Ruifang 瑞芳鎮, the gateway to Jiufen

A small town before Jiufen

Ruifang township (瑞芳鎮 in Chinese, pronounced Ruìfāng zhèn) translates as "Lucky fragrant small town", but I can tell you, these days I would not call it fragrant, if you ask me. And the lucky part can also be debated, judging from the photos below. This town looked pretty gloomy and run down to me, but maybe the fact, that it was cold and foggy that day, added to the bad image. The town looks pretty small. It used to be a center of the mining industry in the 19th century (source), but these days it's just the gateway to the popular tourist destination Jiufen. And that's the reason, why I ended up here: Our train from Taipei City brought us here and we had to transfer to a bus, that brought us up to the beautiful mountain town Jiufen 九份, the place we wanted to visit. See some photos of Ruifang below:

Ruifang train station.

This part is like a public square and connected to the main road.

This road across the street from the train station is full of food stalls.

This is a type of sausage on a stick, it's very popular in Ruifang.

The photos above were taken in early morning and then we moved on to Jiufen. We didn't spend a lot of time in Ruifang. But we returned in the afternoon, while going back to Taipei. We were hungry, so we decided to eat something here. See some more photos:

This would be a kind of a day market in Ruifang, but it's more like few food stalls only.

We saw food along the street, but we decided to go to that covered area.

This is not really Zhong Xiao East Road, but it has a certain charm.

That famous sausage again. We tried one and it was pretty good.

Then we were headed to that covered area, we were hungry and wanted to eat.

You can read about the food we had there in this post>>

More photos of Ruifang near the river:

I wonder what is built there. A bridge? An overpass? No idea.

Doesn't look like some well thought-out architecture.

I wouldn't live here, it looks pretty gloomy. Wonder how it is, when it's sunny.

When heading back, the whole area was lively.

Ruifang is only worth a visit, if you happen to go to Jiufen or Keelung. You can stop for an hour, walk around a little, try some local food. I don't want to be rude to the people of Ruifang, but there's really not a lot to do here, if you come as a tourist. I hope my photos will help those, who are curious about Ruifang.

[My TAIWAN page][Related: Our trip to Jiufen, Ruifang food][All photos by MKL, 2010]