Jinguashi: The Thousand British Soldiers Forced into the Tunnels to Mine Copper, and a Gold Mountain That Has Yet to Be Washed Clean

30-Second Overview: Most people come to Jinguashi for the 220-kilogram gold brick at the Gold Museum, or the orange-yellow lights that were finally switched on at the Thirteen Levels Ruins in 2019^{1 2}. But the real story of this mountain is not about gold — from 1942 to 1945, the Japanese military forced over a thousand Allied POWs, predominantly from the British Commonwealth, into the copper mine tunnels here. They called this place "Kinkaseki"; the Taiwanese called it "Tubizi Liao"^{3 4}. On November 23, 1997, Canadian Michael Hurst and 150 survivors and family members erected a memorial at the original site³. Today, tourists walk across the waste flue for photos, unaware that the soil beneath their feet still exceeds arsenic and heavy metal limits by several times over^{5 6}.

That Nugget of Placer Gold in 1890, and That "Golden Melon" in 1893

In 1890, workers building a bridge over the Keelung River at Qidu for Liu Mingchuan's cross-island railway struck placer gold⁷. Prospectors followed the river upstream, and in 1893, a Chaozhou-born farmer surnamed Li discovered the "Little Golden Melon" gold vein outcrop in the Jiufen mountain area, and nearby found the "Big Golden Melon" — the peak resembled a "golden melon" (pumpkin) in Taiwanese Hokkien, and so the place was named⁷.

In 1895, Taiwan was ceded to Japan. In 1896, the Governor-General promulgated the "Taiwan Mining Regulations," which restricted mining rights to Japanese nationals from the home islands, stripping the island's own people of their mining rights entirely⁷. In October of the same year, the Governor-General drew a line along the north-south ridge of Keelung Mountain, splitting the mining district in two: the eastern side, Jinguashi, went to "Tanaka-gumi" under Tanaka Chohei, and the western side, Ruifang (Jiufen), went to "Fujita-gumi" under Fujita Denzaburo^{7 8}. A single ridgeline determined the fate of two settlements for the next hundred years.

Tanaka-gumi brought the full suite of mining technology from the Kamaishi Copper Mountain in Japan. In 1904, they struck enargite in the No. 3 Tunnel of the Main Mountain, and Jinguashi transformed from a gold-and-silver mine into a "gold-silver-copper" mine⁷. In 1925, Tanaka-gumi, struggling financially, sold to Gotou Shintarou, who established the "Jinguashi Mining Co., Ltd." In 1931, a new gold vein was discovered, and the Japanese media crowned him the "King of Gold Mountains"^{9 10}. In 1933, the operation was sold again to Nippon Mining Co., Ltd., and a state-of-the-art flotation plant was built at Shuiandong Cave at the foot of the mountain — today's Thirteen Levels Ruins⁷.

📝 Curator's Note: Jinguashi is not a story of "locals striking it rich mining gold." It is a story of "foreign capital bringing foreign technology and turning local mining rights into something illegal." In 1938, Jinguashi's gold output approached 70,000 taels, earning it the title "Asia's No. 1 Precious Metal Mine"^{7 10} — but the gold flowed in one direction: Tokyo.

"Kinkaseki" in 1942: British Soldiers Mining Japan's Copper

After the outbreak of the Pacific War, gold was classified as a non-defense material, and Jinguashi was forced to shift to copper mining as its primary output⁷. From 1942 to 1945, the Japanese military established the "Jinguashi American-British Prisoner Labor Camp" here — known in Taiwanese Hokkien as "Tubizi Liao"^{7 4}. "Bei-Ei" is the Japanese term for "America and Britain."

Over a thousand Allied POWs, predominantly from the British Commonwealth (Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa), were imprisoned here^{7 4}. Most had been captured during the fall of Singapore in 1942, shipped by sea from Changi, Singapore to Keelung, then marched up the mountain to Jinguashi^{3 4}.

