Jiufen

Where it sits. Jiufen clings to the seaward slope of Mount Keelung in Ruifang District, at the northeastern corner of New Taipei City, roughly 30 kilometres from central Taipei and about a ten-minute descent from the open Pacific. The village is built on a gradient steep enough that its streets function as staircases. Jishan Street runs across the hillside as a covered lane barely two metres wide, roofed with corrugated sheeting and awnings, while Shuqi Road drops straight down the slope in a long flight of stone steps and crosses Jishan at right angles. From the upper terraces the view takes in Keelung Islet, the fishing harbour at Shen'ao and a grey wedge of the East China Sea. Cloud sits on the ridge for much of the winter: the northeastern monsoon makes this one of the wettest inhabited corners of Taiwan, and residents joke that the town has two seasons, rain and about to rain.

The story behind it. The name means "nine portions", from a local account of a settlement so small and so cut off that supplies were ordered in nine shares, one per household. That obscurity ended in the 1890s, when gold was found in the Keelung River during railway construction and prospectors traced the metal upstream into these hills. Under Japanese rule after 1895 the Fujita concern and later Taiwanese operators worked the Jiufen and neighbouring Jinguashi lodes hard. By the 1930s the hillside carried theatres, teahouses, brothels and several times today's population, and the place was talked about as Little Shanghai. The Shengping Theatre, built in 1934 and then the largest cinema in northern Taiwan, is the surviving monument to that boom. Output collapsed after the war, the mines shut in 1971, and Jiufen emptied into two decades of quiet dereliction.

On screen. A film revived Jiufen, and it was not a Japanese one. Hou Hsiao-hsien shot much of A City of Sadness here in 1989 — a Keelung family torn apart by the February 28 Incident and the White Terror that followed — and when the picture took the Golden Lion at Venice, Taiwanese visitors began arriving to look at the stairways they had seen on screen. The louder claim came later. After Spirited Away opened in 2001, Shuqi Road's red lanterns, timber balconies and stacked teahouses were widely identified as Hayao Miyazaki's model for the bathhouse town, and the A-Mei Teahouse on the steps became the most photographed building in northern Taiwan largely on that basis. Studio Ghibli has publicly denied the connection, and Miyazaki has said he had not been to Jiufen when he made the film. The influences he has actually named are Japanese: above all the Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum in Koganei, which he visited repeatedly during production, along with old hot-spring inns of the Dogo Onsen type. The resemblance is genuine; the lineage is not. Both things can be true, and it is worth knowing which is which before queuing for a table.

What you actually see today. Jishan Street is a food corridor. Taro balls, chewy dumplings of taro and sweet potato flour, come hot in ginger broth in winter and cold over shaved ice in summer, and two long-running shops on the lane have been arguing about the recipe for decades. Other fixtures: the peanut-brittle ice cream roll, shaved from a block with a plane and wrapped in a thin pancake with coriander; fish ball soup; stinky tofu; sweet taro cake. Shuqi Road is the picture. Three tiers of red lanterns hang off the A-Mei Teahouse, and the older Jiufen Teahouse occupies a restored 1920s mining house where the tea is served with a timer and instructions. The Shengping Theatre reopened in 2011 after restoration, with its wooden seats, hand-painted posters and old projectors, and costs nothing to enter. Because Jishan is roofed, the village works in drizzle, which is more than can be said for most Taiwanese day trips.

Nearby. Jinguashi, fifteen minutes on by bus, holds the Gold Museum, the 1922 Crown Prince Chalet, a 220-kilogram gold ingot you can touch and the walkable Benshan Fifth Tunnel. Below it the Thirteen Levels, the terraced concrete skeleton of the Shuinandong smelter, has been illuminated at night since 2019. The Golden Waterfall runs ochre with mineral drainage, and the Yin Yang Sea at Shen'ao Bay carries a yellow iron plume across the harbour. The Mount Keelung trail, 588 metres, takes about an hour of steps and repays it with both coasts at once.

Getting there and timing. Take a TRA train from Taipei Main Station to Ruifang, roughly 40 to 50 minutes, then bus 788 or 827 or a taxi up the hill. Bus 1062 runs direct from Zhongxiao Fuxing station in Taipei in about 90 minutes. Weekends turn Jishan Street single-file; weekday late afternoons are the sweet spot, when day-trippers leave and the lanterns come on. Steps and narrow lanes make the village impractical for wheelchairs and hard work with a pushchair.