Yingge

Yingge (鶯歌) is a town to the south-west of Taipei, and is famous for its longstanding pottery industry.  Yingge means "oriole song" - apparently the name is derived from a rock formation in the area that looked something like a bird and was known as the "oriole brother" (鶯哥石).  The Chinese word for "brother" is a homophone for "song", so possibly the name of the town is another product of the general sanitisation of names by the Japanese during the occupation.

When we visited Yingge we really only had time to visit the Ceramics Museum, and do a quick walking circuit of the town.

We arrived at the Ceramics Museum just in time for the younger members of the tour to participate in a pottery class in the downstairs pottery studio.  There must have been a good twenty or so benches set-up in the studio, but seeing as there were only five kids participating in the class we all fitted onto a single bench, even including parent helpers.  The instructor demonstrated how to make a lantern or money-box in the shape of a dragon.  The techniques were so effective that both the members of our tour were able to turn-out very convincing dragons.

At the end of the class we were able to pay to have the products fired, glazed and mailed back to us.  Presumably they are already waiting for us back in Taiwan.

After the pottery class we went for a wander in the drizzle through the grounds of the museum.  There were a number of beautiful old kilns there - I gather they have visiting pottery artists from all around the world come in to work out of the grounds of the museum.

After we left the museum we walked a circuit of the town.  Surprisingly one of the biggest hits with the junior members of the tour was a  scene of some roadworkers repairing the road at a busy intersection in peak hour.  You would think that the kids had never seen roadworks before - although admittedly it was absolute bedlam.  The intersection was essentially still open, and traffic was being directed through the intersection as the workers laid sections of it, with trucks and workmen and rollers going everywhere.  I can only assume that they must work like that every day without a fatality, but from where I sat it looked like an occupational health and safety nightmare. 

One of the dragon money boxes.

The other dragon money box.

Working on a dragon money box in the pottery studio under the Ceramics Museum.

"Yingge" - the sign at the railway station.

One of the wood-fired pottery kilns in the grounds of the Ceramics Museum.

The highlight of the day - relaying a road at a busy intersection in peak hour.

Beitou

Beitou (北投) is an old hot-spring resort area on the northern edge of Taipei, where it benefits from the geo-thermal  activity on the edge of Yangming Shan.  It was popular with Japanese officials during the Japanese occupation, and had a reputation as something of a red-light district.  While the Wikipedia entry is frightfully polite in both English and Chinese and makes no mention of a red-light past, it does inform me that the name derives from a phonetic transcription into Chinese of the original Formosan Aboriginal placename, which apparently meant "witch".  Go figure.  Today there are no witches apparent to the casual observer, but there's  an abundance of hotels and resorts offering natural sulfur spring spas.

Yet again, the Mass Rapid Transit system has made an enormous impact on the task of getting to Beitou.  Not only is there a direct train from Taipei Main Station to Beitou, there's then a dedicated line between Beitou and what's called "New Beitou", where the hot springs are located.  There must be a lot of money in the area to have justified a dedicated line just to run between two stops.

Our main objective in Beitou was Diregu (地熱谷, which translates as something like "Earth Hot Valley" - no idea why it's "Earth Hot Valley" instead of "Hot Earth Valley").  Diregu is a steaming pool just below the source of a number of hot springs.  It used to be popular with tourists to cook eggs and other food in the hot, sulfurous water, but these days the pool is fenced-off to prevent people from burning themselves and polluting the pool with abandoned food.  From the MRT station we basically followed the streams up hill on the assumption that they must be flowing out of Diregu.  The parks lining the streams are absolutely luxurious by Taiwanese standards - again reflecting the amount of money that the authorities must spend in the area,  In one part of the park we found a lillypond that was full of waterlillies and tiny frogs, and spent a decent half-hour sitting watching the frogs.