The prisoners' labor was mining copper ore in the Main Mountain tunnels. Inside the tunnels, temperatures were high, air was thin, and the dust was laced with arsenic and sulfur. They worked in torn shirts and wooden clogs, and failure to meet the daily copper ore quota meant beatings^{4 11}. One survivor described it as a "Hell Camp"¹¹. In a 2015 BBC Chinese interview with Canadian researcher Michael Hurst, he calculated that the mortality rate at Jinguashi was among the highest of any Japanese POW camp in the Pacific theater⁴.

In the second half of 1944, after the U.S. military gained air superiority, mining operations gradually ceased, and in 1945 the prisoners were collectively relocated to Xindian for custody⁷. After Japan's surrender, those who survived boarded ships home from Keelung Harbor — and from then on, they remembered this mountain as "Kinkaseki," not "Jinguashi"³.

📝 Curator's Note: The last batch of copper from Jinguashi was dug out by the British. This fact barely exists in Taiwan's tourism narrative.

November 23, 1997: The Monument Erected by Survivors' Own Hands

Fifty years after the war, this history was virtually blank on the Taiwan side — even locals had rarely heard of it. The turning point came at the end of 1996: Canadian expatriate Michael Hurst, living in Taiwan,偶然 learned of Tubizi Liao's existence and began tracking down survivors and launching a memorial project^{3 11}.

On November 23, 1997, over 150 surviving POWs, family members, and representatives from Canada, Britain, New Zealand, and Australia unveiled a memorial at the site of the former POW camp — today's Jinguashi "International War-End Peace Memorial Park"³. The monument bears the names of over a thousand prisoners from Jinguashi and all other POW camps across Taiwan^{3 4}.

Hurst later founded the "Taiwan POW Camps Memorial Society" and has brought survivors and their families back to Jinguashi every November for memorial services^{11 12}. When the Taipei Times profiled him in 2005, he had been doing this work for eight years; by 2025, it has been nearly 30 years^{11 12}.

"We are not doing this out of hatred for the Japanese. We are doing it so that those who suffered know they have not been forgotten." — Michael Hurst, 2005¹¹

The monument in the park is still there today. It is just up the hill from the Gold Museum, near the direction of the No. 5 Tunnel of the Main Mountain. Most tourists pass by without stopping.

That 1992 Film: Wang Tung Was Not Filming Gold, but People Drowned by Gold

The first person to show Taiwan that "Jinguashi is not just gold" was director Wang Tung.

The 1992 film Hill of No Return, set in Japanese-era Jinguashi, written by Wu Nien-jen and starring Peng Chia-chia and Yang Kuei-mei, tells the story of two tenant farmer brothers, A-ju and A-nan, who flee their indentured labor contracts to go mine gold in Jinguashi, only to be consumed by the mine, by Japanese capital, and by their own dreams^{13 14}. That year it won the Golden Horse Awards for Best Feature Film, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Art Direction¹⁴.

The film has no heroes. Miners, widows, bar girls, Japanese foremen, children felled by plague — everyone is crushed by this mountain's appetite for gold¹⁴. This came twelve years before the Gold Museum opened in 2004 with its narrative of "Golden Years" and "mining settlement preservation"^{15 16}. What Wang Tung offered in 1992 was already "silence."

📝 Curator's Note: There are two competing narratives about Jinguashi. One is the museum and tourism bureau's "gold-dreaming" narrative; the other is Wang Tung's and Michael Hurst's "this mountain swallowed how many people" narrative. The former sells tickets; the latter is closer to the truth.

That Light in 2019: Illuminating the Thirteen Levels Ruins, but Not the Arsenic in the Soil

In 1987, Taiwan Metal Mining Corporation (Taijin Company) declared closure due to the collapse of international copper prices and its inability to repay bank loans, officially ending Jinguashi's century of gold production. The land was taken over by Taiwan Sugar Corporation, and the Shuiandong Cave copper smelter at the foot of the mountain was handed to Taiwan Power Company (Taipower)⁷. From then on, Jinguashi's population plummeted from its peak of tens of thousands to fewer than two thousand, most of them elderly⁷.

