A Misty Wonderland:

Acidic and radioactive

Guided by Lin Chih-hai, founder of Beitou Storyteller, we walk up a slope along Beitou Creek. Plumes of vapor billow from a narrow ditch on one side of the road. Lin says that vapory streams like this, which are ubiquitous in this northern part of Taipei, all flow from hot springs—but they’re too hot to bathe in.

Threading our way through the clouds of steam, we arrive at Thermal Valley, where we are greeted by a hand bath in the shape of the island of Taiwan. Lin explains: “The warm water here is drawn from the hot springs in Thermal Valley. The water is clear, faintly tinged with green. It’s what we call a green sulfur spring. The pH value is between 1 and 2, which means the water is highly acidic. This level of acidity is almost equivalent to that of sulfuric acid.” Alarmed by Lin’s explanation, we pull back our hands from the water. “But unlike sulfuric or hydrochloric acid, the spring water is not strongly corrosive. After soaking in it, just rinse it off with clean water without using soap. It’s safe to soak here,” Lin reassures us.

Beitou’s turquoise-colored hot springs are also referred to as “radium springs” because the water contains the radio­active chemical element. Medical research in Japan has discovered that hot springs with radium can help alleviate fatigue and ease musculoskeletal pain. Lin says with pride that these precious springs are known to exist only in two places: Beitou, and Tamagawa in Japan’s Akita Prefecture.

Thermal Valley is enveloped in steamy vapors all year round. We begin to feel the heat in the air as soon as we set foot in its surroundings. This headspring occupies 2,800 square meters, with an average temperature of over 70°C. In some parts of this vast area, temperatures can even reach 90–100°C. With the surface of the boiling water bubbling wildly, the sight is reminiscent of the Hell of Cauldrons in Chinese Buddhist cosmology—no wonder the place acquired the grisly name of Hell Valley in the Japanese colonial era.

In the area below Thermal Valley, Beitou Creek flows down a series of cascades. The five small waterfalls are numbered sequentially from downstream to upstream.

The water at Thermal Valley is crystal clear, with a slight green tint. This is one of the two places in the world whose green sulfur hot springs are known to contain radium.

This site—the first of a series of cascades you encounter while traveling up Beitou Creek—witnessed the beginnings of Taiwan’s hot spring culture and was considered particularly photogenic in the Japanese era. (courtesy of Yang Yeh)

A land of sorcery

Embraced by the Datun mountain range, Beitou’s sheltered topography conspires with its abundant geothermal energy to turn the place into a misty otherworld, especially in the soft rain of winter, when we can imagine sorcerers performing rituals here to conjure up clouds and vapors. The Ketagalan indigenous people who lived here called the place Patauw, meaning “land of sorcery.” This appellation morphed into the modern name, Beitou, which continues to carry intimations of magic.

Beitou deserves its otherworldly name, being endowed with a profusion of hot springs that encompass not only the turquoise-tinted waters of Thermal Valley but also springs of an opaque white color and those containing mud or iron-rich precipitates. Few other places are home to such a wide variety of hot springs. Beitou is also blessed with other natural resources, such as triangular club-rush, kaolin, and sulfur. The locally quarried Qili’an Stone (a quartz sandstone), which was used to build city walls in olden days, can be found in Beitou Park.

The two-story building of the Beitou Hot Spring Museum was a public bathhouse in the Japanese colonial era. Designed by Matsunosuke Moriyama, it combines Japanese and Western architectural elements. It was once the biggest public bathhouse in East Asia.

The Large Bath in the Beitou Hot Spring Museum features Roman-style columns, which confer a sense of grandeur.

Inspired by the deeply alluring story of Beitou, Yang Yeh is devoted to researching local history and is an avid collector of old objects.

Cultural history

The natural bounties of Beitou account for its early development. The Japanese era (1895–1945) saw Beitou’s evolution into a recreational area that drew crowds of tourists and bon viveurs. After World War II, people gravitated toward Beitou to socialize and discuss business. Local historian Yang Yeh says Beitou’s food culture is known for its sumptuousness. Many hot spring hotels established here after 1945 were actually branches of classy restaurants in central Taipei. Accomplished cooks would move between these two locations to flaunt their culinary skills. Banquets at the hotels in Beitou were grand occasions that called for gastronomic opulence. To go well with alcoholic drinks, the foods had to be pungent, with the result that tasty and visually striking dishes like fo tiao qiang (“Buddha jumps over the wall”), liyu daxia (“carp and prawns”), and caihong wugong xun (“rainbow centipede crab”—a combination of crabs with various colorful ingredients, arranged in the shape of a centipede) came to define Bei­tou’s high-end cuisine.

Social occasions fostered a need for entertainments. Bei­tou’s distinctive culture of nagashi was born of this context. A Japanese word meaning “flow,” nagashi in Taiwan denotes itinerant singers and musicians, or the form of their musical offerings. While there had already been female performers at hotels in the Japanese era, after the war the inclusion of Western instruments such as accordions, saxophones, guitars, and bass guitars, altered the conventions of accompaniment in musical performances at local hotels and restaurants. Yang has interviewed veteran nagashi musicians and amassed a substantial collection of nagashi song books to document the glory days when venues in Beitou vied with each other to engage the services of more than 100 nagashi bands. He says with a smile that nagashi musicians were incredibly skillful: they could accompany a customer singing an unfamiliar tune after they had heard just a few snatches of it.

