Yuanlin Credit Union (員林信用合作社)

Yuanlin Credit Union (員林信用合作社) was a small town bank from Yuanlin, Taiwan, that went out of business at the turn of the century. It originated with a Japanese colonial era credit union founded in 1914 and based out of a long-vanished red brick building directly across from Yuanlin Station (員林車站), a plot of land later occupied by the doomed Golden Empire Building (黃金帝國大樓). In the post-war chaos the original credit union was renamed and reorganized several times, eventually giving birth to the credit union that constructed this particular branch, possibly in the late 1960s or early 1970s.

The Taiwanese banking sector, dominated by state-owned banks, underwent liberalization and deregulation in the late 1980s and early 1990s¹. Consumer confidence began to ebb, however, and a series of widely publicized bank runs in 1995 and 1996 prompted government intervention. Although Taiwan weathered the 1997 Asian financial crisis dozens of small banks and agricultural cooperatives were in serious trouble by the end of the decade, Yuanlin Credit Union among them.

A financial reform task force formed in the late 1990s to deal with the problem. The government adopted a policy of arranging mergers between failing institutions and healthier organizations ready for expansion. This brings us to Sunny Bank (陽信商業銀行), which was originally founded in 1957 as the Yangmingshan Credit Union and reorganized into a commercial bank in 1997. Sunny Bank acquired Yuanlin Credit Union in September 2001 and either closed and sold or completely rebranded its remaining branches². This particular branch continued to operated for several years but was eventually closed at an unknown date, almost certainly whenever the newer Sunny Bank branch opened closer to the train station.

Without business records or other details to examine I’m left guessing about the date of construction. Based solely on its authoritarian modernist style I would estimate this was built in the early 1970s, but there is considerable margin for error. Whatever the case, the building was stripped of anything worth salvaging at some point—hence all the wiring shown in several of these photos.

These photos were captured in 2016, around when the bank was a regular feature of urban exploration groups in Taiwan. Around 2023 the building was sold and converted into a KTV, which is a rather surprising fate for a ruin such as this. I revisited in 2025 and initially assumed a new building had been constructed on the footprint of the original, but no, this is still the same building!

Warning: this location is abandoned, hazardous, or otherwise neglected and may be unsafe and even dangerous! Exercise appropriate precautions when visiting.

警告：此處已廢棄或長期無人管理，可能存在潛在危險。造訪時請務必提高警覺，並做好相關安全防護措施。