At the Mid-Autumn Festival in 2019, Taipower enlisted Chou Lien, the lighting master behind the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building, to illuminate the Shuiandong Cave Thirteen Levels Ruins, which had been shut down for 32 years, with 250 LED lights^{17 2}. From that day on, tourists set up tripods along the Yin-Yang Sea to photograph the 13-story ruin, and the "Shui-Jin-Jiu" secret spots on Instagram drew massive crowds².

But in that same year, on August 19, 2019, Ruifang residents protested at Taipower: the land on which the Thirteen Levels Ruins sits is a publicly announced "soil pollution control site," because early copper smelting left behind large quantities of arsenic, copper, lead, and zinc, and the waste flue running along the ridge beside the ruins has had heavy metal contamination that has gone uncleared for years^{5 18}. Taipower responded that "containment measures are in place and monitoring is ongoing," but acknowledged that the site had indeed been listed as a pollution control zone by the environmental protection bureau¹⁸. A 2020 investigative report by the United Daily News noted that the waste flue is now a popular photo spot, but it is itself a facility designed in the 1930s to vent metallic vapors, and arsenic levels in the soil have been unable to naturally degrade for decades^{5 6}.

The "Yin-Yang Sea," which dyes Keelung Mountain golden-yellow and the bay below yellow-brown, is partly due to the natural oxidation of pyrite in the Keelung Volcanic Group's rocks, and partly due to wastewater from upstream mine tunnels^{7 17}. It is a landscape, and it is also an industrial wound.

📝 Curator's Note: The Taipower that turned on the lights and the Taipower that manages soil contamination are the same Taipower. Jinguashi's "beauty" and "toxicity" are two sides of the same coin — inseparable.

160 Meters Below Sea Level: The Miners' Lunch Boxes and Silicosis

The most thoroughly consumed by the tourism narrative are the miners themselves.

The No. 9 Tunnel of Jinguashi's Main Mountain was dug down to 160 meters below sea level¹⁹. Inside the tunnels, temperatures were high, humidity was extreme, and oxygen was low. A miner's lunch box was invariably "three bowls of white rice, pickled cucumber, and salted egg," because anything else would spoil inside the mine¹⁹. There were taboos inside the tunnels: no whistling, no mentioning snakes — these taboos were not superstition, but linguistic safety valves set up in a workplace with a high mortality rate¹⁹.

The highest-paid job was "pneumatic drill operator," because it required operating a vibrating drill to bore holes into rock faces — and also because it meant inhaling the most mineral dust, with most operators eventually dying of silicosis¹⁹. Miners traded their lungs for gold. Both Tanaka-gumi during the Japanese era and Taijin Company after the war operated employee hospitals in Jinguashi (today's Jinguashi Hospital Site), which served as both welfare and operational necessity — the settlement had to cope with trauma, oxygen deprivation, and years of dust lung disease simultaneously²⁰.

When VERSE magazine visited Ruifang in 2024, local elders described how the original Jinguashi gold outcrop stood at an elevation of 660 meters, but nearly a century of open-pipe blasting from the Qing dynasty through Taijin Company shaved over 200 meters off the entire mountain. The "Gold Museum" where visitors stand today is actually standing on what was originally the mid-slope²¹. The mountain was not flattened by tourism — it was flattened by its own excavation.

📝 Curator's Note: The Miners' Culture and History Museum is in Houtong. Retired miner Zhou Chaonan rents the changing room of the Rui-San Main Mine on a NT$3,500 monthly elderly pension to preserve history²² — this is how Taiwan's miners write their own story. At Jinguashi's "Gold Museum," the miners' presence is still marginal.

The Prince's Guest House of 1922: A House Built for a Visit That Never Happened

In 1922, Tanaka Mining Co., Ltd. spent a fortune constructing a lavish Japanese shoin-style building, intended as lodgings for the Japanese Crown Prince Hirohito (later Emperor Showa) during an inspection tour of Jinguashi's mines — but Hirohito never came^{23 24}. This is what is now designated as a New Taipei City municipal historic site: the "Prince's Guest House"^{23 24}.

