Taiwan's gold rush mountain village — red lanterns, rain, and the stairs that inspired Spirited Away
Jiufen is a hillside former gold-mining town perched above the northeast coast of Taiwan, its narrow red-lantern alleyways, teahouses hanging over the Pacific, and persistent mist creating an atmosphere of magical ambiguity that inspired Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away (though Studio Ghibli has never officially confirmed it). The town boomed during the Japanese colonial gold rush and declined after WWII, then was rediscovered by Taiwanese cinema in the 1980s — Hou Hsiao-hsien filmed A City of Sadness here in 1989. The stepped Jishan Street is lined with taro ball shops, peanut ice cream rolls,…
Gold was discovered near Jiufen in 1893 during the Japanese colonial period, triggering a rush that made the town one of the wealthiest in Taiwan. After the war the gold ran out and Jiufen was largely forgotten until the 1989 film A City of Sadness — which addressed the 228 Massacre taboo for the first time — put it back on the map. Today it receives millions of visitors annually despite its inconvenient location, drawn by an atmosphere unlike anywhere else in Taiwan.