Baked jade whelks sizzle on a stove. [Photo by Lin Jinghua / China Daily]

There were about 100 small stores beside the road, which I later learned is Jishan Road, the town's main thoroughfare, and which also has many small workshops that sell leather goods, sculptures and paintings.

Before long, heavy rain was falling, and I took refuge in a doorway. Stone steps at an angle of 75 degrees led to the top. I clambered on all fours to the top and found a teahouse there.

"You have just walked the famous path that runs through houses," a young man said. "This architecture is unique to Jiufen."

Soon I came to well-known Shuqi Road, an almost vertical stone path with more than 300 steps. (Shu means vertical and qi rugged.) On both sides stand art shops, restaurants and family hotels and Shengping Theater, believed to be the first theater in Taiwan, and one of the locations for A City of Sadness.

This two-story building was built in 1914 and renovated 20 years later. The theater, with its 600 red wooden seats, and a projector that still works, has become a kind of place of pilgrimage for aficionados of Hou's film. In the town's halcyon days the theater served as a social meeting place, somewhere to unwind for those who had toiled away during the day looking for gold. It is now a film museum.