenir shops were opened, whose names often alluded to the film "City of Sadness".
Jiufen is currently a popular tourist destination in Taiwan and attracts many weekenders from Taipei . It is also popular with Japanese tourists because of the rumor that the city center was the model for the 2001 anime film Spirited Away . However, Miyazaki himself denied this.
The surrounding mountains are well developed with hiking trails that offer views of the villages, the remains of the mining facilities and the nearby sea. Noteworthy here are the Golden Waterfall and Yinyang Bay, which are colored yellow by the mineral-rich mountain water. The mountain of teapots seems curious, the tip of which takes on the shape of a teapot from certain angles. The Gold Ecological Park provides information on the history of mining and the gold rush; u. a. a real mine tunnel can be visited.
Directions
- Intercity buses from Keelung and Taipei head for the place.
- The nearest train station of the TRA Yilan Line is in Ruifang , which can be reached by bus from Jiufen in 15 minutes.
References
- This article contains the translated text of the English Wikipedia article Jiufen (as of January 12, 2008 ), which in turn is based on the following Japanese Wikipedia article (as of February 26, 2006 ). All articles are subject to the GNU Free Documentation License .
Web links
- Tourist destinations in Ruifang (English)
- Item on AmCham Taipei website (English)
- Gold Ecological Park (Chinese) English