Jingtong Borough is famous today for two things that seem to have nothing to do with coal: the sky lanterns that visitors release over the Pingxi valley at night, drifting upward in the dark, and the mountain scenery that makes this stretch of the old mining railway one of Taiwan's most picturesque short trips. The Jingtong Mining Industry Museum is the counterweight to both. Its quiet two-story building — originally a dormitory for Taiwan Railways Administration employees, converted into a museum in stages between 2001 and 2005 — holds the evidence of what the Pingxi valley was before it became scenic. Before the lanterns, there was coal.
The building that houses the museum was not built to be a museum. It was utilitarian: a dormitory for railway workers, people whose daily job was to keep the trains running through the Pingxi valley. When the mining economy that had justified those trains disappeared, the building became available for a different kind of use. In 2001, the Taiwan Ministry of Interior provided funding to begin converting the structure. The following year, the museum was formally designated as the local culture museum for what was then Pingxi Township, and it received its name. Renovation and improvement continued over the next few years — a fire protection system in 2003, accessibility improvements, and a NT$3.3 million investment in 2004 to upgrade the surrounding environment and build the museum's programming and collections. On 27 January 2005, the Jingtong Mining Industry Museum officially opened to the public.
The museum's exhibitions are organized across two floors in a way that moves from landscape to labor. The ground floor presents permanent displays on the geography of Pingxi Township — the steep, narrow valleys, the river system, the terrain that made this region both rich in coal deposits and difficult to work. It provides the physical context for everything that follows. The upper floor is where the mining story comes into focus: artifacts from coal extraction activities sit alongside material from local culture, placing the industry inside the human world it created. The gift shop occupies a building adjacent to the main structure. The overall scale is modest, as befits a local culture museum serving a small mountain community, but the specificity of what it preserves — this valley, this industry, these people — is more valuable than a larger institution's generality would allow.
The Pingxi branch railway line, which runs through Jingtong, was built in 1921 specifically to serve the coal mines of the upper Keelung River valley. For decades, the trains that now carry day-trippers up to launch lanterns were hauling coal down to the port at Keelung. The communities along the line — Shifen, Pingxi, Jingtong — were mining towns, with everything that implied: company structures, dangerous work, lives organized around the rhythms of extraction. When the mines closed and the industry contracted, the railway was repurposed for tourism and the towns remade their identities around scenery and tradition. The museum sits in the middle of that transformation, its former-dormitory bones a reminder of what came before, its collections asking visitors to look at this beautiful valley and see the human effort that once defined it.
The museum is accessible from Jingtong Station on the Taiwan Railway's Pingxi branch line — a branch that requires a change of trains at Ruifang, the hub town where the mining railway meets the main north coast line. The journey from Taipei takes roughly an hour by train, and the scenery for the last portion is genuinely dramatic: the line follows the Keelung River through mountain gorges, with waterfalls visible from the carriage windows. Jingtong Station itself is a small wooden structure that has been designated a historic railway building, and the short walk from the station to the museum passes through a village where the past is legible in the architecture. The museum's two floors offer a focused, honest account of what this part of Taiwan was built around — and what it cost the people who built it.
The Jingtong Mining Industry Museum sits at approximately 25.02°N, 121.72°E in the upper Keelung River valley, Pingxi District, New Taipei City. The Pingxi valley is a narrow mountain gorge visible from the air at 4,000–6,000 feet as a deep green cleft running roughly east-west through the mountains southeast of Taipei. The terrain here is rugged and heavily forested, with the valley floor barely wide enough for the railway and the river to run side by side. Nearest major airport: RCSS (Taipei Songshan), approximately 35 km to the northwest. The mountain terrain means weather can change quickly; the valleys trap cloud and fog, and visibility at lower altitudes may be limited, particularly in winter and during the rainy season. From cruising altitude on a clear day, the ridgeline separating the Pingxi valley from the Keelung coastal corridor is a prominent visual landmark.