Jiufen is a former gold-mining town perched on a steep hillside above the northeast coast of Taiwan, about 50 kilometres from Taipei. Its stepped stone lanes, red lanterns, and teahouses clinging to the cliff face make it one of the most photographed places in Taiwan — and one of the most visited on weekends, when the numbers of visitors can make the narrow alleys feel impassable. Come on a weekday, or arrive late in the afternoon after the tour buses have gone.
The town flourished during the Japanese colonial era as the centre of Taiwan's gold rush. When the mines closed in the 1970s, Jiufen emptied and fell into a picturesque decline. The 1989 Hou Hsiao-hsien film A City of Sadness — the first major Taiwanese film to address the 2-28 massacre directly — was shot largely in Jiufen and sent visitors back. The town's atmospheric teahouses, particularly the A-Mei Tea House at the top of the old stairs, became Taiwan's most-photographed building and were widely (if apocryphally) linked to the bathhouse in Studio Ghibli's Spirited Away.
The Gold Museum in Jinguashi — the former gold refinery a short distance from Jiufen — is worth the extra effort. The facility operated into the 1970s and is now a well-maintained open-air museum with intact industrial machinery, tunnels you can crawl into, and a view over Jiufen's red rooftops to the coast. Jiufen Old Street is the main commercial artery — crowded, yes, but the taro balls, fish balls, and peanut-and-cilantro ice cream are worth the crowd. The views from the Shuqi Road viewpoint in the late afternoon, with the Pacific coast below and clouds moving in from the sea, are consistently extraordinary.