Photo festival part 2-B: Adjoined slum and cemetary in Taipei: Part B-Cemetary

This is the third installment in my rapid photo gallery posting series to prepare for my new camera, following Part 1 Osaku amateur photographers in Akihabara and Part 2-A: Adjoined slum and cemetary in Taipei: Part 1-Slum.

Last summer when I was in Taipei I stayed for a week and change at my friend Cerise’s house, located in a nice new looking development up the hill a bit from Xinhai Station, on the Muzha MRT elevated train line. The area immediately around the station looks to have been a center of carpentry and similar workshops since well before the station was built in the early 1990s (Muzha was Taipei’s first MRT line, built from 1988 and opening in 1996), and still surround it.

Behind the station are several of the aforementioned workshops, beyond which is a hill, upon which is a traditional Chinese cemetery of the kind popular in Taiwan. This is not particulary weird, but what is kind of weird is that in between the cemetery hill and the immediate vicinity of the station is a small cluster of private homes that I can’t describe in one word any more appropriate than “slum”. These photographs are of the cemetery itself, and Part 2-A: Slum is the gallery of photographs of the area from the station to the area to the cemetery proper.

All photographs here taken with a Canon 300D camera with 17-85mm EFS lens, on August 1, 2008.

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Here are a flash slideshow, recommended for full-screen mode, followed by HTML for the flash challenged.


Here is the view from the path leading up the hill into the cemetery.

Phone numbers for services related to being dead and remembered in stone.

Small temple inside the cemetary.

Wide shot of entire grave for the “Chen” family, followed by two detail shots.

One of the largest and fanciest memorials on the grounds.

Many of them are well maintained.

But not all are.

Guardian statues like this one are common, usually in matching (or non matching) sets of one on either side.

Closeup of secondary shrine inside of the one pictured above.

Stove for burning ghost money.

Ghost money that has been heavily rained on.

Perhaps the aftereffects of a zombie awakening?

Many of the memorial stones have photographs pasted into them.

Fairly heavy stages of overgrowth.

Blue skies.

When I die, I want my corpse to be guarded by elephant spirits too.

A good look back at the station.

Cracked.

Downright postapocalyptic looking.

Maintenance shack.

Graveyard in the vegetable garden (as seen in previous gallery).