KEELUNG, Taiwan—About an hour and a half north of Taiwan’s capital sits Keelung, (pronounced, and otherwise spelt ‘Jilong’), an unremarkable coastal city with drab weather and several tourists spots. About an hour from Keelung is Jiufen, an old gold town which broke down in the late 60s, and recovered thirty years later to become the buzzing tourist hub it is today.
Keelung flashes its tourist attractions around like a proverbial wristwatch, whereas Jiufen’s are hidden away amongst crooked alleys and steep cobblestone steps on a former gold mountain.
For example, every second bus in Keelung advertises the city’s half-a-dozen tourist attractions with cute pictures on each side. There’s the happy-go-lucky, anthropomorphic bamboo shoot (a well-known eat in the city), the smiling man with the fish (reference to a tourist/fishing spot called ‘Badouzi’), a set of large temple gates (a large park, called Zhongzheng, has these), a statue of Bodhisattva Guanyin (a Buddhist figure which the city has taken as the equivalent of a patron saint), and, finally, a picture of a chicken next to a cage. Following the pattern, one would expect that these last two symbols were advertising the existence of a battery farm somewhere on the outskirts of the city, but it is not so. This is a kind of play on words. The characters for chicken and cage are pronounced ‘ji’ and ‘long’ in Chinese, the same sound as ‘Jilong’, the name of the city. This last flourish is the first taste of Keelung’s unabashed kitsch.
Keelung flashes its tourist attractions around like a proverbial wristwatch, whereas Jiufen’s are hidden away amongst crooked alleys and steep cobblestone steps on a former gold mountain.
For example, every second bus in Keelung advertises the city’s half-a-dozen tourist attractions with cute pictures on each side. There’s the happy-go-lucky, anthropomorphic bamboo shoot (a well-known eat in the city), the smiling man with the fish (reference to a tourist/fishing spot called ‘Badouzi’), a set of large temple gates (a large park, called Zhongzheng, has these), a statue of Bodhisattva Guanyin (a Buddhist figure which the city has taken as the equivalent of a patron saint), and, finally, a picture of a chicken next to a cage. Following the pattern, one would expect that these last two symbols were advertising the existence of a battery farm somewhere on the outskirts of the city, but it is not so. This is a kind of play on words. The characters for chicken and cage are pronounced ‘ji’ and ‘long’ in Chinese, the same sound as ‘Jilong’, the name of the city. This last flourish is the first taste of Keelung’s unabashed kitsch.