One of the interesting discoveries for us from this trip was hokutolite (北投石).  Many sources proudly proclaim that hokutolite is the only rock amongst the thousand or so known rocks on Earth that is named after a placename in Taiwan.  I have even seen it described as a Taiwanese "National Treasure".  Ironically, the name "hokutolite" is actually from the Japanese word for "Beitou" - basically "Beitou stone".  The rock was first discovered and named by a Japanese scientist in 1906, who naturally enough gave it an English name based on his Japanese pronunication of "Beitou".  The other irony is that I'm not actually entirely sure that hokutolite officially qualifies as a stone - it certainly isn't a mineral.  As I understand it, it is a blend of lead-sulfate and barium-sulfate, meaning that the correct name is probably "angleso-barite" - ie barite with anglesite mixed-in.  There is no English Wikipedia entry on "hokutolite", although there is an entry in the Chinese version of Wikipedia, here.  Interestingly the Chinese Wikipedia entry says that one of the former Presidents of Academia Sinica did his Masters thesis on hokutolite, so I will be very careful about suggesting that it might not formally exist.  My text book on the rocks and minerals of Taiwan tells me that in the past the Diregu area was pillaged by collectors looking for hokutolite samples, and that hokutolite supplies are now essentially exhausted since the vicinity of Beitou stream has been declared a protected area.  It goes on to say that residents of the area remain alert for hammering noises in the middle of the night, and occasional arrests are still made.  The lengths that some people will go to for mineral samples...  The text book (and Chinese Wikipedia) also tells me that hokutolite is only found in two locations in the world - the second being a hot spring area in Japan.

Fresh samples of hokutolite are radioactive due to the presence of traces of radium, although sources state that older samples no longer display any radioactivity due to the rapid decay of the radium.  Amusingly, a sign at Diregu proclaimed the "magical health-giving properties" of the radium traces in the spa.

I'm tempted to set-up a Wikipedia entry for hokutolite to see what happens.

After we left Diregu we headed back down the hill to the Hot Springs Museum, in what used to be the old Japanese-era public spa building.  The building is a beautiful example of Japanese colonial architecture, with a strong Prussian flavour to it.  The spas in the building are no longer open for use - apparently the constant moisture and heat was considered incompatible with ongoing preservation - so today you can walk through the old spas. 

In one of the rooms upstairs there was an exhibit talking about the contribution to the development of Beitou by one of the Japanese Governors of Taiwan.  He was so popular in the area that the residents paid for a statue of him in a local park.  I am thinking that these sorts of acts of love and affection for the Japanese colonial overlords would not have gone down so well with the Nationalists when the Japanese were expelled in 1945.  Possibly the economic underpinnings of Beitou were such that it was already hard for the locals to refute accusations that they were collaborators.

In the museum there was also an exhibition on the local movie industry.  Apparently the area was the scene for a large number of Taiwanese-language movies in the decade or so after the end of the Japanese occupation.  My impression has always been that the speaking of Taiwanese was heavily suppressed by the Nationalists, so it is interesting if there was a significant volume of Taiwanese-language movies being produced in what at the time would have been a tightly-controlled society.

When we came back down from Diregu we stopped for a while in a park to watch some kids playing around a fountain.  There was a group of old people sitting in the park there, mostly in wheelchairs, accompanied by their Philippina carers.  While I anticipate that the activity was ostensibly related to giving the old people some time out in the park and the fresh air, it seemed pretty clear that the main factor at play was giving the Philippina maids a chance to get together and gossip in Tagalog, occasionally pausing to wipe the dribble off the chins of their charges.  It looked like a miserable existence, but I reminded myself that these must have been some of the luckiest and wealthiest old people in Taiwan, and lots of people in their situation were either sitting at home watching television and being looked after by kids, or lying in grim retirement homes.  I guess compared to that, sitting in a park listening to Tagalog might not be too bad.

A waterlilly in a stream-side park in Beitou.

Foreign tourists watching frogs in a park in Beitou.

A waterlilly in a stream-side park in Beitou.

A waterlilly in a stream-side park in Beitou.

The stream flowing down from Diregu in Beitou.

Diregu, with steam rising off the pool.

Diregu.

An excited foreign tourist.

More Diregu.

An excited foreign tourist bathing his feet in the warm stream.

The old Japanese-era spa building, now the Museum of Hot Springs.

Excited foreign tourists in the tatami room in the old spa building.

The tatami room in the old spa building.

Inside the old spa building.

One of the old spas, now turned into a mseum exhibit on the folk music of different locals cultures - from memory it had folk music in Taiwanese, the local Formosan Aboriginal language, Mandarin and Hakka.

The main spa.  No longer in use, but still with a pool of water at the bottom of it.

A detail from the gable of the old spa building, showing the Japanese tiles and gabling.

The perimeter wall around today's public spa.

