Nantou Road Trip 2015: Taichung to Puli

April 19th, 2018

In October 2015 I set out from Taichung to attend a music festival in Nantou, the landlocked county in the mountainous interior of Taiwan. Since I don’t often have an opportunity to ride a scooter I allocated some extra time for onward exploration and ended up visiting many interesting and wonderful places, many of them quite obscure. What follows is the first part of a mostly visual record of this road trip around the geographic center of Taiwan.

The famous Jingxunlou (景薰樓) gatehouse in Wufeng. The style is an eclectic mix of influences that make it purely Taiwanese.

After arriving in Taichung by train I picked up my ride, stopped for ice cream at the amazing Fourth Credit Union (第四信用合作社), and hit the road, cutting south through Dali into Wufeng. Here I stopped to photograph the iconic Jingxunlou (景熏樓), a gatehouse originally constructed in 1867. What you see here is not the original building—it was severely damaged in an earthquake and rebuilt in an eclectic style fusing Western, Japanese, and traditional Chinese influences in the 1930s¹. This gatehouse is part of the much larger Wufeng Lin Family Mansion and Garden (霧峰林家宅園), something I didn’t have the time to see on this trip, but would strongly recommend to anyone with an interest in Taiwanese architecture and history.

Láiyuán Road (萊園路) facing east toward the mountains.

An industry of broken parts by the roadside in Wufeng.

An oddly-placed bench bearing the flag of the Republic of China in Guangfu New Village.

Further south I made a small detour to scope out Guāngfù New Village (光復新村), one of the very few military villages slated for preservation, and the 921 Earthquake Museum (九二一地震教育園區). I then merged with Provincial Highway 3 to cross the Wū River (烏溪) into Caotun. All photos from this point forward were taken in Nantou County.

A stone garden by the roadside not long before sundown.

A stone garden (石雕園) by the roadside is the first thing that caught my eye after entering Nantou. The exact significance of each item escapes me but I’ve learned the traditional marble column is known as a huábiǎo (華表)—and I’ve seen the orb described as a Nine Dragon Ball (九龍球). Several stone lanterns line the laneway leading to Yùhuáng Temple (玉皇宮), a fairly large house of worship venerating Yuhuang Dadi (玉皇大帝), the Jade Emperor. I wondered if those lanterns had once belonged to a long-vanished Shinto Shrine (神社). The inside of the temple wasn’t all that out of the ordinary but I captured the traditional three-footed censer (三足圓爐) and a bunch of fortunes (籤詩) dangling from hooks on the wall.

The gateway to Yuhuang Temple in rural Caotun.

The outer censer, one foot facing the world.

DIY fortune telling inside a temple in Caotun.

An old stone lantern with a halo of soot. Evidently it has seen some use but not for quite some time.

Back on the road again, this time with a view of the jagged Ninety-Nine Peaks on the horizon.

The catastrophic 921 Earthquake struck Nantou in 1999, extinguishing thousands of lives, knocking down countless buildings, and reshaping entire landscapes. One of those landscapes is the Ninety-Nine Peaks (九九峰), rugged hills completely denuded of vegetation as a result of the many landslides caused by the quake. Much of the vegetation has grown back in the nearly two decades since then—but the jagged contours of these steep hills remain readily apparent to anyone passing through this valley on their way to Puli and Sun Moon Lake (日月潭). If you’re curious about this geographic feature have a look at this drone footage for more.

The sluggish Wu River sweeping through the eastern plains of Caotun Township, Nantou County.

Taking a scenic detour across Pinglin Bridge.

The rusted hulk of some kind of machine likely involved in the gravel extraction industry.

The Koxinga monument at the entrance to Guoxing.

Nothing much to do out here but drink, is there?

I made another brief detour to check out central Guoxing, fully expecting to see some old shophouses or other points of interest, but saw almost nothing apart from the Koxinga (國姓爺) monument at the southern end of town. Guoxing is named after Koxinga, the pirate king who vanquished the Dutch and established the short-lived Kingdom of Tungning (東寧王國) in southwestern Taiwan. He never came anywhere near this part of Taiwan but several of his generals camped near here while engaging Indigenous forces from the Kingdom of Middag (大肚王國) around 1670. The wholesale slaughter drove Indigenous Taiwanese emigration from the coastal plains into the more remote Puli Basin (埔里盆地), which was not officially opened to Han Chinese settlement until 1875. It strikes me as a tasteless choice of names, not unlike naming a town after Christopher Columbus in America.

An awesome Hakka restaurant at the western end of Puli.

I arrived in Puli after nightfall, checked into a hotel, and went out for dinner at Yàzhuō Local Hakka Cuisine (亞卓鄉土客家菜). This was a wise choice—it has since become one of my favourite restaurants in Taiwan and I always make a point of dining here when I’m passing through Puli.

That’s all for the first day of this trip. I covered around 60 kilometers in all, which is not a lot, but the goal was to take it easy and see more of Nantou County. I’ll have more to share in the near future as I work through the backlog of photographs and notes from this trip. Stay tuned!

For comparison, have a look at the Jishan Gatehouse in nearby Beitun. ↩

Map

Themes

921 Earthquake (九二一大地震)

Regions

Caotun (草屯)
Guoxing (國姓)
Puli (埔里)
Wufeng (霧峰)

Series: Nantou Road Trip 2015

This series features notes and photos from several days of riding around Nantou in late 2015. I set forth from Taichung, bound for a music festival, and ended up taking a number of interesting side trips to areas not commonly discussed on the English language web.