Pingxi

Where it sits. Pingxi District occupies the headwaters of the Keelung River in the hills of southeastern New Taipei City, a green, wet, thinly populated valley about an hour and a half from Taipei by train. Fewer than five thousand people live in the whole district. The valley floor is barely wide enough for the river, a road and the single-track Pingxi branch railway, so the settlements string out along it: Sandiaoling, Dahua, Shifen, Wanggu, Lingjiao, Pingxi and Jingtong, seven stations across 12.9 kilometres. Above them rise a set of unusually abrupt sandstone peaks — Xiaozi Mountain, Cimu Peak and Putuo Mountain among them — that look far bigger than their modest heights because they stand as bare rock fins above the tree line.

The story behind it. Pingxi was a coal district. Seams were worked here from the Japanese colonial period, and the branch railway was laid in the early 1920s by a private mining company specifically to move coal down to the main line at Sandiaoling; the state railway absorbed it at the end of the decade. At its peak the valley supported pits, washing plants, aerial ropeways and company villages. The last mines closed in the 1990s, and what remains is unusually legible: the Taiwan Coal Mine Museum sits above Shifen with a working narrow-gauge ore train, and at Jingtong the wooden station building of 1929 still stands, one of the very few timber stations left in Taiwan, beside the black bulk of the old Shidi coal-washing plant that is slowly being taken back by fig roots.

The lanterns. Pingxi is known nationally for sky lanterns, and the tradition is tied to that same isolation. The usual account holds that in the Qing period settlers in these hills would retreat into the mountains when bandits came down the valley, and those left behind would send up a lantern as the signal that it was safe to return; the release later attached itself to the fifteenth day of the first lunar month, the Lantern Festival that closes the Lunar New Year. The modern version is a mass event. On festival night several thousand lanterns are released in timed waves from a schoolyard in Pingxi or Shifen, the sky fills with drifting orange, and the district is closed to private cars with shuttle buses running from Taipei. Outside the festival, lanterns are sold and launched every day of the year at Shifen. Environmental objections are loud and legitimate — spent frames land in the forest and on the railway — and the district has trialled bamboo-and-rice-paper designs and pays crews to collect the debris.

On screen. The valley has a durable place in Taiwanese cinema. Its best-known appearance is in You Are the Apple of My Eye, the 2011 coming-of-age film written and directed by Giddens Ko, whose sky lantern scene was shot at Pingxi and drove a wave of young visitors from across East Asia to write the same kind of message on the same kind of paper. The branch line and its wooden stations show up regularly in Taiwanese television drama and advertising for the same reason a film crew likes any single-track railway: the trains are slow, the frame is uncluttered, and the tracks make a natural corridor for a camera.

What you actually see today. A day here is a station-hopping itinerary on a one-day rail pass. Shifen has the widest waterfall in Taiwan and the lantern-launching Old Street. Wanggu and Lingjiao have smaller falls reached on short forest paths. Pingxi Old Street is a compact hillside lane of noodle shops and lantern stalls beneath a railway bridge that crosses directly overhead. Jingtong is the end of the line, where bamboo tubes carrying written wishes hang in their thousands along the fences. The hiking is the underrated part: Xiaozi Mountain, at only about 360 metres, is a genuine scramble up fixed chains and steel ladders to a summit the size of a dining table, with a drop on every side and a view down the full length of the valley. Cimu Peak and Putuo Mountain nearby give the same experience at lower intensity.

Getting there and timing. Take a TRA train from Taipei to Ruifang, then the Pingxi Line; day passes allow unlimited hops. Buses 795 and 1076 also serve the valley. The district is wet year-round and wettest from October to March under the northeastern monsoon, which is atmospheric on the trails and miserable in a downpour. Lantern Festival dates move with the lunar calendar, falling in February or early March, and require planning: transport is restricted and the valley is full. Steep steps, unfenced rock and narrow lanes make most of Pingxi unsuitable for wheelchairs.