The Daan River Heaven Sword: East Asia's Tallest Tree Hid for Seven Hundred Years in a Place We Could Not Reach

30-Second Overview: Taiwan has a tree 84.1 meters tall, roughly the height of a 28-story building, and it is currently the tallest known tree in East Asia¹. It is called the "Daan River Heaven Sword," a Taiwania (Taiwania cryptomerioides) growing in a deep valley near the headwaters of the Daan River at about 1,650 meters above sea level. It is estimated to have lived for seven or eight hundred years². During the 2023 Lunar New Year, the "Tree Finder" team spent seven days tracing the river upstream, with nighttime temperatures falling to minus 2 degrees Celsius, before climbing into its crown and lowering a tape measure to obtain that number³. The most counterintuitive fact is this: on a country swept by typhoons every year, with fragile geology prone to landslides and floods, height like this should not, in theory, exist. It could grow to 84 meters and live for seven hundred years precisely because it was hidden in a valley humans could barely reach. The same "inaccessibility" that let it escape large-scale logging during the Japanese colonial period and after the war also meant that only after nearly a decade of work and a laser scan of the entire country did we see it for the first time that year⁴.

At the beginning of the 2023 Lunar New Year, above an unnamed valley deep in the Xueshan Range, several people clung to the crown layer of a Taiwania tree. From the top, they slowly released a tape measure, letting it drop toward the distant forest floor. When the tape stopped, the number was 84.1 meters³.

It was the tallest tree ever recorded in Taiwan, and it is currently the tallest known tree in East Asia¹. But what truly gives one pause is how long it had remained hidden. This tree had stood in that valley for at least seven hundred years², surviving Qing rule, Japanese colonial rule, wave after wave of postwar logging, and the typhoons that sweep across Taiwan every year. We did not finally know it was there until that year.

84.1 Meters, Taller Than the Instruments Guessed

Measuring the height of a tree sounds as if it should be the simplest thing. But the world's tallest trees are precisely the hardest to measure accurately.

The "Tree Finder: Giant Tree Mapping Project" uses airborne LiDAR: an aircraft carries lasers over the forest, and the returning point cloud is used to calculate a canopy height model for each patch of woodland⁵. In the data, this giant tree, numbered 55214, was estimated at 79.5 meters⁶. That height alone was enough to put it among Taiwan's tallest trees.

But lasers have blind spots. They fire downward from the sky and register the reflective surface blocked by the outermost leaves of the crown, not necessarily the true highest point. Steep slopes, visual obstruction, and insufficient point density can all cause underestimation. To determine exactly how tall a tree is, the most accurate method remains almost primitively awkward: a person climbs up, lowers a tape measure from the top of the tree to the ground, and measures directly. This method is called a "tape-drop"⁷.

When team members actually climbed to the top of tree 55214 and lowered the tape, the figure was 84.1 meters, a full 4.6 meters taller than the laser estimate⁶. In other words, the tallest living thing in Taiwan had even fooled an instrument looking down from the sky, which had made it nearly five meters too short.

That 4.6-meter gap could almost serve as a footnote to the entire story. The project team compared 22 giant trees across Taiwan that exceeded 40 meters and had been climbed and measured in person. The average gap between laser and tape, expressed as RMSE, was 4.55 meters⁸. The taller a tree is, and the deeper it is hidden, the more instruments tend to underestimate it. The tallest tree is often the one least willing to be seen clearly.

Curator's Note
It is easy to imagine "measurement" as neutral and objective, as if sufficiently advanced instruments can grasp everything. But the pair of numbers 84.1 and 79.5 reminds us of something: even the most precise laser ultimately still required a person to climb to the treetop and lower a tape measure before the matter could be settled. The Heaven Sword is the tallest, and therefore also the hardest to calculate accurately. The tallest life in Taiwan was confirmed by the oldest method.

A Country Where Tall Trees Should Least Exist

Pull the camera back and look at all of Taiwan, and the very existence of the Heaven Sword becomes a mystery.