The rise of karaoke led to the decline of nagashi culture in Beitou. But another component of Beitou’s traditional cultural landscape persists: motorcycle services which predate modern forms of food delivery by several decades. The part of Beitou known as Xinbeitou (or New Beitou), where hot springs abound, has a hilly terrain, crisscrossed by narrow back streets. Motorbike taxi services came into being as a convenient way to navigate the locality. In the early days, most passengers were employees at local hotels and restaurants. Drivers would also deliver food or even settle utility bills for their customers. The jobs they undertook were rich and varied. Today, local housewives continue to use these services in their daily lives. When emerging from markets with heavy bags of groceries, for example, they phone the motorbike taxi companies, and drivers arrive in no time to take them home.

The water in the open-air spas at Beitou Park is drawn from Thermal Valley. Visitors come here to relax body and soul by soaking in the turquoise-colored springs.

Evolution of the spas

Yang, a collector of historic objects and photographs related to Beitou, draws on documentary evidence to explain how a tourism industry came to develop around the area’s hot springs. In 1893 a German businessman named Richard Nikolaus Ohly became the first person to recognize the commercial potential of Beitou’s hot springs. He set up a bathing club in Fengzaipu (around today’s Xinmin Road). Because the club wasn’t furnished with indoor spas, however, visitors had to go down to Beitou Creek to bathe in the wild. In 1895 the Treaty of Shimonoseki ceded Taiwan to imperial Japan, and Ohly began to welcome Japanese officials to his club.

Ohly’s new guests included Kametaro Matsumoto, who worked for the colonial government’s military administration. Matsumoto fell in love with the hot springs and began to pursue a spa business of his own in secret. In 1896 he resigned from his government post and established Shotoen, the first hot spring hotel in Beitou to be officially registered. Matsumoto’s venture set in motion Beitou’s hot spring tourism.

Subsequently Daikichi Imura, Japanese magistrate of Taipei Prefecture (Taihoku Chō), renovated Beitou Park and local water pipelines, and built what was then the biggest public bathhouse in East Asia: the Beitou Public Bathhouse. The Japanese government later constructed a new railway line branching off the Tamsui Line. This took visitors to Xinbeitou Station, providing easier access to the hot springs. Hence the distinction between “old” and “new” Beitou. Bit by bit, Beitou’s hot spring industry came into its own.

Lin Chih-hai established Beitou Storyteller to help more people appreciate the beauty of his hometown through cultural tours.

Railway station and hot spring museum

Building on the endeavors of their predecessors, Beitou residents today, with their strong sense of community, remain devoted to local prosperity.

The original Xinbeitou Station was closed in 1988 with the closure of the Taiwan Railways Administration’s Tamsui Line. (The route was later used to build the Tamsui Line of the Taipei Metro, including a new Xinbeitou branch line.) The old wooden station building was sold for a nominal fee of NT$1 and moved in its entirety to the Taiwan Folk Village in Changhua. With cultural heritage preservation garnering wider public attention, academics, residents, and local historians began to advocate for this historic building to be returned to Beitou. Their efforts paid off in 2013. The edifice was reassembled and restored near its original site. Reopened in 2017, it continues to attest to the history of rail transport in Taiwan over the past century.

The Beitou Public Bathhouse was another site threatened with demolition. “As children, we used to say this building was haunted,” Lin Chih-hai recalls. Fortunately, the controversies surrounding the Beitou Cable Car Link Project raised local awareness of its cultural importance, and the former bathhouse has been given a new lease of life as the Beitou Hot Spring Museum.

Designed by Japanese architect Matsunosuke Moriyama, the Beitou Public Bathhouse represents a marriage of Japanese and Western architectural styles. Its second floor has a Tatami Lobby, where visitors could relax after bathing. From the balcony next to the lobby they could admire Mt. Guanyin and its famous sunset. The Large Bath on the first floor features columns inspired by Roman architecture. We can imagine how light used to penetrate the stained glass windows along the adjacent arcade and cast a prismatic spell upon this steamy space, creating a surreal atmosphere.

Although the building no longer functions as a bathhouse, visitors to the museum can learn about the evolution of Beitou’s hot spring industry. Here they also get to examine the rare Beitou Stone (hokutolite), which comes from Beitou Creek. Containing radioactive radium, this is the only mineral in the world that is named after a place in Taiwan, hokuto being the Japanese pronunciation of Beitou.

Soaking in a hot spring reinvigorates our bodies and souls, and the pleasure lingers on and on. Come and explore what Beitou has in store for you and be part of its deeply alluring story.

The building of the erstwhile Xinbeitou Station has been reassembled and restored after a checkered history. The only surviving station building of the old Tamsui Line, it attests to Taiwan’s history of rail transport over the past century.