Jinguashi and Jiufen

Jinguashi (金瓜石) and Jiufen (九份) are famous old goldmining towns up on the north-east coast of Taiwan.  The story goes that when they were building a railway bridge across the river in nearby Ruifang, one of the labourers had worked on the goldfields in California and Australia and noticed the alluvial gold in the river, leading to a local goldrush.

The goldfields were exploited on an industrial scale by the Japanese during the occupation, and most of the goldmining infrastructure in Jinguashi seems to be Japanese-era.  Allied prisoners of war were held in the surrounding area during the war, and worked in the goldmines.

The mines are essentially exhausted these days, although there are apparently always flickers of interest from foreign mining companies looking to employ modern high-tech mining methods to make the remaining gold deposits economic again.  When the existing mineshafts were abandoned, tailings were thrown down the shafts, leading to contamination of the ocean off Jinguashi as run-off flows through the mines and leaches out all sorts of frightening heavy metals.  Bizarrely, the phenomenon, an environmental catastrophe, is something of a tourist attraction and has been given the name "Yin-yang sea" (陰陽海) for the way the different coloured waters flow together.  I have sat on the beach at Jinguashi and watched a fisherman standing out in the middle of the Yin-yang Sea fishing - hopefully it was catching them and kissing them and throwing them back - but I imagine (Taiwanese being Taiwanese) the fish were headed for a kitchen table, complete with a dose of mercury, arsenic and lead.  I've included a link to the satellite photo of the Yin-yang Sea here.  The satellite photo doesn't really do it justice, but you can get a sense of the amount of contamination that must be flowing down into the ocean every day.

Jiufen is a nearby hillside town that is most famous for having been the location for the movie "City of Sadness" (悲情城市), set just after the Second World War and the end of the Japanese occupation.  Jiufen was fading away after the mines shut down, but then after it featured in City of Sadness it became famous, and tourists flocked in to lap-up the town's old-world charm. 

The name Jiufen is interesting - so many Taiwanese placenames hark back to the way in which the land was originally settled by the early settlers from the mainland.  "Jiufen" means literally "nine shares", and is a reference to the site having originally been claimed and settled by nine families who split the land between them.

We caught a bus from Taipei and enjoyed the bus trip up towards the sea, then cutting inland behind the range of mountains on coast.  We stayed on the bus past Jiufen and got off at Jinguashi, then walked down the hill to the Gold Mining Museum.  Inside the museum we went on a tour of a restored Japanese-era building that would have been accommodation for the family of one of the Japanese senior officials during the Japanese-era, and later accommodation for the family of a Chinese senior manager after the end of the occupation.  Different parts of the building had been restored to reflect different periods of use.

From there we wandered through the grounds of another building that was built specifically to house the Japanese Crown Prince when he came for a visit.  The whole area is fairly god-forsaken at the best of times - being so exposed to the ocean, the climate would be consistently damp and cold and windy, and then during the period when the mine was working it must have been fairly grimy, so it's interesting that the Crown Prince would choose to spend enough time here to justify building a new house specifically for him.  The grounds have a mini-golf course and an archery range - again built specifically for the Crown Prince.

Next we visited a mineshaft that has been kept open and restored for visitors.  When we paid for admission they gave us our tickets and strange blue cloth caps, which had us completely bemused until we realised that we had to wear safety helmets in the minshaft, and the caps were helmet-liners either to prevent us from catching helmet-cooties or to prevent us from spreading our helment-cooties.  The mineshaft was interesting, with displays of work-scenes using mannequins and original equipment.  The displays included blasting and the security-check for the miners at the end of their shift, to make sure they weren't smuggling-out any gold.

 From there we climbed up the hill to the ruins of an old Shinto temple.  You can imagine that gold mining would have been a dangerous occupation, and in the face of that danger the temple would have been important to the Japanese working around the mines.  Presumably the locals would have had their own temples in the town.  It's difficult to get a sense of what the temple must have looked like when it was built - I am guessing it had a lot of wood in the construction, and this has all rotted-away, leaving only the stone pillars.

By the time we had come down from the temple the museum had closed, so we found a bus and headed back to Jiufen with a group of workers from the museum. We'll have to go back to see the memorial to Allied prisoners of war another time.

