The cats arrived after the miners left. Houtong, in the mountains of Ruifang District east of Taipei, became famous in the twenty-first century for the hundreds of cats that colonized its hillsides — so many that the village was christened a "cat village" and began drawing visitors who came to photograph them. But beneath every photograph, beneath every charmed tourist moment, lies a deeper story: this small valley was once the site of Taiwan's most productive coal mine, where men and women descended hundreds of meters underground for decades, where the economy of an entire island drew on their labor, and where the costs of that labor — physical, human, mortal — are not yet fully counted.
The Ruisan Mining Company took over operations here in 1934, four years after the mine first opened in 1930. What they built over the following decades was extraordinary in scale. The mine workings eventually extended six kilometers in length and reached depths of up to half a kilometer underground. Some 300 kilometers of narrow-gauge railway track threaded through those tunnels — a subterranean transit system built entirely in service of coal extraction. By the time the mine closed in 1990, more coal had been extracted from the Ruisan mine than from any other mine in Taiwan. That fact sits quietly at the center of Houtong's identity: this narrow valley, tucked into green mountains, once powered more of the island's economy than anywhere else in the country.
The Wikipedia article on Houtong offers one detail about the miners that is easy to pass over quickly: due to the high temperatures underground, they often wore little or no clothing while working. Take that in for a moment — the heat was so intense, hundreds of meters below the mountain, that clothing became unbearable. Men worked in those conditions for full shifts, carrying tools and pulling coal through a half-kilometer of compressed rock. Both men and women worked at the mine through 1963. The work was dangerous in ways particular to coal mining: dust, gas, collapse, the constant physical toll of extraction. Taiwan's coal industry, across all its mines in the Ruifang area, saw accidents and fatalities over its century of operation. The people who did this work were not footnotes to an industrial story. They had families, neighborhoods, and daily lives in these mountain valleys — lives shaped entirely by the industry that gave Houtong its reason to exist.
The mine closed in 1990. What happens to a place when its central purpose disappears? At Houtong, the answer came slowly and in stages. The industrial structures — the processing plant, the conveyor systems, the buildings that served the mine's surface operations — remained, too substantial to simply vanish but no longer in use. The community shrank as workers moved to other work or other towns. The cats, semi-feral and multiplying, began to fill the vacancy. A generation of visitors discovered the village through social media photographs — a hillside thick with tabbies and calicos, a kind of accidental sanctuary. The cats are real and the visits they draw are genuine. But the more important thing, for those who want to understand what Houtong actually is, is the coal dust that preceded them.
The Houtong Coal Mine Ecological Park was established to ensure that the industrial history of the site does not disappear behind the gentler story of cats and tourism. The preserved structures give physical form to what the mine required: the scale of the surface facilities speaks to the scale of the underground operation. Walking through the park, visitors move through the bones of an industry — the skeleton of what it took to extract coal from a mountain for sixty years. The narrow-gauge railway tracks that once ran underground are part of what made this operation function; 300 kilometers of them, a figure that becomes more remarkable the more you think about it. The park's existence is, at its best, an act of collective memory — a recognition that the people who worked here deserve more than to be forgotten the moment their industry ceased to be profitable.
Visitors today arrive from Houtong Station on the Taiwan Railway, a short walk from both the cat village and the coal mine park. The two Houtongs — the one famous for cats, the one famous for coal — sit together in the same narrow valley. There is no contradiction in being drawn here by both. The cats are charming, the scenery is beautiful, and the mountains are green in a way that makes it hard to picture a half-kilometer shaft dropping through them. But the park earns its name when visitors do the harder imaginative work: picturing the surface of this valley at the height of the mine's operation, the machinery running, the workers moving, the coal coming up from underground to feed an island's need for energy. That Houtong is harder to see, and more important to remember.
Houtong lies at approximately 25.09°N, 121.83°E in the Keelung River valley, roughly 25 kilometers east-northeast of central Taipei. From the air at 3,000–4,000 feet, the valley is visible as a narrow green cleft in the mountains east of Ruifang town. The Keelung River winds through the valley floor below. The terrain rises sharply on both sides, which explains why the mine's underground extent (half a kilometer deep) was necessary to reach the coal seams. Nearest major airport: RCSS (Taipei Songshan), approximately 30 km to the west. Weather in this inland valley can differ from the coast — morning fog is common in the mountains, clearing by midday in summer months.