Taiwan is not a place well suited to producing extremely tall trees. Each year, three to five typhoons make direct landfall. Large trees on high mountain ridges take the first impact: snapped by wind, struck by lightning, or uprooted. Add young geology and steep slopes, and heavy rain often brings large-scale landslides. In such an environment, for a tree to grow beyond 80 meters requires not only several centuries of time, but also several centuries of luck: not being broken by wind, not being cut down, and not being swept away by a landslide⁹.

That is why Taiwan has surprisingly few supertall trees. Only a handful of giant trees across the country currently exceed 70 meters, and every one of them belongs to the same species: Taiwania¹⁰. Why Taiwania, rather than the sacred cypresses many people picture? Here lies a piece of common knowledge that most people remember backward.

The "sacred trees" in our collective memory are almost all red cypress or yellow cypress, such as the Alishan Sacred Tree or the Lala Mountain Sacred Trees: massive, ancient, fenced off, and revered. But red cypress generally reaches only about 65 meters in height¹¹. They were able to become sacred trees and survive to the present for a somewhat brutal reason: red cypress is susceptible to fungal rot, and its heartwood often hollows out into a honeycomb-like structure. The wood then loses commercial value, so during the logging era people did not bother cutting it down, and it was spared¹¹. Taiwania is different. Its trunk is straight, its heartwood is not hollow, and it is excellent building timber. The species' potential height can reach about 90 meters¹². It grows the tallest, and for that very reason it was also the most worth cutting.

Taiwania foliage and its straight tree form: with a straight trunk and non-hollow heartwood, it is excellent building timber, which also made it especially "worth" cutting during the logging era. Photo: KENPEI / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

So why did the tallest Taiwania survive? The answer lies not in the tree itself, but in where it stands.

Hidden Means Surviving

The Heaven Sword grows near the headwaters of the Daan River, in a deep valley at about 1,650 meters above sea level¹³. To get there, one must trace the Daan River upstream for about 20 kilometers, cross powerful currents, climb over dangerous cliffs prone to rockfall and landslides, first ascend nearly a thousand meters, then descend more than another thousand. This is a route that even experienced mountaineers may not be able to complete¹⁴. Researcher Rebecca Chia-Chun Hsu described the settings where such giant trees grow: "The places where these giant trees are located are environments that even experienced mountaineers find very difficult to reach."¹⁵

Precisely this "inaccessibility" became its life-saving charm.

From the Japanese colonial period through the postwar era, Taiwan underwent wave after wave of large-scale logging. The cypresses and Taiwania of Alishan, Taipingshan, and Basianshan were hauled down the mountains in vast quantities. But logging equipment has limits to where it can go. It cuts where roads can be built and where timber can be transported out. The sheer-walled valley near the Daan River's headwaters was beyond the reach of timber cableways and trucks, so this 84-meter giant was left behind. It hid deeply enough to survive.

Hsu captured the logic precisely: "The place where the Heaven Sword stands shares traits with previously discovered giant trees: it exists in unlogged primary forest and is located in a valley that can shelter it from typhoons."¹⁶ That sentence explains both its height and its lifespan. The valley terrain shields it from direct typhoon winds, so it is not snapped like large trees on ridgelines. The unlogged primary forest gives it the chance to accumulate time into height.

Cloud forest in Shei-Pa National Park: afternoon fog and a highly humid environment with annual rainfall of about 3,000 millimeters are crucial to Taiwania's ability to move water up to an 80-meter crown. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Scientifically, Taiwania can grow this tall because three conditions stack together. First is the high humidity of the cloud forest zone: Taiwania is naturally distributed at elevations of 1,500 to 2,400 meters, in cloud belts with annual rainfall of about 3,000 millimeters¹⁷. Afternoon fog forms there, and fog water can be absorbed directly through leaf surfaces, helping solve the enormous pressure problem of moving water from roots to a treetop 80 meters high. Second is the combination of valley terrain that shelters it from typhoons and pioneer advantages on landslide sites: Taiwania seeds are small and can drift long distances on the wind. Seedlings often land on valley landslides and fallen logs. As a light-loving pioneer species, once a landslide opens a canopy gap and sunlight enters, it races upward¹⁸. Third is that hidden means surviving: inaccessible terrain let it escape the human saw.

