Documentations

Less then one hour north of Taipei, Taiwan in the rural township Sanjhih lies an abandoned resort of UFO shaped buildings.

The Sanjhih hotel resort was originally planned in the 1960's as a luxury vacation spot for stressed out rich Taiwanese, beautifully placed on the ocean and only a short distance away from Taipei.

But before it ever could be finished, several financial scandals, accidents, planning mistakes, superstition and the extreme temperature differences in the north of Taiwan made it necessary to stop the project around 1970 and leave the partly finished buildings to rot.

Today the resort is a dangerous but fascinating retro-futuristic photo opportunity with practically no signs of vandalism, but the natural decay of buildings left alone in the salty air next to the ocean for almost 40 years.

Flanked by a huge dragon, cut in half to make space for a main street, a Chinese gate invites into the resort and immediately it captures your imagination. UFO shaped space ships surrounding two swimming pools with now defunct fountains and water slides.
An artificial mountain with a fallen statue straight out of the movie 'Planet of the Apes' from 1968 oversees the whole area.

Exploring the resort further you'll find a never finished reception hall and restaurant, more concrete skeletons of never completed UFO's and a huge construction hall where the fiberglass and polyester forms were created on site. Hardly anything remained of a small entertainment park, its entirely overgrown with plants.

The construction of the living pods was state of the art in the 1960s, a concrete skeleton with (now flooded) basement, staircase and roof top holding each six UFO's, equipped with modern panorama windows, still in plastic wrapped air conditioners and a bathroom. Most of the UFO's contained stacks of unused bricks to complete the constructions. The walls and roof of the UFO's are made out of pre-shaped fiberglass/polyester and give the buildings the UFO like appearance.

Not very surprising one of the pods was occupied by a (former) homeless guy, who even had his little shrine inside, but he was not too happy about another alien visitor in his UFO.