After the war, it was renamed the "First Guest House" and taken over by Taijin Company. In 1989 it was transferred to Taipower, and in 1994 it was placed under preservation²⁴. It is one of the best-preserved and largest Japanese wooden guest halls in Taiwan — but what it represents is the peak of Jinguashi's gold and copper output in the 1920s, a level sufficient to make a colonial enterprise believe that "the Crown Prince should come see it in person"²³ [^26.

The nearby "Four Connected Houses" tell another story: built in the 1930s by Nippon Mining Co., Ltd. as four connected Japanese-style residences for Japanese staff and their families, each with an independent entrance, living room, kitchen, bathroom, and toilet — contrasted with the wooden board houses where local miners lived during the same period, this is the clear class line within a colonial mining settlement²⁵. After the war, they were converted to Taijin Company employee housing and continued in use²⁵.

Quanji Temple: The Temple Where Miners Entrusted Their Lives to Lord Guan

Founded during the Guangxu reign of the Qing dynasty (around 1896), Jinguashi Quanji Temple enshrines the Four Great Patrons — Guan, Lü, Zhang, and Wang — and is the most important local religious center in the Jinguashi settlement^{26 27}. In 1991 (ROC year 80), Quanji Temple cast a 25-metric-ton, 35-chi-tall pure copper statue of Lord Guan on its rooftop, facing the sea with its back to the mountain. It remains the largest outdoor Lord Guan statue on the north coast to this day^{26 27}.

A January 2021 investigation by Scientific Monthly noted that Jinguashi's mining settlement formed a unique folk-religion spectrum — the Gold Shrine brought by the Japanese (1897) coexisted with Quanji Temple brought by local Hoklo people and the annual Mazu procession in the fourth lunar month²⁸. After the Japanese left, the shrine was reduced to broken pillars, while Quanji Temple continues its worship to this day — not because of any superiority of one belief over another, but because the temple survived alongside the local people, and the shrine did not²⁸.

📝 Curator's Note: Miners praying to Lord Guan before entering the tunnel was not a cultural ritual — it was risk management. In a workplace with such a high mortality rate, entrusting one's life to a deity was a very practical form of psychological insurance.

Looking Down from the Entrance of the No. 5 Tunnel of the Main Mountain

Visiting Jinguashi today, you can buy a ticket at the Gold Museum and enter the first 70 meters of the No. 5 Tunnel of the Main Mountain for an experiential walk, seeing the mine cart tracks left behind after mining ceased in 1972²⁹. You can walk up to see the broken pillars of the Gold Shrine, built by Tanaka-gumi in 1898 to "settle the people's minds"³⁰. You can go down to Shuiandong Cave to photograph the Thirteen Levels at night¹⁷.

You can also walk into the memorial park established in 1997 by the surviving POWs themselves — it is right next to the Gold Museum, minutes away. The park is small and quiet, and the monument bears names.

Jinguashi is not just gold. It is the nugget of placer gold from the river in 1890, the thousand British soldiers in the tunnels in 1992, the miners who fell in silence in Wang Tung's 1992 film, the orange light that illuminated the Thirteen Levels in 2019, and the arsenic-contaminated soil tourists walk on today — all layered into the same mountain.

"They have not been forgotten." — from the inscription of the Jinguashi International War-End Peace Memorial Park³

Further Reading:

• Japanese Colonial Period — How the "Taiwan Mining Regulations" stripped the island's people of their mining rights entirely
• Taiwan Metal Mining Corporation — The full arc of Taijin Company from its founding in 1955 to its closure in 1987, the postwar state-capital operation of Jinguashi
• History of Forest Development in Taiwan — Like Alishan and Taipingshan, Jinguashi was part of the Japanese Empire's resource colonial system
• Sun Moon Lake, Alishan: The Empire's Forest and Kao Yi-sheng's Mountain — The imperial economics behind three "famous scenic spots"
• History of Maritime Trade in Taiwan — The shipping network that carried Jinguashi's gold and copper to Kyushu, Japan
• Folk Belief: Lord Guan — Why miners worship Lord Guan; the labor-risk logic behind Quanji Temple's 25-ton copper Lord Guan statue

References