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

30-Second Overview: Most people visit Jinguashi for the 220-kilogram gold brick at the Gold Museum, or the orange-yellow lights illuminating the Remains of the 13 Levels at night—lit for the first time only in 2019^{1 2}. But the real story of this mountain is not about gold. From 1942 to 1945, the Japanese military forced over one 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" (凸鼻仔寮)^{3 4}. On November 23, 1997, Canadian Michael Hurst and 150 survivors and family members erected a monument at the original site³. Today, tourists walk across the waste flue as a photo spot, 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 Gourd" 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 farmer surnamed Li from Chaozhou discovered a "little golden gourd" gold vein outcrop in the Jiufen mountains, and nearby found the "big golden gourd"—the peaks resembled a Taiwanese "kim-koe" (金瓜, pumpkin/gourd in Hokkien), and so the place was named⁷.

In 1895, Taiwan was ceded to Japan. In 1896, the Governor-General promulgated the "Taiwan Mining Regulations," stipulating that only Japanese nationals could mine, stripping the island's inhabitants of all mining rights⁷. 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 Chōbei's "Tanaka-gumi" (Tanaka Group), and the western side, Ruifang (Jiufen), went to Fujita Denzaburō's "Fujita-gumi" (Fujita Group)^{7 8}. A single ridge line determined the fate of two settlements for the next hundred years.

The Tanaka Group brought the full suite of mining technology from the Kamaishi Copper Mine in Japan. In 1904, they struck enargite (硫砷銅礦) in the third tunnel of the main mountain (Honzan), transforming Jinguashi from a gold-and-silver mine into a "gold-silver-copper" mine⁷. In 1925, the Tanaka Group, struggling financially, sold to Gotō Shinjirō, who established the "Jinguashi Mining Co., Ltd." In 1931, a new gold vein was discovered, and the Japanese press crowned him the "King of Gold Mountain"^{9 10}. In 1933, the mine changed hands again to the Japan Mining Company (日本鑛業株式會社), and a state-of-the-art flotation plant was built at Shuidongdong at the mountain's base—today known as the Remains of the 13 Levels (十三層遺址)⁷.

📝 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 an illegality." In 1938, Jinguashi's gold output approached 70,000 taels, earning it the title "Asia's number one 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" (凸鼻仔寮)^{7 4}. "Bei-Ei" (米英) is the Japanese term for "America and Britain."

Over one thousand Allied POWs, predominantly from British Commonwealth nations (Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and 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, and then marched up the mountain to Jinguashi^{3 4}.

The prisoners' labor was to enter the copper tunnels of the main mountain and mine ore. Inside the tunnels, temperatures were high, air was thin, and the dust was laden with arsenic and sulfur. They worked in torn shirts and wooden clogs, and failure to meet the daily copper 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 death 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 activities 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—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 British hands. 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 few locals had heard of it. The turning point came in late 1996: Michael Hurst, a Canadian long-term resident of Taiwan, happened to learn of Tubizi Liao's existence and began searching for survivors and launching a memorial project^{3 11}.

On November 23, 1997, over 150 surviving POWs, family members, and representatives from Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand unveiled a monument 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 every November he brings survivors and their families back to Jinguashi for a memorial service^{11 12}. When the Taipei Times interviewed him in 2005, he had been doing this work for eight years; by 2025, it had been nearly 30 years^{11 12}.

"We do this not out of hatred for the Japanese, but to let those who suffered know that they have not been forgotten." — Michael Hurst, 2005¹¹

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

That 1992 Film: Wang Tung Filmed Not Gold, but the People Drowned by Gold

The first person to show the Taiwanese public that "Jinguashi is not just gold" was director Wang Tung (王童).

The 1992 film Hill of No Return (無言的山丘), set in Japanese-era Jinguashi, was written by Wu Nien-jen and starred Peng Chia-chia and Yang Kuei-mei. It tells the story of two tenant-farmer brothers, A-chu and A-man, 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 hostesses, 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—the museum's narrative was "Golden Years" and "mining settlement preservation"^{15 16}, whereas what Wang Tung offered in 1992 was already "no words" (無言).

📝 Curator's Note: Two narratives about Jinguashi are in conflict. One is the museum and tourism bureau's "gold-dream-come-true" 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 Remains of the 13 Levels, but Not the Arsenic in the Soil

In 1987, the Taiwan Metal Mining Corporation (台金公司) shut down due to a collapse in 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 Shuidongdong copper smelter at the mountain's base 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 (周鍊), the lighting master behind the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building, to illuminate the Remains of the 13 Levels at Shuidongdong—idle for 32 years—with 250 LED lights^{17 2}. From that day on, tourists set up tripods along the bay to photograph the 13-story ruin, and the "Shuijinjiu" (水金九) secret-spot hashtag flooded with visitors on Instagram².

