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 former Yuanlin Credit Union doesn’t look so bad from the street. Note the credit cooperative logo (合作標章) at the top of the façade. The entrance to the old bank still bears the outlines of the original characters overhead, from right to left. The Taiwanese banking sector, dominated by state-owned banks, underwent liberalization and deregulation in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Consumer confidence…