Gold was discovered in Jinguashi's mountains in the late 19th century, and the find transformed a quiet hillside into one of East Asia's most productive mining districts. The Japanese colonial government industrialized the operation, building the Shuinandong Smelter in 1933 - a facility so massive, built into the hillside in tiers, that local miners called it "13 stories." The process split neatly into four stages: mining, sorting, smelting, and refining. At its peak, the complex processed enormous quantities of gold, silver, copper, and sulfur ore, all of it hauled down the mountain by cable car to the smelting works above Liandong Bay.

Today the smelter stands ruined and magnificent, its concrete tiers climbing the hillside like a neglected Pompeii. The Taiwan Metals Mining Corporation closed operations decades ago, but the structure refuses to decay gracefully. It broods above the coastal highway, visible for miles, a monument to industrial ambition that the jungle has not yet fully reclaimed.

The Yin-yang Sea is Jinguashi's strangest legacy. Driving along the coastal road, travelers encounter a bay where half the water is turquoise and half is ochre yellow, the two colors meeting in a wavering line. For years, residents blamed pollution from the smelter's runoff. But the mining stopped, and the yellow persisted. Scientists eventually traced the phenomenon to geology rather than industry: Jinguashi's mountains contain vast deposits of pyrite that have been oxidizing for millions of years, producing ferric iron ions that do not dissolve easily in water. When rainfall carries these particles to the sea, they form floating iron particles that tint the shallows gold.

The Gold Waterfall feeds this same chemistry. Rainwater seeps through cracks in the surface rock, infiltrates the abandoned mine shafts, interacts with pyrite and enargite underground, and emerges where the terrain drops sharply as a cascade that glows amber in the sunlight. The waterfall is beautiful in the way that only unintended things can be - a natural wonder manufactured by the collision of geology, mining, and weather.

Chitang Old Street was once the busiest thoroughfare in Jinguashi, packed with shops and known locally as "Little Ginza" for its commercial energy. Walking it today requires descending steps outside the police station, passing the old Japanese hospital, threading through Tongshan settlement, and climbing back up to Cyuanji Temple. The black asphalt roofs sit at different heights, jumbled together like shuffled cards. General goods stores still display cigarettes in old-fashioned cases. Vendors sell handmade herbal grass sticky rice sweets that have been produced the same way for generations.

Cyuanji Temple, built in 1896, anchors the street's upper end. Its roof bears a gold and bronze statue of Guan Gong weighing more than 25 tons - the largest such idol in the world. Each year during the Dragon Boat Festival, the temple holds the Green Grass ceremony, a ritual unique to this village. Believers carry a sedan chair through the hills, stopping whenever its crossbars point toward sought-after herbs. The collected plants are washed, dried, ground by stone pestle, spread to cure for up to seven days, then rolled by hand into balls roughly three centimeters across. The "100 Herb ball" ritual takes the better part of a week from start to finish.

During World War II, the Japanese operated a prisoner-of-war camp at Jinguashi, forcing captured Allied soldiers to labor in the mines. The Gold Museum, housed in the former offices of the Taiwan Metal Mining Corporation, documents this history alongside the broader mining story. Its second floor displays a world-record 220-kilogram ingot of .999 pure gold, a concentration of wealth that feels almost obscene given the suffering that once occurred in the tunnels below.

Nine mine pits dot the mountainside at elevations ranging from 156 meters below sea level to 417 meters above it. The fourth pit, at 417 meters, was destroyed by Typhoon Lin En in 1987, buried under torrents of mud and silt until it ceased to exist. The fifth pit, at 319 meters, still holds a massive air compressor once believed to be the most powerful in Southeast Asia - rusted and broken now, but with its air pipe intact, a machine the locals treasured as "the source of life." The eighth pit descends to 156 meters below sea level and is completely submerged. These abandoned shafts are not tourist attractions. They are wounds in the mountain, slowly filling with water and minerals, quietly producing the golden runoff that paints the waterfall and splits the sea.