Red cypress avoided felling through hollow heartwood; Taiwania avoided felling through sheer terrain. Taiwan's two oldest kinds of giant trees escaped the same logging era in two completely different ways.

That seven-hundred-year figure needs to be laid out carefully. The Heaven Sword is "estimated to be about 700 to 800 years old." This figure was calculated from its roughly 8.5-meter girth and the growth rate of Taiwania. It has not actually been dated through core sampling of its annual rings¹⁹. Some international reports in 2026 even described it as "nearly a thousand years old"²⁰. This older figure may come from another estimation method. Girth-based age estimates are uncertain: the Shuishan Sacred Tree in Alishan was once estimated at 2,700 years old, but after the Forestry Bureau took an increment core, the figure was revised to 1,081 years, a difference of more than 1,600 years²¹. So for the Heaven Sword, the more responsible formulation is this: it is estimated at seven or eight hundred years old and may be older, but until someone actually cores its rings, the number carries a question mark.

The Tree Finders, and Eyes That Spent a Lifetime Looking for Trees

The Heaven Sword was "found." And the story of finding it begins on an afternoon when a pair of shoes broke.

In 1994, Hsu made her first Nenggao Historic Trail traverse. On the fourth day, her shoes had already fallen apart. Exhausted, she leaned beside the Qilai Dam to rest, but her gaze was caught by a giant tree across the valley: a Taiwania. Looking at that towering figure, she said that after feeling awed, she suddenly found the strength to keep walking²². She did not yet know that this image would pull her through the rest of her life.

That tree was, in fact, another tree. The Heaven Sword stands at the headwaters of the Daan River: another place, another Taiwania. But the tree across from Qilai Dam in 1994 was the starting point of "seeing." Hsu later studied botany at National Taiwan University, earned a doctorate in Amsterdam, joined the Taiwan Forestry Research Institute to study canopy epiphytes, and became the kind of person whose life is spent dealing with trees high above the ground²³.

The systematic search for "Taiwan's tallest tree" truly began in 2014. That year, Hsu's team visited the "Three Sisters" Taiwania in the Qilan Conservation Area, formally setting out on the path of searching for giant trees²⁴. From 2014 onward, they successively located, climbed, and tape-measured 22 giant trees over 40 meters tall⁸. But finding trees one by one on foot was too slow. Taiwan is too large, and its deep valleys too numerous. Hsu herself said: "Many trees are in uninhabited places. Just cutting through grass and opening a route takes more than ten days."²⁵

The turning point came from a batch of laser data. In the 2010s, Taiwan's Ministry of the Interior successively obtained nationwide airborne LiDAR scans after Typhoon Morakot. From 2016 onward, the team led by Chi-Kuei Wang at National Cheng Kung University's Department of Geomatics also launched a second large-scale scan²⁶. In 2019, Hsu and Wang formally formed the "Tree Finder: Giant Tree Mapping Project," turning laser point clouds into maps of giant-tree hotspots that could be systematically interpreted²⁷.

Lasers alone were not enough. Among the candidate points initially screened by the algorithm, the false-positive rate was absurdly high: more than 90 percent of the "tall trees" flagged by the machine were actually calculation errors²⁸. So in 2020, the project did something very Taiwanese: it uploaded more than 50,000 LiDAR profile images to a citizen science platform and invited hundreds of people to interpret them online, using many human eyes to remove tens of thousands of algorithmic false positives one image at a time²⁸. To encourage participation, the platform also designed achievement badges, and whoever found the tallest tree could even earn the right to name the giant tree²⁹.

Lasers scanned the whole country, citizens' eyes filtered the profiles one by one, and then people climbed to the treetop and settled the matter with a tape measure. The Heaven Sword is the final number produced by this entire technical chain. By the end of 2022, the Taiwan Giant Tree Map had already marked 941 giant trees over 65 meters tall across Taiwan³⁰. Number 55214 was one of those coordinates.

Curator's Note
"Finding the tallest tree in Taiwan" required more than one extraordinary tree. It required an aircraft scanning the whole country, a laser algorithm, hundreds of strangers reading profile images in front of computers, several Indigenous team members who could guide the route, a group of scientists willing to spend seven days tracing a river upstream and climbing a tree, and finally a roll of measuring tape. The Heaven Sword was not "seen" until 2023, but this act of seeing was a collective process in which Taiwan spent a decade learning itself anew.

