Zhutouqi Oilfield

Remains of an oilfield in the hills on the eastern edge of Yujing, Tainan, part of the wider Yujing Oil Field (玉井油田) surveyed by the Japanese colonial government and later administered under Xinying Oilfield (新營礦場). Hōden Oil (寶田石油) sank the first test wells around 1916 and extraction was on record by 1919, but appreciable quantities of oil and gas only appeared after a second round of drilling from 1939. Water buffalo hauled the casing up to the drilling sites, an aerial ropeway ran 720 meters to the ridge above, and a light railway connected the field to Yujing eight kilometers away. More than twenty wells were in operation by the 1950s, when the settlement here supported wooden dormitories, a company store, a cinema, and a kindergarten. The gas ran out within a generation, and CPC Corporation sold the whole complex to scrap dealers around the middle of the 1970s, pipelines and all, leaving a land god shrine built by the company and a few fragments of brickwork under the regrown forest.