I read about Houtong - Cat Village (侯硐貓村) a few years ago. I had plan to go last year but I never had a chance. I finally got a chance to go with my high school classmate.
Houtong was once a rich small mining town, it was built during the Japanese rule of Taiwan. During its peak years, Houtong produced the largest coal output of a single area in Taiwan, around 220,000 tons of coal per year. At that time, there were about 900 households with a population of more than 6,000 people.
In the 1990s, the coal mining industry began to decline. The majority of the residents moved away due to lack of jobs and only few hundred residents remained.
Since 2008, a local cat lover organized volunteers to give abandoned cats a better life. They posted the cats' pictures online and they received many positive response from other cat lovers around the world. Houtong is a tourist destination now.
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