Alishan: The Empire's Forest and Uong'e Yata'uyungana's Mountain

30-second overview: Most people know Alishan as a place to watch the sunrise. Few know that on April 17, 1954, at 2:30 in the afternoon, Uong'e Yata'uyungana — first township mayor of Alishan Township and Tsou intellectual known as "the Nietzsche of Alishan" — was executed by firing squad at the Anken execution ground in Xindian. And thirty-five years earlier on that same mountain, Japanese forestry scholar Kawai Yoshitaro returned to find the millennium-old cypress trees all felled, and wrote a poem of remorse: "Axes entered the emerald peak." The soul of Alishan is not in the sacred trees, the sunrise, or the cherry blossoms — it is in the memories rewritten by these two empires in succession.

A Poem of Remorse: Kawai Yoshitaro Returns to Alishan in 1919

In 1919, Tokyo Imperial University forestry professor Kawai Yoshitaro set foot on Alishan again. Seventeen years earlier, in 1902, dispatched by Goto Shimpei, he had made his way from Chiayi's Gongtian through Shizijiao into Tapang, encountering for the first time the cypress forest of Alishan, "rich and of excellent timber quality."^{1 2} That survey led the Governor-General's Office in 1903 to specially commission him to plan forest development and railway routing; the development plan was approved in 1906, Fujita-gumi took over construction, and work formally began in 1910.^{2 3}

But the Alishan Kawai saw in 1919 was a different mountain. At the place where he had once slept overnight, he found that the thousand-year-old ancient trees that had once towered toward the sky had all been felled — only stones and moss remained. He wrote this poem:⁴

Axes entered the emerald peak,
A thousand years of ancient forest, all felled.
The rock pillow, the moss seat — all vanished without a trace,
The murmuring spring takes the place of sounds once heard.

He named that place "Mianyu" (Sleeping Moon) — and the Mianyu Line of today's Alishan Forest Railway takes its name from this poem.⁴ Two years after his death in 1933, friends erected a "Kinzan Dr. Kawai Memorial Stele" on Alishan; the inscription was composed by philosopher Nishida Kitaro.²

Curator's note: This is the most honest moment in all of Japan's colonial forestry history — a forestry scholar looks back at the road he built, and all he can do is write a poem of apology.

During the Japanese colonial period, the three major state-run forest operations at Alishan, Taipingshan, and Baxianshan together logged a combined area of 18,432 hectares between 1912 and 1945, with a timber volume of approximately 6.63 million cubic meters.⁵ These cypress trees were carried off to build the Meiji Shrine and construct warships — the motherland needed "sacred timber" to symbolize imperial legitimacy, and Alishan's ancient trees were forced to become the pillars of shrines.

Post-war logging was even more intense. Between 1946 and 1990, 44.56 million cubic meters were harvested across more than 340,000 hectares — 6.7 times the Japanese colonial state-run figures.⁵ The colonial era was labeled "plunder"; the postwar era was packaged in nationalist narrative as "rebuilding the base of recovery" and "settling veterans." The stumps of Alishan's sacred trees are the bones left behind by two successive regimes.

Uong'e Yata'uyungana: The Nietzsche of Alishan

Uong'e Yata'uyungana (高一生 in Chinese, also romanized as Kao I-sheng) was born on July 5, 1908 in the Tsou settlement of Kibu on Alishan.⁶ In 1924, he entered the Tainan Normal School, where he played piano, composed music, and read Nietzsche — the source of his epithet "the Nietzsche of Alishan."^{6 7}

He was more than a musician. He wrote works including "Hunting Song," "Spring's Saponika," "Cuckoo Mountain," and "Song of Climbing Jade Mountain," setting the Tsou world to music in his own language.⁶ He taught Japanese, taught music, and served as a police officer. When the Japanese left in 1945, he became the first township mayor of Wufeng Township (now Alishan Township).⁶ His wife, Kawagawa Haruko (Chinese name Kao Chun-fang, 1913–1999), gave him eleven children; their eldest daughter, Kao Chu-hua, later worked as a singer under the name "Pinanayana," performing in Taipei nightclubs to support the family.⁶

After the February 28 Incident, he sheltered mainlanders who had fled to Alishan for refuge — this act of goodwill later became one of the charges against him. He also advocated for Tsou self-governance and sought to establish an autonomous county for indigenous peoples.^{6 8} In the eyes of the early 1950s Nationalist government, this amounted to sedition.

Curator's note: Uong'e Yata'uyungana's tragedy lay not in anything he did wrong, but in living in an era when "helping mainlanders could be construed as being a Communist spy, and defending one's mother tongue could be construed as pursuing separatism."

