Gold Leaf | Ruiwudan Theater — The Grain Barn With a Stage in It

The ticket window at Ruiwudan still shows the last film it sold seats for. The theatre closed in 1989 and nobody changed the board.

Chen Yu-te owned a grain barn on this street in Fuli, at the far southern end of Hualien, and in 1962 he built two more floors on top of it and opened a cinema. The ground floor stayed a barn. Above it, several hundred people at a time watched films — and because there was a proper stage, there was also traditional opera, and travelling acts. When each of the two Chiang presidents died, the hall was borrowed as a memorial chamber. Fuli supported four theatres at its peak. Then the young people left for the cities, and the theatres closed one by one.

Gold Leaf used it for the rooms where officials and merchants drink and trade favours, and for the entrance of Xia Muxue, the singer.

The fourth generation brought it back. Chen Wei-chiao grew up underfoot in the building, moved away to Kaohsiung, and returned in 2011 to start repairs, then screenings — one chosen weekend a month from 2014. The cypress benches are the originals, seat numbers still inked on the backs. The air-raid evacuation diagram is still on the wall.

This stop carries an obligation. The theatre is shut except on announced screening days, and it is a family's building on a residential street. Find a date on their Facebook page and go then. Do not push at the door on a quiet afternoon, and do not treat the neighbours' street as a set.

Get a screening and you sit on a wooden bench inside a converted rice barn, watching a film in a small farming town. That is the actual experience, and nowhere else on this trail offers it.

Cover photo: Fuli township street, by Lord Koxinga, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Area view of the town — not the theatre itself, which has no free-licensed photograph available.