‘Far over the misty mountains cold / To dungeons deep and caverns old / We must away ere break of day / To seek the pale enchanted gold’….. And so we did ~ venture forth that is, in the footsteps of The Hobbit and his friends, to the misty mountains cold, dungeons deep and caverns old ~ there’s plenty of them in the mountains above Keelung, and plenty have sadly lost their lives in those caverns mining the gold.  And copper.  The old gold mining town of Jinguashi 金瓜石 is located right there, right in the misty mountains, and just above it is Teapot … Continue reading Teapot Mountain 茶壺山 ~ very misty, very muddy, but hey, very fun!

What a place!  In its heyday, Jinguashi 金瓜石 was a very major happening kind of place, a gold rush town up in the mountains above Keelung on Taiwan’s NE coast with one of the world’s largest gold and copper mines ~ over 600 km of tunnels in and under those hills. During the Japanese era (1895-1945), it became the largest copper mine in the Japanese empire. But by the 1970’s it was all gone, the gold rush all finished.  As with all mining towns, so here – a tragic history of hard labour and terrible working and living conditions. Worse too, as … Continue reading Teapot Mountain 茶壺山 and Banpingshan 半平山 (半屏山) Ridge