Jiufen

Jiufen was a scatter of houses on a steep hillside until gold was found in the area in the 1890s, shortly before Japanese rule began. The name is usually explained by a story that the original households ordered supplies in nine shares, jiu fen, from the coast below. Under Japanese administration the deposits around Jiufen and neighbouring Jinguashi were worked systematically, Jinguashi's copper and gold by a Japanese company and Jiufen's by the Taiwanese businessman Yan Yunnian, whose family grew wealthy from the mines.

By the 1930s the town was crowded and prosperous, with a cinema, restaurants and theatres stacked along the slope. During the Second World War a prisoner-of-war camp operated at Jinguashi, where Allied prisoners were put to work underground. Mining continued after 1945 but the seams thinned, output fell through the 1960s and 1970s, and the last workings closed in the 1970s. The population drained away and many houses were left empty.

The town was rediscovered through film. Hou Hsiao-hsien's A City of Sadness, shot here and released in 1989, brought Taiwanese visitors up the hill, and the teahouses that opened for them defined what Jiufen has been ever since. Its lantern-lit steps are widely said to have influenced the look of a celebrated Japanese animated film, a claim the director has denied, and the resemblance still draws visitors. Today the economy is tourism, and the debate is over crowding rather than closure.

The town's identity is built from the mining years and the films that revived it. A City of Sadness set part of Taiwan's post-1945 reckoning, including the 228 Incident, on these streets, which gave Jiufen a weight beyond its size and made its stone steps familiar across the Chinese-speaking world. Photographs of the lantern-hung teahouses are among the most reproduced images of Taiwan.

Older residents speak Taiwanese Hokkien, and the culture is that of a Hokkien mining community: temples to Mazu and the earth god tucked into the slope, a strong observance of Ghost Month in a trade where accidents were common, and funeral and offering customs kept up more carefully than in the cities. The Japanese half-century also left traces, in wooden houses at Jinguashi, in the shrine ruins above it, and in the tea-drinking habits of the town.

Daily manners are those of small-town Taiwan: quiet, practical, unhurried outside shop hours. The visible tension is between residents and the volume of visitors, since the lanes are streets people live on, and shopkeepers ask for calm in the evening after the buses leave. Tea culture is taken seriously here, with brewing demonstrated and explained rather than hurried, and the slower pace of a teahouse is the main thing the town sells.

Jiufen and Jinguashi together hold only a few thousand residents, part of Ruifang district in New Taipei, and the population is elderly: many younger people work in Keelung, Taipei or New Taipei and return at weekends. Almost every household income is connected to visitors — stalls, teahouses, guesthouses, car parks and buses — which makes the town's rhythm the opposite of a commuter suburb's.

The day begins quietly, fills as coaches arrive from mid-morning, peaks in the afternoon and empties again by evening, when the lanes belong to residents and the small number of overnight guests. Weekends and Lunar New Year bring traffic queues on the mountain road, and shopkeepers open and close around them. Deliveries come up by van to the road above and are carried down the steps by hand.

Life on a steep, wet hillside sets its own terms. Houses are stacked in layers with staircases for streets, damp and mould are constant problems, and the monsoon months keep roofs and drains in repair. Landslide risk after typhoons is a recurring concern along the mountain road. Jinguashi, with fewer shops, has kept more of the feel of an ordinary village, and the old mining compound there is now the main employer of its kind, as a museum.

Taro balls are the dish Jiufen is known for. Taro and sweet potato are steamed, mashed with starch and cut into chewy pieces, yuyuan, then served hot in a light sweet syrup or cold on shaved ice with mung and red beans — a bowl made in shop windows along the lanes and eaten on terraces facing the sea. Grass jelly, xiancao, and sweet potato soup appear in the same bowls.

Savoury snacks come from the stalls of the Old Street: fish balls and fish-paste soups, the region's seafood arriving from the ports below; braised pork rice, lu rou fan; sausage grilled and wrapped in glutinous rice; and peanut ice-cream rolls, in which shaved peanut brittle and scoops of ice cream are wrapped in a thin pancake with coriander. Fried taro cakes, steamed buns and pineapple cakes fill the rest of the shopfronts.

Tea is the reason many people stay longer than an hour. The teahouses serve Taiwanese oolongs, often Baozhong from nearby Pinglin or high-mountain leaf from further south, brewed at the table in small pots with repeated infusions and accompanied by dried fruit, melon seeds and tea-flavoured cakes. In Jinguashi the speciality is the miner's lunchbox, kuanggong biandang: rice with a slab of braised pork and vegetables in a metal tin, sold as a reminder of the shifts underground.