BALLARAT — Mandopop singer Jay Chou filmed the music video for his single "Gold Rush Town" (淘金小鎮) at Sovereign Hill, an open-air museum in the Victorian city of Ballarat. The video has accumulated more than 9 million views on YouTube.

Sovereign Hill, located in the Ballarat suburb of Golden Point, depicts the first decade following the 1851 discovery of gold in the area. The museum includes exhibits on the history of Chinese people during the Australian gold rush.

In the music video, Chou portrays a Chinese detective pursuing bank robbers in a frontier town setting. His character wears attire similar to known portraits of Detective Fook Shing, who served on the Victorian police force from the 1860s to the 1880s and solved crimes across the colony and in Sydney.

Tens of thousands of Chinese migrants traveled to the Victorian goldfields in the 1850s, interacting with migrants from various other regions. Chinese migrants made up 25% of Ballarat's community in the 1850s and may have constituted the majority in some areas of the colony. As of 1871, 14% of men over 15 in Ballarat were Chinese. They worked in a variety of occupations during the gold rush, including mining, market gardening, and police work. Some Chinese Australians became wealthy during the period and publicly displayed their wealth, similarly to European migrants.

The museum's "Chinese camp" exhibit, which opened in 2024, presents the multi-ethnic nature of the goldfields and the cross-cultural relations that developed there. The exhibits use Chinese-language sources to highlight the role of Chinese migrants in Australian history.

Chou, known in Mandarin as Zhou Jielun (周杰倫), has released 25 albums that have sold more than 30 million copies. His audience includes both Chinese ultra-nationalists and Taiwanese independence sympathisers. "Of course I'm Chinese. I'm also Taiwanese," Chou said. "Gold Rush Town" has spawned dozens of commentary videos and cover versions on Chinese-language platforms such as BiliBili.