溪州戲院

November 30th, 2016

The entrance to a vintage theater in the sleepy hamlet of Xizhou.

Some people are into urban exploration for the optics—they love visiting the most visually-impressive places and taking cool photos—but I’m just as interested in documenting history and solving puzzles. Animated by curiosity, I have become proficient in navigating the Chinese language web in search of leads. Not all of these turn out to be something interesting but I enjoy those rare days where I set out into the countryside and see how many candidate sites I can knock off my list. This is what originally brought me to the gates of the humble Xizhou Theater (溪州戲院) in the small town of Xizhou, Changhua.

A closer look at the tile-encrusted ticket booth. This was obviously constructed later than the original date of the theater’s founding.

In November of 2016 I went for a scooter trip around southern Changhua, primarily to revisit Beidou, a vital center of trade and commerce in the late Qing dynasty era. After touring that old town I forged on to Xizhou, a little down the road to the southwest, to scope out a few leads, this theater among them. I hadn’t been able to figure out the exact location through Google Maps in advance but knew it was somewhere on the western side of town. That turned out to be enough of a clue for me to locate the ruins of Xizhou Theater not long after the search began.

Both sets of theater doors were locked tight but there obviously isn’t much left of the body of the theater itself.

The notice board to the left of the ticket booth indicates this theater spent its last years hosting somewhat more salacious forms of entertainment.

Ordinarily I would go take a closer look but my presence aroused so much attention on the small street the theater is located that I declined to jump the fence out front and take a closer look. From the street it appeared as if little remains of the interior anyhow—broken timber from the original roofing is piled up against the door and sunlight is seeping through—but I hoped to return some day. As chance would have it I found another opportunity to visit Xizhou about six months later—and since I already knew the location I drove up and hopped over the gate before anyone noticed the presence of a foreigner in their midst. It is from this second visit that the majority of these photos were captured.

An oblique look at the rounded ticket booth at Xizhou Theater, just about the only part of the building that remains intact.

Unsurprisingly there is little written about this small town theater on the web. I only found two mentions of the place, both of them on Taiwanese tourism blogs: here and here. One of these links mentions that the theater was built for workers at Xizhou Sugar Factory (溪州糖廠). This sugar factory dates back to 1909 and was in continuous operation until sometime in the 1970s or so (which would give a proximate cause for abandonment). Initially I guessed the theater might have been built in the 1940s or 1950s during the peak of the sugar boom but according to academic sources I uncovered while rewriting this post it dates back to 1928. There’s a very good chance the original theater was heavily renovated during the post-war period.

In any case, the nearby sugar factory lay idle for decades before it was eventually converted into a public park. The rise and fall of the sugar industry probably explains much of the history of Xizhou—as well as this obscure little theater. And that’s what’s fun about this whole “urban exploration” hobby: everything is connected in some fashion and it’s endlessly interesting to attempt to connect the dots.

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

Themes

Japanese Colonial Era Taiwan (台灣日治時代)
Theaters in Taiwan (台灣老戲院)
Urban Exploration in Taiwan (台灣城市探險)

Series: Taiwan Summer Road Trip 2017

In the summer of 2017 I borrowed a scooter to ride to a music festival in Nantou and only returned it several months later. It wasn’t a continuous road trip—I’d leave the scooter parked at various HSR stations as I slowly made my way around central and southern Taiwan—but each leg of the trip usually involved 3 or 4 days of riding. In the end I gathered enough material for 60 or 70 posts, only some of which have been published.