Jiufen is wonderful in a higgledy-piggledy sort of way.  The main street is narrow and winds up and down the hillside, lined with all sorts of shops, restaurants and cafes.  With all the tourist traffic since City of Sadness it has become fairly commercialised, but it still has bucket-loads of character.  At the end of the main street we stopped and looked out over the coast towards Jilong / Keelung.  All the streets on that side of Jiufen were an enormous expanse of flashing lights - all flashing in the same rhythm but out of sequence - I've put a short video of it here.  It was an impressive effect - we must get our local government to organise something similar with the street lights around here.  I suppose it gets fairly tedious if you live in the area and have flashing lights outside your bedroom window every night.

The kitchen in a restored Japanese-era house in Jinguashi (金瓜石).  Different parts of the house had been restored to reflect different eras of usage and occupation.

The dining room, restored to reflect the era when it would have been occupied by the family of Japanese senior employees of the mine.

A sitting room, also restored to reflect the Japanese era.

This house was built for a visit by the Japanese Crown Prince.

I think this is Jilong Shan (基隆山) in the background, to the north-west of Jinguashi.

The gardens of the residence built for the visit of the Japanese Crown Prince.

Part of the residence built for the visit of the Japanese Crown Prince.

This is actually a mini-golf course, specially built for the visit of the Japanese Crown Prince.  Apparently concrete was a relatively new and expensive material at that time, and so was regarded as somewhat exotic and prestigous.

The archery range of the residence built for the visit of the Japanese Crown Prince.

Part of the gardens of the residence built for the visit of the Japanese Crown Prince.

A gate on one of the Japanese-style residences at Jinguashi (金瓜石).

Tracks from the mine railway at Jinguashi (金瓜石).

A foreigh tourist wearing a hat-liner to prevent transmission of headlice to other tourists borrowing helmets to visit the goldmine at Jinguashi (金瓜石).

One of the old mine rail wagons at Jinguashi.

The entrance to one of the old mines at Jingushi.

A foreign tourist wearing a helmet before entering the mine shaft.  The character in the background is "jin", the word for "gold".

Inside the gold mine.

There displays inside the mine with mannequins to illustrate the typical goldmining tasks.  I think this one was about using explosives to clear rock.

A foreign tourist with her helmet at what can be described as a jaunty angle.

A view from above Jinguashi, looking back down into the town, and north towards the ocean, with Jilong Mountain (Keelung Mountain / 雞籠山) to the left.  "Jilong" means "chicken cage" - one possible explanation for the origin of the name of the nearby city of Jilong / Keelung is that it is named after this mountain, which was named for its similarity tot he shape of a traditional bamboo chicken cage.  Keelung City has retained the sounds of its name, but changed the characters to something more auspicious than "Chicken Cage City".  This seems to have been quite a common phenomenon in Taiwan - the original frontier culture under early Chinese settlement was very earthy, and they had placenames like "Beat the Dog" (the actual original name for Gaoxiong / Kaohsiung - " 打狗" or "Takao").  During the Japanese occupation, their refined sensibilities were somewhat offended by these sorts of names, and they would officially change the place names, often to similar-sounding names with more auspicious meanings. 

An archway on the staircase upto the old Shinto temple above Jinguashi.

The ruins of the old Shinto temple above Jinguashi.

The ruins of the old Shinto temple above Jinguashi.

The ruins of the old Shinto temple above Jinguashi.

Looking north-east from the ruins of the old Shinto temple above Jinguashi.

Looking north-east from the old Shinto temple above Jinguashi, giving a good indication of the typical terrain along this part ot the coast.

Coins inside a stone lantern at the old Shinto temple above Jinguashi.

A foreign tourist walking along the mine railway line at Jinguashi.

A foreign tourist walking along the mine railway line at Jinguashi

Descending the stairway from the old Shinto temple above Jinguashi.

Looking back up to the old Shinto temple above Jinguashi.  The Japanese must have put an enormous amount of effort into building up the foudnation on the steep hillside.

One of the old Japanese-era buildings in Jinguashi.  The buildings are wooden-framed, and must suffer badly from termite infestation and damp over the years.

One of the Japanese-era buildings that has been restored. 

The shops lining the main street of Jiufen (九份).

A typical narrow alleyway in Jiufen.

The main street of Jiufen.

The main street of Jiufen.

Jiufen.

The main street of Jiufen.

The view looking west along the coast from Jiufen.  The glow on the horizon will be the lights of Jilung / Keelung.

Jiufen.

Jiufen.

Jiufen.

An excited foreign tourist on the bus on the way from Jiufen back to Jilung / Keelung.