The Seven Days of Unsheathing

On the second day of the 2023 Lunar New Year, the Tree Finder team set out³¹.

The target was number 55214, the giant tree that had already been marked on Hsu's survey map for more than half a year. Before departure, she wrote with the kind of obsession that made the trip unavoidable: "Even if I don't get to climb the tree, I have to find a way to see 55214 with light gear."³² She also knew that LiDAR was not infallible: "The original LiDAR data were established from scans at a density of two points per meter, so there remains a very small chance that a tall tree is located in a 'gap.'"³³ The tallest tree might happen to fall in a blind spot the laser had missed. No one could say for certain what they would see after climbing in.

Hsu later described the danger of the route this way: they had to trace the river upstream for about 20 kilometers, cross the high-flow Daan River while risking being swept away, then climb a 1,500-meter ridge and traverse steep landslide terrain. During the process, someone was accidentally injured by falling rock. Only at the end did they finally see, in the distance, that slender, towering giant tree³⁴. The entire trip took seven days, and nighttime temperatures once fell to minus 2 degrees Celsius³.

The Daan River originates on the western side of Dabajianshan. The Heaven Sword is hidden in a headwater valley deep in this part of the Xueshan Range, a place almost unreachable by human effort. Photo: Alan Wu / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Seven days, minus 2 degrees, broken shoes, rockfall injuries, and crossings of a rushing river: this is the real cost translated from the words "cannot reach." The same reason the Heaven Sword survived until today also made those who measured it suffer. When team members climbed into the crown and lowered the tape to confirm 84.1 meters, Hsu described it as a tense and joyful moment, especially for the team members who had guessed its true height in advance³⁵.

It naturally took the position of Taiwan's tallest tree. Second place is the Kaa-Lang giant tree in the Zhuoshui River basin, at about 82 meters; third is the Taoshan Sacred Tree in Shei-Pa, at 79.1 meters³⁶. And Taiwan's ten tallest trees are, without exception, all Taiwania³⁷.

資料來源：Taiwan Forestry Research Institute, Tree Finder: Giant Tree Mapping Project

Placed side by side, the three numbers are not far apart: 84.1, 82, 79.1. But they support a fact few countries can claim: Taiwan is one of the few places in East Asia currently known to grow giant trees over 70 meters tall³⁸. On a typhoon-swept country, those few meters of height were purchased with centuries of concealment.

Administratively, the area where the Heaven Sword stands lies at the junction of the Ministry of Agriculture's Forestry and Nature Conservation Agency Taichung Branch and Shei-Pa National Park³⁹. The research was jointly led by Hsu of the Taiwan Forestry Research Institute and Wang of National Cheng Kung University, with funding from the Ministry of Agriculture and Yuen Foong Yu Consumer Products Co., Ltd.⁴⁰ In June 2026, the process of searching for and measuring the tree was formally published in the international journal Frontiers in Forests and Global Change⁸. CNN, Mongabay, and Sci.News reported on it at the same time, allowing this tree that had been hidden for seven hundred years to be seen by the world for the first time⁴¹.

Three Names, and One Missing Name

This tree has more than one name. How it was named is itself a quiet story worth pausing over.

The oldest layer is its scientific name. The genus name of Taiwania, "Taiwania," was assigned by Japanese botanist Bunzo Hayata in 1906. The specimen had been collected in 1904 by Government-General engineer Konishi Nariaki at Wusongkeng in Nantou Prefecture. Hayata published it at the Linnean Society of London, naming it after Taiwan⁴². In botanical taxonomy, this is unique: Taiwania is the only tree genus in the plant kingdom named after "Taiwan"⁴³. But Taiwania is not endemic to Taiwan. Its natural distribution spans Taiwan, southwestern China, northern Myanmar, and Vietnam⁴⁴. What belongs uniquely to Taiwan is only the genus name. And that imperial-era naming process completely bypassed the knowledge systems of the Indigenous peoples who had long lived on this land⁴².

