Suwang-dong mining plant (水湳洞選煉廠遺址)
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A cluster of abandoned industrial buildings on several tiers down a hillside in northern Taiwan’s mining area. Not quite urbex, since you cannot enter the interiors of any of the buildings, but still a good dose of industrial/mining grimness to take in when touring the region, if you’re into such things (like I am).
More background info: it’s all a bit murky, I’m afraid. My guidebook didn’t mention the site at all. But I grabbed the name off Google Maps and searched for it online. No English pages were returned, but after entering the name in Chinese I did find a Chinese article about the site, which I had machine-translated. However that technology doesn’t seem to be well attuned to Chinese, as the outcome was rather chaotic, more than bordering on gibberish in many places.
All I could gather was that the site is a relic of the copper and gold extraction industry and that its purpose was that of a kind of “refinery”, for extracting unwanted substances from the mineral ore in a wet slurry type of process … or something like that – but the technical details elude me. Sometimes it’s also referred to as a “smelter”. Maybe it was both?
The now abandoned structures seem to date back to the 1930s when a Japanese company operated the mining enterprises of this place. What happened after WWII is not entirely clear, nor when exactly operations ceased, possibly in the late 1980s.
Sometime in the 2000s, the site was listed as historically significant, and in 2017 an artist added some public works of art, including light installations (see below and the photos).
The name of the place can also be found transliterated as “Shuiandong” and sometimes it is referred to as the “13 storeys/levels” (and here and there the figure is given as 18) in allusion to the structure of the tiered facility.
What there is to see: really just the industrial ruins, in all their nice and grim atmospheric “glory”. It’s a case where images say more than words, so check out the photo gallery below!
The best view over the whole complex is to be had from an observation point atop a small pavilion reached by semi-hidden steps by the end of the road in Changren Community. My guide claimed it was a “secret” spot only he knew about. I doubt that somewhat, though, because the paving stones at the viewpoint had a plaque set into one of them saying “Photo Spot” next to a drawing of the plant. So we will hardly have been to first ones to ever make use of it.
The plant itself is off limits – allegedly because of toxic waste still present in the ground and the interiors. However, we stopped at the top part of the plant, where there is a small car park. That way I could at least peek into one part of the plant, but a fence prevented any access.
Also at this top part of the fortress-like edifice was a plaque about an art project (described in the usual arty hyperbole style). Two elements of this, basically sculptures in the form of the letter <i>, are to be found here too: one by the side of the big concrete bunker-like building, another, illuminated one inside a tunnel at the far end of the car park to the east of the building.
I found this short stay at these spots a valuable add-on to our tour by car – after this my wife and I were driven to the airport for our flight home, so Suwang-dong was quite literally the final flourish of our 2023/24 Taiwan trip.
But whether it would really be worth it to come all the way here just for the industrial ruins, everybody has to judge for themselves. For fans of industrial archaeology (like myself) it should have enough appeal. Proper urbexers, however, would want access to the insides, so could be disappointed. And for many others this is quite likely a place that will leave them cold. The choice is yours.
Location: near the coast in the north-eastern corner of Taiwan, east of Ruifang District (technically part of New Taipei City, though it’s not an urban location), in the Changren Community.
Google Maps locators:
Top of the plant: [25.1186, 121.8647]
Viewpoint pavilion: [25.11917, 121.86615]
Waterfall viewpoint: [25.1176, 121.8616]
Discoloured bay: [25.1237, 121.8639]
Access and costs: quite off the beaten track, and only quite easily accessible by car; free.
Details: I saw this place as part of a whole-day excursion with a driver/guide from Taipei, which also took in Wanli, Keelung, Jinguashi Gold Museum, Kinkaseki and Houtong Coal Mine Ecological Park. As we had booked the same driver/guide for several days between Taitung and Taipei and paid the company who hired him in one lump sum, I cannot say how much just this part of the touring would have come to. My very (!) rough estimate would be in the region of 10,000 NTD for the whole day. But it should be possible to arrange shorter excursions including this site for less.
If you have your own vehicle and want to visit this site independently, you can of course do so. Best use a GPS/SatNav device and enter the Google Maps locators above.
In theory you could also get public transport, first a local train to Ruifang Station then a bus (line F805 or 891) to Chengren Community (濓新里), but that would be cumbersome and connections are unlikely to be frequent enough to make this really doable. And you don’t want to risk getting stranded up here …
Note that the interiors of the industrial buildings are off limits – allegedly because of toxic residues from the refining process (arsenic, cyanide) still present inside.
Time required: not long. We spent just under half an hour at the site, both at the viewpoint and at the top of the abandoned plant.
Combinations with other dark destinations: At the junction where the road up the hillside branches off is a sight that is sometimes referred to as the “golden waterfall” (officially “Huangjin Waterfall”). Here water bursts from the hillside and cascades down some tiers of rock, dying them a reddish brown/copper colour (so not really golden). Apparently that’s from some toxic chemicals in the water. This then gushes down and into the river in the valley below, where it then also dyes the riverbed the same otherworldly colour before ending up in the sea where you can see the greenish-yellowish discolouration of the seawater in the bay (not a place for swimming, then, I guess … even though they call the bay “Yingyang”). My guide declared that the waterfall was “all natural”, but I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that this phenomenon is also somehow related to the local extraction industry. The Gold Museum website claims the colour is from iron-rich molecules dissolved from pyrite in the acidic water … I don’t know if that’s reassuring.
Combinations with non-dark destinations: see under Taiwan in general and Jinguashi Gold Museum in particular.
