Jiufen, a mountain-side town, in Ruifang district, Xinbei city, draws tourists with its landscape, local specialities and gold heritage. [Photo by Lin Jinghua / China Daily]

Lost luster found as block buster movie pulls in tourists

When the film director Hou Hsiao-Hsien was making his award-winning film A City of Sadness in Jiufen in 1989 he could scarcely have realized what a service he was doing to the town, which is about a 90-minute drive from downtown Taipei.

The film, set between 1945 and 1950, depicts the life of the four brothers of the Lin family, and its background is the February 28 Incident in Taiwan in 1947, an anti-government uprising that took place exactly 69 years ago this weekend. I imagine Hou chose Jiufen as a location for his film because it perfectly captured the mood he wanted to depict.

That dark mood of the late 1940s was no doubt inextricably linked to the tragedy of the thousands who died as the uprising was quelled, while the somber air Hou found in Jiufen in 1989 may have had something to do with the fact that by then Jiufen was a mere shadow of the thriving gold town that had existed there in the earlier part of the century.

On a foggy morning early this month I visited Jiufen, which, thanks mostly to Hou using it in his film, has turned into a tourist attraction over the past 25 years and regained some of its earlier verve. After a train and bus trip from Taipei I stood in a narrow street bathed in fog. I latched on to a group of people who were ambling along, and we ended up in a cobblestoned lane that turned out to be a mecca for food.