Caoling Memorial Stele

A small stone monument in the hills near Caoling Village (草嶺村) in Gukeng, Yunlin. It was erected in 1936 by local residents to commemorate Sasaki Hidenosuke (佐佐木英之助), a Japanese police inspector, and 25 officers under his command, who were killed at this spot on December 30th, 1901. The patrol had climbed Shibi Mountain (石壁山) in pursuit of the forces of anti-Japanese resistance fighter Ko Tie (柯鐵)¹, whose Iron Kingdom (鐵國山) base lay nearby on the Dapingding plateau. The resistance fighters had rigged a rockfall above the trail using vines and bamboo frames and brought it down on the officers as it passed below. Since there was no Shinto shrine in Caoling Village this was also the site that schoolchildren would visit to pay their respects on important occasions in the late Japanese colonial period.

The marker was lost to the forest for decades and only rediscovered in 2002, then surveyed again in 2016 by a team from National Taiwan Normal University. The county has since cleared the surroundings and built a short hiking trail to reach the site, the 200 Steps Trail (兩OO步道).

Footnotes

1. Also known as Tiehu (柯鐵虎), or “Iron Tiger”, he passed away in 1900, not long after surrendering to the colonial authorities. Many others continued to resist, among them Zhang Lüliang (張呂良), who was gunned down along with hundreds of other resistance fighters after surrendering in 1902. ↩