Red lanterns on a gold-mining hill
Jiufen
A hillside town in northern Taiwan where rows of red lanterns light steep stairways lined with teahouses.
Why Jiufen is lantern red
Jiufen clings to a mountainside above the sea in northern Taiwan. Gold was found here in the 1890s and the village grew quickly into a mining town, reaching its peak under Japanese rule in the first half of the 20th century. The mines closed in 1971. The town found new life after it featured in a well-known Taiwanese film in 1989. Its main stairway, Shuqi Road, is lined with old teahouses hung with strings of red paper lanterns, lit at dusk and often blurred by mist and rain. Many roofs were traditionally coated in black tar against the wet weather. A nearby museum at Jinguashi tells the story of the gold.
Values are fair approximations of what the eye sees there, not measurements.
Colours tied to Jiufen
Written by the Rang desk with AI assistance. Background: "Jiufen" on Wikipedia. If you know Jiufen and we have it wrong, tell us.
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The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.
- Shekhawati In: Digrajsingh, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- Kutch In: Zeel Satyendra Modi, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- Kanchipuram In: Ssriram mt, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- Auroville In: Kaspar Konrad, Public domain, source
- Fatehpur Sikri In: HibaSiddiqui, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- Delhi In: A.Savin, FAL, source