Nestled in the mountains of Yilan’s Datong County, Cilan Divine Tree Garden is one of Taiwan’s 18 potential World Heritage Sites.
STORY AND PHOTOS BY STEVEN CROOK
We were still some distance from Cilan Divine Tree Garden (棲蘭神木園區) when I realized that the area’s strict entry requirements protect more than the ecology of this remote conservation zone.
Visits must be booked at least a week in advance, and all sightseers have to arrive on one of the operator’s minibuses. I immediately understood why, as no car owners in their right mind would want to subject their vehicle to the 11 kilometers of potholed logging road that separate the garden from more civilized motoring conditions.
The previous afternoon, when we saw some of the minibuses bring tourists back to Mingchih Resort (明池山莊), my wife commented on the 12-seaters’ mud-spattered sides. But as our little convoy negotiated a series of tight switchbacks that took us higher into the mountains, it became apparent why keeping the minibuses clean isn’t possible.
Once past the gate that controls access to Forestry Road 100 (100線林道), the road surface quickly deteriorates. We splashed through puddles and slurry, passing landslide damage in several places. I was thrilled to leave the driving to someone who comes this way several times per week, and equally thankful that I never get car sick.
If you’re coming from Taoyuan or Mingchih, the turnoff is just beyond the 74.6-km mark on Provincial Highway 7 – the Taoyuan-Yilan route, also known as the Northern Cross-Country Highway (北橫公路).
Forestry Road 100 starts at an altitude of around 1,100 meters, then climbs to the Cilan Divine Tree Service Station (棲蘭神木服務站) at approximately 1,620 meters above sea level. Between these two locations, the forest isn’t particularly attractive. It’s mainly commercial cedar plantations that lack the thickness and rich green undergrowth characteristic of healthy natural woodland. There is an upside, however. Occasional gaps make it possible to enjoy brief yet impressive views of the upper reaches of the Lanyang River (蘭陽溪), northeast Taiwan’s principal drainage.
The foreground can be just as engaging. On the drive back to Mingchih, as most of my fellow passengers dozed, I saw a Formosan serow within a few meters of the logging road. This endemic protected species, which some English-language sources mistakenly call a “mountain goat,” doesn’t like human company. The animal stared in our direction momentarily, then dashed deep into the forest. I consider myself lucky to have encountered two serows in the last four years.
Setting out from the station to explore the garden alone isn’t allowed. This being a wilderness – the word “garden” in the name notwithstanding – straying from the path could be disastrous. Visitors are asked to choose either the 2.3-km or 1.2-km route and stick close to the guide assigned to their group. We wanted to see as much as possible, so we opted for the longer route, which takes the better part of two hours.
Our guide said we’d brought favorable weather, by which he meant it hadn’t rained so far that day. Cilan’s temperate coniferous forests get twice as much precipitation as Taipei, and misty conditions are the norm. The trail can be slippery in places, and there are lots of steps, so hiking footwear is a must. That said, the trees that make Cilan unique are reachable by any reasonably fit person.
Cilan Divine Tree Garden is home to two evergreen species, the Taiwan red cypress and the Taiwan hinoki (or yellow) cypress, as well as a protected thistle (Cirsium albescens) found on the left bottom corner of NT$1,000 bills. The Ministry of Culture (MOC) website states that 62 of Cilan’s cypress trees are over 400 years old, while other sources say the area has nearly 100 specimens at least 1,000 years old. This uniqueness prompted the MOC to list this place as one of Taiwan’s 18 potential World Heritage Sites in 2002.
In 1959, the government handed over control of 45,000 hectares of land around Cilan to the Vocational Assistance Commission for Retired Servicemen, now the Veterans Affairs Council (VAC). Ex-soldiers who’d come to Taiwan with Chiang Kai-shek established a network of logging roads and set about making commercial use of the area’s forest resources. By 1985, over 7,000 hectares had been cleared of native trees. Some accessible giant cypresses were spared the saw, however, because their shape meant they couldn’t easily be cut into sellable planks.
Following the 1991 ban on all logging in natural forests, the VAC’s Forest Conservation and Management Administration (FCMA) commissioned a survey of surviving ancient trees and began giving them names inspired by their ages.
Before he began introducing individual trees, our guide explained how experts can estimate the age of a living tree, without cutting it down, by measuring the tree’s circumference and comparing it to nearby fallen trees of the same species. Examining those deceased neighbors makes it possible to calculate the average ring width and determine normal bark thickness.
For me, the most memorable of the 51 named trees was No. 6, the Confucius Sacred Tree (孔子神木). This 41-meter-tall red cypress is thought to have sprouted from this hillside within a few years of the birth of China’s greatest sage 2,574 years ago. In addition to being the oldest of the named trees, it sports a twisted branch that reaches down to the ground that has been dubbed “Confucius’s walking cane.”
The garden’s tallest red cypress is the Bao Zheng Sacred Tree (包拯神木, No. 26). Boasting a height of 51 meters, it was named for a Song Dynasty official who lived from 999 to 1062 CE. Bao was posthumously deified because of his reputation for incorruptibility and justice.
If you’ve been to Taroko Gorge, you likely passed through a small inland settlement called Tianxiang (天祥). That town, and tree No. 9 in Cilan, both honor Wen Tian-xiang (文天祥, 1236-1283 CE), a Southern Song literati celebrated for choosing to die rather than submit to Kublai Khan after the latter defeated the Song and established the Yuan dynasty.
