According to local lore, the earliest households of Jioufen, a town nestled in the mountains of Taiwan's northeast coast, numbered exactly nine. When supplies arrived by sea, they were hauled into the steep hills in nine portions, pronounced jiou fen in Chinese.
The name today calls to mind a village steeped in history and made famous by the 1989 film City of Sadness directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien, in which the local director captures the painful decline of a once prosperous town.
The town's fortunes first rose when gold was discovered in 1890. The first gold nuggets came from a large vein running beneath the town, and by the peak of its gold mining days in the 1930s, Jioufen had acquired the nickname "the gold capital of Asia." Much of the wealth from the town, however, flowed into the coffers of the Japanese, who occupied the island from 1895 to 1945.
After World War II, the mines ran dry, and the town's shimmering prosperity faded. Once a honeycomb of activity, Jioufen became, once again, a sleepy village. In the 1980s, the town's economic stagnation lent it a melancholy air that appealed to Hou Hsiao-hsien and other artists. The crumbling buildings, traditional teahouses, and winding hilltop lanes gave the Taiwanese a unique glimpse into their own past. As visitors flocked to the city refuge, it arose again from obscurity, and today it once more bustles with life.
The following photographs (dating from 1959 to the present) capture scenes of Jioufen from its slumbering days of decline to its recent revival.