新城晨光戲院

Locations

June 24th, 2024

Chenguang Theater (晨光戲院) was a small golden age cinema located in Xincheng, on the northern perimeter of Hualien City. It was established by Huang Meihua (黃梅花) around 1963 and almost certainly would have catered to members of the Republic of China Air Force (ROCAF) stationed at the nearby airbase. Little information exists to substantiate more of the story of this old cinema, but if regional trends held true in this instance, it likely closed down in the early 1980s before it was repurposed for storage.

Chenguang Theater from the street. It doesn’t look like much, but the purely functional exterior would have likely displayed hand-painted movie posters back in the day.

A closer look at what was probably the main entrance to the theater.

Up until this point you would be excused for doubting this was ever a theater, but the sight of the ticket window should put all doubts to rest.

The ticket window from another angle. I can’t quite make out what the characters on the left say.

Much of this old theater was built with wood and has since rotted away.

First look at the interior of Chenguang Theater. All that rope suggests it might have had some use in fishing or perhaps construction.

The old cabinet has the name of the theater emblazoned in red.

Fire safety would have been critical at a partly wooden theater like this one. Exposure to the elements has degraded everything in sight.

Perhaps those folded wooden benches at bottom right were originally seats for audience members at this theater?

The magnificent desolation of the stage of this former theater, no silver screen in sight.

A parting glance at this obscure theater in rural Hualien County, now no more.

Ultimately I only managed to visit this theater once in 2018, while on a long ride down the Huadong Valley, before it was demolished in 2023. From what I’ve seen the projection room was also the very model of aesthetic decay, but I have no capture of my own to share. Too many cinemas disappear before I have a chance to fully document everything I hoped to see.

Note: this location has vanished. Any information presented here is only for reference.

提醒：此地點已消失，本文僅供參考用途。

Map

Address: 花蓮縣新城鄉嘉里村嘉里一街39號

Recorded On

May 16th, 2018

Sources

New Taipei Gold Museum Report: In Search of Old Theaters, Hsinchu Municipal Cultural Center, 2019 《新北市立黃金博物館「尋找老戲院身影」》，新竹市立文化中心，2019

Themes

Theaters in Taiwan (台灣老戲院)

Series: Huadong Valley Ride 2018

Field notes and photographs from a week of cycling from Hualien City to Taitung City along the scenic Huādōng Valley (花東縱谷) of eastern Taiwan in the spring of 2018. Several themes emerged while writing about this trip: old standalone movie theaters, of which I visited nearly 20; derelict railway infrastructure including stations, military checkpoints, and abandoned lines; relics of the Japanese colonial era, particularly former Shinto shrines; and Indigenous Taiwanese culture.