Jiufen is that must visit small mountain town that looks to the East China Seat, and has its roots during the gold-rush era of the 1890s. The name of the town in Chinese – 九份 – apparently comes from its origins before the 1890s, where just nine (‘九’) families resided in the small village and that food and provisions brought up to them had to be divided into nine portions (‘份’). The gold rush brought about the usual hordes of wealth-seekers and turned the village into a bustling town, then went into relative decline again until 1989 when the Taiwanese film A City of Sadness brought it solidly into the national limelight when it was the film’s shooting location. Today though, Jiufen is best known internationally for its A-Mei Teahouse for its resemblance to location scenes in the famous Japanese anime film Spirited Away.
It’s actually a short 5km drive uphill to Jiufen Old Town from the Golden Waterfall we stopped earlier. But the road in is quite narrow with a couple of extremely sharp turns up hill. And as we approached the town, traffic slowed to a terrific crawl as cars had to jostle with space with the large tour buses, not to mention visitors on both sides trying to get from point to point in the small town with umbrellas in the rain and all trying not to get run over by vehicles at the same time. Our minsu is literally just steps away from the Old Street and only accessible by vehicles via a very narrow one-way street. More than a few cars were trying to come out the other way instead. Just chaos:
Our minsu itself is also quite tucked in from this side road even and only accessible by foot via a few flights of very steep steps. No wonder previous guests staying in the property have all remarked that trying to get to the home is really tough with large luggage cases! We had just one medium-sized one and largely containing the things that two kids need – i.e. their clothes, their warm clothing, their toiletries, their soft toys, their medicine and first-aid kids for all manner of emergencies – and even just that proved to be a struggle with rain thrown in for good measure.
The messing around with turtle-speed traffic and the steep climb was worth it though. The minsu is a stone-built house, beautifully decorated, homely and is literally just about 30 seconds walk away from the Old Street, and about 2 minutes walk from A-Mei Teahouse. One thing we’ve got to say about this trip at this point: the homestays we’re staying in keep getting better and better!
This is exactly the kind of home we’d be happy to vegetate in on a rainy day and absolutely not go out. But we deliberately chose an overnight stay in Jiufen really to visit the Old Street when the afternoon crowds were dissipating, and for me to take evening and night shots of the area. I’ll cover that in the next post.
For the moment though, we thought the crowds would be thinning out from 4PM onwards, so we’ll brave the rain and step out to explore. Boy – were we mistaken. The place was still choked with visitors at 4:15PM. And as though people congestion was not making things bad enough, many were carrying umbrellas rather than wearing ponchos, which meant that we had to be alert to not get our eyes poked out by other visitors’ umbrella rib tips. And many shopkeepers were annoyed even as the raindrops were sliding off the umbrellas onto their wares as the walkways of the Old Street are very narrow in some parts. No wonder our homeowner strongly advised when briefing us at check-in not to use umbrellas if possible.
There were also a lot of people all stopping to take pictures of themselves posing against the A-Mei Teahouse and obstructing everyone else behind them – many of whom I’m sure are probably also waiting for their turn to similarly pose for their Instagrams – in the narrow walkways, trying not to slip down the steep stone steps, all in rain. It got so bad that we decided to just duck into a restaurant right beside A-Mei Teahouse for an early dinner, then retire back to the much more comfy minsu to chill and wait it out. After all, the person who’s really interested in this Teahouse is this photography-nut, not the kids or the wife – so why should they suffer for my indulgences haha.
Next post on my attempts for a night photography shoot of the Old Street and A-Mei Teahouse!
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