板橋長江路商店

February 3rd, 2016

An abandoned row of shops at the entrance to Banqiao. These were once repair shops, hair salons, variety stores, and so on.

Last week I cycled across the Huájiāng Bridge (華江橋) to Banqiao to meet a friend for coffee. At the foot of the bridge I couldn’t help but notice the outline of a long-abandoned building of some kind, the sort of place where you’ll find scooter repair shops and other small businesses along any main road in Taiwan. Not having found anything close to a formal name for the place I have simply named it for the street it is on, Chángjiāng Road (長江路).

Around back at the abandoned row of shops. Not very pretty, just your run-of-the-mill ruin in urban Taiwan.

Although exceedingly common, I find the location of this abandonment to be somewhat peculiar. Usually the areas around the end of a major bridge in the Taipei metropolitan area is good for business—but something about the design of the offramp of this particular bridge evidently made this building hard to reach. Indeed, there is no real pedestrian traffic passing this way, only scooters zipping by on their way into Banqiao.

Accessing this building is a piece of cake. The only thing the owners seem interested in prohibiting is free parking.

Getting up here might give you a bit of trouble, however. There’s no stairway or ladder to these small rooms.

Accessing this complex is a piece of cake. There are numerous entrances all around the back and side of the building. I should warn you, however: at least one squatter has made this place her home. I took care not to disturb her or take photos of her personal effects as she was milling around one of the back rooms, evidently sorting trash or some such thing. Finding homeless people in unsecured ruins is a common thing in most other places but very rare in my extensive experience here in Taiwan.

Figuring out what went wrong here is beyond my ability. Often I am exploring places with formal names and histories, however tenuous, but there’s almost no record of this place on the internet insofar as I can find. The only thing I was able to turn up was a (now-dead) post on Yahoo Answers of all places. Apparently this block used to contain a hair salon (formally named 皇家貴族理容名店), a pet shop (寵物店, possibly matching a sign out front that reads 新世界水族寵物釣具), lumber store (木材店), and at least one mechanic (機車店).

Dating the abandonment to December 2000.

There would have been other businesses in this complex—maybe a love motel and almost certainly a betel nut stand—but it would require more effort than I am willing to undertake to find out what they were. Absolutely everything of value has been taken and most of the interior has been stripped down to bare concrete. Google Street View provides almost nothing in the way of additional information as the place was already abandoned in 2009—which is as far back as records go. And really, it’s not that important. This is the sort of everyday ruin you’ll find all around the country, just another failed business venture, a victim of awkward positioning, economic stagnation, mismanagement, or some combination thereof.