The land was donated in 1916 by Yan Yun-nian, and the Taihoku Prefecture government — the Japanese colonial administration based in what is now Taipei — raised funds and built a simple theater that could seat 400 people. Jiufen was then at the height of its gold-mining prosperity, a hillside town crowded with workers and merchants and the infrastructure that a profitable extraction economy attracts. The original building did not last: it collapsed in 1927. What replaced it was more substantial. In 1934, the structure was rebuilt as the Shengping Stage — a two-story building of hollow bricks with a roof trimmed in Chinese cypress, seating arranged in six-seat rows on the ground floor and a U-shaped grandstand of wooden chairs on the upper level. For a mining town theater in the mid-1930s, it was well-appointed.

In 1945, Taiwan passed from Japanese to Republic of China administration. The transition carried different meanings for different institutions, and for the Shengping Stage the immediate consequence was a name change: it became the Shengping Theater. The renaming acknowledged the new political reality while keeping the operation largely continuous. The theater ran through the postwar decades, showing films and hosting Taiwanese opera performances in a community that had entered its long post-mining decline. The gold extraction that built Jiufen had run thin, and the hillside town was contracting. The theater contracted with it, rebuilt once more in 1961, and then faced a series of structural challenges — the final blow arriving with the 1986 Pacific typhoon season, which damaged the building so severely that it closed.

The 1986 closure marked the beginning of a long institutional limbo. A typhoon damaged the roof again in 1994, compounding the structural problems. The building sat, unoccupied and deteriorating, while Jiufen itself was experiencing a revival of a different kind: the 1989 film A City of Sadness, directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien, was partly filmed in the town, and the attention it brought sparked a tourism economy that transformed Jiufen's narrow alleys into one of Taiwan's most visited destinations. In 2009, the theater building was donated to the Taipei County Government, which by 2010 had become the New Taipei City Government. The government designated it a historical monument on 28 June 2010. Renovation followed: work began in October 2010 and was completed in 2011, after which the theater reopened to the public.

The building covers 660 square meters across two floors. The hollow brick walls and Chinese cypress roof elements represent the construction techniques and material choices of 1930s Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule — a hybrid of imported engineering and local materials. The interior arrangement reflects the theatrical conventions of the period: ground floor seating in fixed rows, upper gallery in a U-shaped grandstand configuration that gave upper-level patrons an angled view of the stage. The building is compact by the standards of contemporary venues but generous by the standards of a hillside mining town. Restored rather than rebuilt, the theater retains the proportions and material character of its 1934 construction. Walking in, the scale is immediately intimate — 660 square meters does not leave room for grandeur, only presence.

The Shengping Theater today regularly hosts films, Taiwanese opera performances, and other cultural events — continuing the mixed programming that characterized its original operation. Taiwanese opera, known as gezaixi, is a form of musical theater performed in Taiwanese Hokkien; seeing it in a restored 1930s venue in Jiufen is an experience with particular resonance, the form matching the setting in both age and regional character. The theater serves Jiufen's visitor economy while remaining a functioning cultural space rather than a static museum piece. Its position on the steep lanes above Jiufen's famous teahouses and staircase alleys makes it a natural stop on routes through the old town — a building that explains something about what kind of place Jiufen once was, and why people still come to find its traces.