aeeble

Inside the Jingtong Coal Mine Memorial Park, located above Jingtong Station in Pingxi, New Taipei City, Sheshi Mountain was not originally a mountain at all. It is a hill—or coal-slag heap—formed by decades of piling up waste rock separated out after coal was washed and sorted. Today it has become a tourist attraction; visitors can see a mine entrance cut into the stone, and it is easy to picture how coal was once extracted from the rock face below and hauled out through the great inclined shaft. The park is lush with vegetation, and the tangled, interlaced tree roots create a living mural that few cameras can resist. A stroll through the coal-mining park feels like stepping back a century into Jingtong’s past. The Jingtong Shidi Coal Mine, the longest-operated, most productive, and largest in scale, once yielded coal of the highest quality and quantity in Taiwan; its product was called “Taiwan Coal.” Buildings and equipment from the Japanese colonial period have been preserved, turning the site into a commemorative park. Within it one can see the coal-washing plant—one of Taiwan’s Top 100 historic sites—the ruins of the main office, and the Shidi Great Inclined Shaft, all evoking the bustle of the old mine and the prosperity of Jingtong a century ago.