Tseng Shui-chih, the curator and owner of Chiufen's Gold Museum, ushers me over to peer into the small bowl he holds in his hand. For the last half an hour he has been grinding grit and silt and washing the results on a slat of wood. Inside the bowl is caked with dark mud, but the mud glitters with tiny stars.
"Gold!" he hisses.
Not that there's any more gold in them there hills. Chiufen might be a ghost town today if nostalgia hadn't reclaimed it. Before the 1890s, locals claim that just nine families lived up in these hills northeast of Taipei. And hence the name -- "nine parts" -- a reference to shopping trips for provisions undertaken in turn by each of the families and then divided nine ways.
PHOTO: CHRIS TAYLOR, TAIPEI TIMES
It was the discovery of the sparkling stars in the sand by local women who used the sediment that washed down from the hills to scour their cooking woks that kick-started the tiny town's fortunes. By the mid-1930s, Chiufen was known as "Little Shanghai," a place of bright lights, windfalls and desperate toil. A decade later the gold was gone and so were the lights.
And so Chiufen might have remained, forgotten, had not Taiwan's headlong rush into prosperity created a longing for the past that that same rush was obliterating.
Locals claim that Chiufen first captured urban Taiwan's attention when it was featured in a Mr Brown television advertisement in the 1980s. But the movie makers also had their eye on the place, with its picturesque laddered streets and antique homes, at around the same time. Finally it was Hou Hsiao-hsien who, in 1989, clinched Chiufen's status as one of Taiwan's top-billed memory-lane travel destinations when he made it the setting of his groundbreaking art-house portrayal of Taiwan's 228 incident, City of Sadness.
PHOTO: CHRIS TAYLOR, TAIPEI TIMES
The movie is remembered in the name of a tea shop on the main laddered street that climbs up from the main road where buses drop off residents and visitors. And tea houses are mostly what Chiufen is about these days. Tea houses and arts and crafts. Oh yes, and that quintessential Taiwanese passion: street snacks -- in this case variations on the sticky-rice bun known in Taiwanese as muaji.
It's a curious feeling to wander the narrow streets of Chiufen in the tow of ambling groups of tourists from the city. There's a sense of dislocation, as if you have found yourself cast somehow between the medieval bustle of Kathmandu and the arts and crafts nostalgia of an English village. The hawkers call out from stands, selling their sticky-rice creations, and the crafts shops sell Buddhas, incense and fingered back-scratchers. There's a sense that somehow the history that created this picturesque town has been forgotten according to the imperatives of commerce: the tea shops sell overpriced coffee and tea and uninspired meals; the gift shops jostle with souvenirs that might come from anywhere in Taiwan; and the Chiufen art gallery turns out to be a venue for the sale of for the most part kitsch work of local potters.
By all means take in a coffee or a tea -- some of the tea shops have splendid veranda views of the snaking alleys below; others sport views of the surrounding hills. And by all means buy some pottery or some local sticky rice.
PHOTO: CHRIS TAYLOR, TAIPEI TIMES
But the real joys of Chiufen are a walk through the narrow streets up to the look-out that offers views of the wooded hills, an occasional temple or pagoda peeking out of the greenery, and, in the distance, the sparkling sea Fulong Bay, an ant-size fishing boat chugging out of the harbor, a faint chalk line of spume following in its wake; or a strenuous walk up the path that snakes along the shoulder of Mt Keelung, offering superlative views of the northeast coast; or a visit to the Gold Museum.
Not that the museum is anything much in itself. Appropriately -- given the amnesiac quality of this picturesque escape from the city -- it has a neglected, down-at-heel look about it. The squat concrete building looks like it could do with a coat of paint and rubbish litters the area surrounding it that might otherwise have been a garden. It is, in short, a characteristically Taiwanese tribute to the past -- half-hearted, little patronized, almost apologetic. But also, and as is so often the case in Taiwan, the man behind it is passionate about his mission.
Mr. Tseng isn't in attendance when I first enter the museum, but an assistant evinces that Chinese compulsion to anthropomorphize as I poke around the downstairs exhibition of rocks and gold in glass cabinets.
PHOTO: CHRIS TAYLOR, TAIPEI TIMES
"Look, it's a frog with a baby on its back," she says pointing at a fist-sized specimen. "And here, that's a camel. Look, a mouse. This one's the shape of Taiwan. And that, they're ants climbing a tree." And so it goes, until Mr. Tseng appears, a medium-set man in his late fifties dressed in slacks, a T-shirt and flip-flops.
"You wait here while I get the show ready," he commands and disappears upstairs. Karaoke music begins to chug from speakers accompanied by clanking and hammering sounds that I assume are Mr. Tseng preparing his show.
I browse the rocks shadowed by the attendant, who disconcertingly hums along with the karaoke music until Mr Tseng calls for me to mount the stairs.
PHOTO: CHRIS TAYLOR, TAIPEI TIMES
And there he is with the tools of the trade he learned at the age of 14, and which he says nobody but himself remembers now. He's grinding sediment with a huge mortar and pestle. And then he's adding water and grinding the sediment again with a foot-operated, sharp-edged metal wheel. And then he's transferring the results to a wooden slat that he splashes with water, turning it this way and that, allowing the chaff to flow away into a large pot.
"The gold's heavier than the sand," he says. "We'll be able to see it soon." And sure enough, the occasional sparkle appears in the grit, until by the time his work has reduced a bucketful of grit to half a small bowl of black mud he is hissing "Gold!" and we can see the stars.
Chiufen may have forgotten its past in its quest for the tourist dollar, but Mr. Tseng is determined to do his bit to make sure that at least the occasional visitor who strays from the gift shops and tea houses gets a glimpse of the days when hopefuls toiled under the sharp-eyed gaze of overseers to extract gold from the sand.
"I founded the museum so that people wouldn't forget how Chiufen was once a bustling gold town," he says. "But sometimes now I think I'm the only one who remembers."
For your information
Chiufen can be reached from Taipei in around 1-1/2 hours by train and bus.
Take a Suao-bound train from the main Taipei train station and get off at Juifang. At Juifang, buses depart from opposite the train station approximately every 20 minutes for Chiufen.
There are no hotels in Chiufen, but if you want to spend the night, many families offer basic tatami-style rooms for between NT$500 and NT$600 -- ask at any of the shops for a "minsu."
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