Japanese botanist Bunzo Hayata, who in 1906 named this tree genus "Taiwania" at the Linnean Society of London. It is the only tree genus in the plant kingdom named after Taiwan. Photo: Sasaki / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain

The second layer is a poetic name: "the tree that bumps into the moon." This is the Rukai people's name for the Taiwania species. Standing beneath this kind of conifer giant, one cannot see the crown when looking up, and the human body feels so small. From that experience came a name romantic almost to the point of myth⁴⁵. But this name belongs to the species as a whole: it is the Rukai name for "Taiwania," from Rukai traditional territory around Great Ghost Lake in southern Taiwan. It is neither the name of the individual Heaven Sword tree nor an Atayal-language name⁴⁶.

The third layer is "Heaven Sword." During the 2023 expedition, the team passed through Dongyang Mountain and Xishi Mountain, jokingly nicknamed in mountaineering circles as the "Eastern Heretic and Western Venom." After descending into the Daan River valley, they saw an entire stand of giant trees rising together, an atmosphere like the "Mount Hua Sword Summit" in Jin Yong's martial-arts novels, where the greatest masters gather to determine who is first under heaven⁴⁷. The tallest among them, 55214, was named Heaven Sword. The Heaven Sword comes from The Heaven Sword and Dragon Saber; the words "heaven-leaning" describe an extraordinarily long precious sword⁴⁸. A very long, sky-piercing, peerless sword corresponds exactly to this sword-like Taiwania towering upward. From "Eastern Heretic and Western Venom" to "Mount Hua Sword Summit" to "Heaven Sword," this is an interlinked set of wuxia imagery, not a casual name. The naming was completed only after the team returned from the expedition. While they were in the mountains, the tree was still called only "55214"⁴⁹. The person who named it was an Indigenous team member of the Tree Finder group. All public materials say only "an Indigenous team member" and do not record the person's name or nation⁵⁰.

Place these three names side by side, and a quiet tension emerges. The scientific name came from a Japanese colonial botanist, the poetic name from the Rukai people of the south, and the wuxia name from contemporary Han culture. Each of the three layers has someone speaking. But this tree stands in the upstream core of the traditional territory of the Atayal Beishi group: the Beishi people call themselves Liyung-Painux, meaning "rushing river," and there are 13 Beishi Atayal communities along the Daan River⁵¹. In currently public materials, no Atayal-language name for this tree or the land where it stands can be found⁵².

This does not mean such a name does not exist. The Atayal Gaga oral tradition explicitly includes "ecological and environmental knowledge," and the traditional knowledge system concerning plants and animals in the Daan River basin is alive⁵³. But the Indigenous-language name of this giant tree, located at 1,650 meters above sea level in the far upper reaches of a traditional hunting ground, has not yet appeared in public documents. Perhaps it is because the tree is too deep and too distant; perhaps because oral traditions do not leave a written place name for every tree. So the only honest wording here is: it has not been found in currently public materials, not that it "does not exist." Hsu herself has also especially emphasized the contribution of Indigenous team members in interviews. She said Indigenous people have been involved in the team's expeditions every time, and that the team's ability to survive in the mountains depends on Indigenous local knowledge of the forests⁵⁴.

Curator's Note
A tree has, at once, a colonizer's scientific name, a southern tribe's poetic name, and a modern wuxia name, yet it lacks the Indigenous-language name of the people whose land lies beneath it. This gap requires no moral verdict from anyone. It simply reminds us that "naming" involves who has the right to speak, whose knowledge is written into documents, and whose voice remains quiet in Taiwan's story. Leaving that quietness honestly in place and letting readers think for themselves is closer to truth than rushing to provide an answer.

After Seeing

After learning that it was there, Taiwan began trying to "see it clearly."

In March 2025, Australian Tasmanian tree-climbing photographer Steven Pearce and his team completed a life-size portrait of the Heaven Sword⁵⁵. The method was awkward and stubborn: climbing specialists slowly climbed the tree and took photographs one by one at each parallel height, about 120 images in all, then stitched them frame by frame into a complete image of the whole tree from root to crown⁵⁶. Pearce had previously photographed giant eucalyptus trees in Australia and the United States. Speaking in English, he said this was the most difficult tree-photography trip he had ever climbed, and that Taiwan's forests and scenery were equal to anywhere in the world⁵⁷.