Living memorials
Many of the trees here bear the names of historical figures from Chinese history. No. 5 bears the name of Sima Qian (司馬遷), often described as the father of Chinese historiography. Sima was born around 145 BCE. His tree is the stoutest in the garden, having a girth of 4.14 meters. No. 12 is a 38.4-meter-tall living memorial to Zhuge Liang (諸葛亮, 181-234 CE), revered as a Chinese military-political hero since the Three Kingdoms period.
No. 29 commemorates Emperor Guangwu (光武帝), who restored the Han dynasty in 25 CE. Strangely, the information panel devotes more text to one of the emperor’s contemporaries, Jesus of Nazareth, than to him. No. 46 celebrates Wang Yang-ming (王陽明, 1472–1529 CE), the Ming dynasty general and intellectual whose name is also attached to Yangmingshan National Park near Taipei.
Countless rotting trunks litter the hillside because, in 1999, the FCMA ceased gathering deadwood following the “Fallen Trees Incident.” Some officials were accused of forging documents so they could fell living cypresses and pass off the valuable wood as having come from dead trees. The prosecutions were unsuccessful, and the controversy added impetus to efforts to establish a national park that would include Cilan (see the accompanying sidebar).
The Cilan area is said to have over 1,000 different plant species. In addition to various ferns and mosses, Chinese-language bloggers report seeing such intriguing plants in Cilan as the red berry Arisaema, sometimes called the Himalayan cobra lily, the Taiwan Pleione, a miniature terrestrial orchid that flowers in February or March, and the Taiwan rhododendron, an endemic species that produces red and white flowers in April and May.
I was starting to wonder if the tree-naming committee had been told to glorify China’s heritage and downplay Taiwan’s much shorter written history when we finally reached a cypress connected to someone of local prominence.
The Zheng Cheng-gong Sacred Tree (鄭成功神木, No. 32) is a 29-meter-tall hinoki cypress that sprouted in 1624 CE, the year in which Zheng Cheng-gong (鄭成功) was born. In 1661-62, forces led by Zheng – a Ming dynasty loyalist known to some as Koxinga – besieged the Dutch trading base in Tainan, expelled the Europeans, and established a Sinocentric regime.
None of the other historical figures assigned a tree at Cilan had the remotest connection to Taiwan. But at least there’s some acknowledgment of the local Atayal indigenous people in the name of the private-sector entity that manages the garden on behalf of the VAC.
Lealea Makauy Ecological Park (力麗馬告生態公園) – named after makauy, the Atayal name for a type of peppercorn (sometimes written maqaw) that often appears in indigenous cuisine – is also in charge of the Mingchih Resort and adjacent Mingchih National Forest Recreation Area (明池國家森林遊樂區) at 1,170 meters above sea level and the Cilan Resort (棲蘭山莊) at a lower elevation.
Rooms at both resorts can be booked through the usual online platforms, but if you want to visit the divine trees, it’s best to contact Lealea Makauy Ecological Park. Regarding signs and information boards, there’s not much English around Cilan Divine Tree Garden, but park staff can arrange an English-speaking guide at no extra cost if given plenty of notice.
Admission to the garden costs NT$770 per person, including pickup from and return to Cilan Resort or Ming-chih Resort. Overnight guests at either resort pay NT$670. Add NT$180 for a bento at the service station.
There’s no need to book in advance if visiting Mingchih National Forest Recreation Area (open from 8:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. daily). Two hours is enough to see the small lake that gives the area its name (which means “bright/clear pond”) and the surrounding woodland. Admission is NT$150 on weekends and holidays and NT$120 on weekdays. There are also the usual discounts for students, children, senior citizens, and those with disabilities.
The National Park That Never Materialized
Taiwan’s once extensive cypress forests were heavily logged during the 1895-1945 period of Japanese rule and after World War II. By the end of the 20th century, fewer than 26,000 hectares remained, of which over half were in the uplands of Yilan County.
Fearing that Cilan’s cypresses might suffer piecemeal degradation if left unprotected, an alliance of NGOs first petitioned the Control Yuan to investigate the FCMA’s controversial removal of trees it had listed as dead. The coalition then campaigned to create a national park incorporating Cilan and its neighboring mid-elevation wilderness areas.
The idea was soon taken up by the central government, which settled on the name Magao National Park (馬告國家公園) and proposed boundaries that would have made the protected area about half the size of Yushan National Park.
Had it come into being, the new national park would have covered large parts of Yilan County’s Datong Township, Jianshi Township in Hsinchu County, Taoyuan’s Fuxing District, and New Taipei’s Wulai District. All four are designated as indigenous areas (原住民族地區), meaning they enjoy an additional degree of autonomy. The central government had promised from the outset that residents would play a key role in running the national park, yet opposition from certain Atayal communities – especially Nanshan (南山) and Siji (四季) in Datong – proved intractable.
According to a 2006 report posted on the Ministry of the Interior’s website, the hostility the authorities encountered stemmed from tribal ideas about “lifestyle rights, land rights, the right to independent development, as well as distrust of the proposed co-management mechanism, coupled with the awareness of multiple previous conflicts between other national parks and indigenous people.”
The budget for Magao National Park was frozen in 2003, and the plan has never been revived in the two decades since. It isn’t the only failed national park project in Taiwan’s recent history. Proposed national parks covering Orchid Island, Green Island, and Nengdan (能丹, part of the Central Mountain Range) were also scrapped as a result of local protests.