On September 10, 1952, the Garrison Command, using the pretext of convening a "Mountain Security Conference," lured Uong'e Yata'uyungana, Tang Shou-jen, and other indigenous leaders to Chiayi, then transported them to the Military Tribunal in Taipei's Jingmei for interrogation.^{7 8} This became what history calls the "Tang Shou-jen Sedition Case" — or, more accurately: the Tsou Intellectual Purge.

2:30 in the Afternoon, April 17, 1954

In February 1954, six people received death sentences: Uong'e Yata'uyungana, Tang Shou-jen, Wang Ching-shan, Fang Yi-chung from the Tsou people, and Lin Jui-chang and Kao Tse-chao from the Atayal people.⁹ The charges: "intent to overthrow the government by unlawful means, with preparations having already begun."

At 2:30 p.m. on April 17, 1954, the six were escorted by Taipei Military Police to the Anken execution ground — now the Third Public Cemetery in Xindian District — where they were executed by firing squad.⁹ Tang Shou-jen was only twenty-eight when arrested; he was a Tsou youth born in 1924 in the Leye community of Tapang on Alishan.¹⁰ Uong'e Yata'uyungana was forty-five when arrested and forty-six when executed.

His ashes were quietly received by his people and brought back to Alishan, buried on a hillside with a view of home.⁸ An investigation by the Transitional Justice Commission later found that the victims' family members had also been subjected to long-term surveillance and persecution by the party-state.⁹

The Mountain Forced into Silence

The White Terror left two wounds in the Tsou communities.

The first was the disappearance of an intellectual class. The Tsou and Atayal intellectuals executed or imprisoned for extended periods simultaneously in the early 1950s robbed indigenous society of an entire generation of leaders.^{7 8}

The second was more covert: many community members fell silent out of fear, and there even emerged cases of Tsou women being coerced into marrying mainlander soldiers to survive or protect their families — when interviewed by The Reporter, one person involved described it as "something like being held hostage."⁸ This history became a taboo within the communities; only in recent years has it been slowly excavated.

This is the most ironic face of Alishan as a scenic mountain: tourists ride the Japanese-era forest railway up the mountain to see cherry blossoms and sacred trees, but the ground beneath their feet, in the 1950s, had just buried six Tsou bodies. On April 17, 2021 — the sixty-seventh anniversary of Uong'e Yata'uyungana's execution — a memorial stele for indigenous victims of the White Terror was finally unveiled on Alishan.¹¹

Alishan in 2026

Today, Alishan has another headache: tourists can't get tickets.

Starting March 2, 2026, the Alishan Forest Railway and Cultural Heritage Office implemented a new "pay immediately upon booking" system.¹² The old system had a two-day buffer period, but at peak times as many as seventy to eighty percent of reserved seats were not paid for — bookings were made but not paid for, seats were locked out, and people who genuinely wanted to ride couldn't get tickets, costing the railway hundreds of thousands of NT dollars in monthly revenue.¹² The new system requires immediate payment at the time of booking; three instances of failure to pay on time within a month result in a six-month suspension.

This is a century-old railway that is still running. It carried Japanese-era cypress timber, carried the post-war martial law system, and now carries tourists chasing the sunrise.

"Alishan's soul is not in those felled ancient trees, nor in those Tsou people who were executed. It is in the people who are still alive, who still remember."

Alishan is not a mountain — it is a history book still unfinished. The poem of remorse that Kawai Yoshitaro wrote in 1919, and the moment when Uong'e Yata'uyungana fell at the Anken execution ground in 1954, are both still waiting, in some corner of this mountain, to be read.

Further Reading:

• Taiwan's Forest Development History — Three hundred years of forestry policy: how Alishan, Taipingshan, and Baxianshan were turned into imperial forests
• Taiwan's White Terror — The Uong'e Yata'uyungana case was only part of the Tsou intellectual purge; the full scale of political violence in the 1950s
• History and Name Rectification of Taiwan's Indigenous Peoples — The Tsou and other indigenous peoples' circumstances and struggles in postwar Taiwan
• The February 28 Incident — Why the goodwill of Uong'e Yata'uyungana sheltering mainlanders later became one of the charges against him
• The Japanese Colonial Era — The imperial forestry system behind Kawai Yoshitaro
• The Camphor Wars of the 19th Century — Before Alishan's cypress forests, there were the camphor trees of the late Qing dynasty being felled. One continuous line from the 1864 Swinhoe expedition to the 1906 Takoham community.

References