But in that same year, on August 19, 2019, Ruifang residents protested at Taipower: the land on which the Remains of the 13 Levels sits is a publicly announced "soil pollution control site," as early copper smelting left behind massive quantities of arsenic, copper, lead, and zinc, and the waste flue running along the ridge beside the site has seen heavy metal contamination go 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 United Daily News investigative report 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" (陰陽海)—which dyes Keelung Mountain golden-yellow and the bay below yellow-brown—is partly due to the natural oxidation of pyrite in the volcanic rock of the Keelung volcanic group, and partly due to wastewater from upstream mine tunnels^{7 17}. It is a landscape and an industrial wound at the same time.

📝 Curator's Note: The Taipower that turned on the lights and the Taipower that manages the 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' Bento Boxes and Silicosis

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

Tunnel No. 9 of Jinguashi's Honzan (main mountain) descends to 160 meters below sea level¹⁹. Inside the tunnels, temperatures are high, humidity is extreme, and oxygen is low. A miner's standard bento was "three bowls of white rice, pickled cucumber, and salted egg," because any other dish 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 fatality 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 the Tanaka Group during the Japanese era and the Taiwan Metal Mining Corporation after the war operated employee hospitals in Jinguashi (today the Jinguashi Hospital Site), serving as both welfare and operational necessity—this 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-pit blasting—from the Qing dynasty through the Taiwan Metal Mining Corporation—shaved over 200 meters off the entire mountain. The "Gold Museum" where visitors stand today is actually on what was once the original mountainside²¹. The mine was not flattened by tourism; it was flattened by its own excavation.

📝 Curator's Note: The Miners' History Museum is in Houtong. Retired miner Chau Chao-nan rents the changing room of the Ruisan main mine on a NT$3,500 monthly senior 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 Crown Prince's Guest House of 1922: A House Built for a Visit That Never Happened

In 1922, the Tanaka Mining Corporation spent a fortune building a luxurious Japanese shoin-zukuri-style residence, intended as lodgings for the Japanese Crown Prince Hirohito (later Emperor Shōwa) 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 historic site: the "Crown Prince's Guest House" (太子賓館)^{23 24}.

After the war, it was renamed the "First Guest House" and taken over by the Taiwan Metal Mining Corporation. 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 residences in Taiwan—but it represents the peak of Jinguashi's gold and copper output in the 1920s, a level sufficient to convince a colonial enterprise that "the Crown Prince is worth coming to see in person"^{23 24}.

The "Four-Connected Row Houses" (四連棟) nearby tell another story: built in the 1930s by the Japan Mining Company as four connected Japanese-style residences for Japanese staff and their families, each unit with its own entrance, living room, kitchen, bathroom, and toilet—a stark contrast to the wooden plank houses where local miners lived at the same time. This is the clear class line within a colonial mining settlement²⁵. After the war, they were converted to Taiwan Metal Mining Corporation 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's Quanji Temple (金瓜石勸濟堂) enshrines the Four Great Benefactors—Lord Guan (Guan Yu), Lü Dongbin, Zhang Dan, and Wang Lingguan—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 (approximately 11.7 meters) 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 (黃金神社, 1897) brought by the Japanese coexisted with Quanji Temple brought by local Hoklo people and the annual Mazu procession in the fourth lunar month²⁸. After the Japanese left, only the shrine's broken pillars remained; 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 worshipping Lord Guan before entering the tunnels was not a cultural ritual; it was risk management. In a workplace with such a high fatality rate, entrusting one's life to a deity was a very practical form of psychological insurance.

Looking Down from the Mouth of Honzan Tunnel No. 5

Visiting Jinguashi today, you can buy a ticket at the Gold Museum to enter the first 70 meters of Honzan Tunnel No. 5, where you can see the mine-cart tracks left behind after mining ceased in 1972²⁹. You can walk up to see the remaining pillars of the Gold Shrine, built by the Tanaka Group in 1898 to "settle the people's minds"³⁰. You can descend to Shuidongdong to photograph the Remains of the 13 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 silently in Wang Tung's lens in 1992, the orange light that illuminated the 13 Levels in 2019, and the arsenic-contaminated soil tourists walk on today—all layered into the same mountain.

"They have not been forgotten." — Inscription on the monument at the Jinguashi International War-End Peace Memorial Park³

Further Reading:

• Japanese Colonial Period — How the "Taiwan Mining Regulations" stripped the island's inhabitants of all mining rights
• Taiwan Metal Mining Corporation — The full arc of the Taiwan Metal Mining Corporation from its founding in 1955 to its closure in 1987, and 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 sea transport network shipping Jinguashi's gold and copper to Kyushu, Japan
• Folk Belief: Lord Guan — Why miners worshipped Lord Guan; the labor-risk logic behind Quanji Temple's 25-ton copper Lord Guan statue
• Keelung City — Jinguashi gold traveled by aerial ropeway to Shuidongdong, then to Badu, then to Niuchou Port, and was loaded onto ships at Keelung's Zhengbin Fishing Port bound for Japan

References