Town built on gold in spotlight again

Lost luster found as block buster movie pulls in tourists

When the film director Hou Hsiao-Hsien was making his award-winning film A City of Sadness in Jiufen in 1989 he could scarcely have realized what a service he was doing to the town, which is about a 90-minute drive from downtown Taipei.

The film, set between 1945 and 1950, depicts the life of the four brothers of the Lin family, and its background is the February 28 Incident in Taiwan in 1947, an anti-government uprising that took place exactly 69 years ago this weekend. I imagine Hou chose Jiufen as a location for his film because it perfectly captured the mood he wanted to depict.