The most moving aspect of that life-size portrait is scale. When an entire 84-meter tree is presented whole, the person standing at its base looks as small as a comma in a line of text. We are used to looking up at trees, but we rarely have the chance to see a whole tree at once. Only in that moment of seeing the whole does one truly feel the weight of seven hundred years.

Earlier, beginning in 2021, the documentary Island of Sacred Trees followed Hsu's footsteps into the depths of the Xueshan and Central Mountain ranges to film these giant trees⁵⁸. The Nature Conservation and Environmental Information Foundation (TNF) also made a full official documentary recording the Heaven Sword expedition, following the team through the route of climbing a thousand meters and descending seventeen hundred[^59]:

Official documentary by the Nature Conservation and Environmental Information Foundation (TNF): following the "Tree Finder" team upstream, climbing a thousand meters and descending seventeen hundred, to fully document the expedition to the Daan River Heaven Sword.

(Island of Sacred Trees became controversial in 2026 over rights issues involving a film book of the same title. The publisher and director are still in negotiation⁵⁹; that belongs to the realm of creative ethics and is unrelated to giant-tree science itself.)

But after seeing comes a harder question: how much longer can these giant trees, now seen, continue to stand?

This is the other side of hidden means surviving. "Inaccessibility" once protected the Heaven Sword from saws, but it cannot hide the tree from climate. Comparing LiDAR data from ten years apart, about 5 percent of Taiwan's 941 giant trees have already disappeared. Wang of National Cheng Kung University warned in English that, at this pace, existing giant trees could die out within the next one or two centuries⁶⁰. Most giant trees grow in geologically fragile valley terrain, while typhoon intensity and extreme rainfall are increasing. A landslide can directly carry away a tree that has stood for a thousand years. Taiwania itself is also listed by the IUCN as Vulnerable⁶¹.

Yet while these giant trees are alive, they are also doing something important for Taiwan. The Tree Finder team surveyed the giant-tree valley where the Taoshan Sacred Tree stands and estimated its carbon storage at about 1,384 metric tons per hectare, close to the giant-tree forests of Tasmania, which have among the highest carbon densities in the world⁶². A forest hidden in deep valleys, which we have only just learned to see, has quietly stored that much carbon. To see these forests is, in a sense, also to see how much remains in Taiwan's mountain forests that is worth protecting.

It Is Alive Today Because We Could Not Reach It Before

Return to that afternoon in 1994. Hsu, with broken shoes, sitting beside Qilai Dam, was drawn to a Taiwania across the valley and found the strength to keep walking. Thirty years later, she and a group of people scanned all of Taiwan with lasers, had crowds of eyes sift through 50,000 profile images, traced a river upstream for seven days, and lowered a tape measure from the top of another Taiwania: 84.1 meters.

This small country that we thought we had long since understood still hides living beings ten times older than we are and taller than any building here. And it is alive today precisely because we could not reach it before.

That "inaccessibility" was once its life-saving charm, letting it escape large-scale logging, evade typhoons, and stand quietly in an unpeopled valley for seven hundred years. Now, finally, with lasers, citizen science, tree climbing, and the guidance of Indigenous team members, we have crossed that barrier and seen its full form for the first time. Seeing is a kind of arrival; but we must be careful that "seeing" does not become another form of harm.

The Heaven Sword is almost impossible to visit in a single day. Seven days of travel, nights at minus 2 degrees, and rushing water form a natural fence that keeps the possibility of crowds outside. Its best protection may still be that ancient inaccessibility.

And now, above that unnamed deep valley at the headwaters of the Daan River, an 84-meter green long sword still quietly pierces the sky.

Further Reading:

• Brown Fish Owl — Also dependent on mid-elevation old-growth giant trees and streams that have not been concreted over, Taiwan's largest owl lives in the narrowing space where "the giant trees have not yet fallen" and "the streams have not yet been engineered" are still true
• Formosan Landlocked Salmon — Another survivor hidden in Shei-Pa, in the Qijiawan Creek basin: a glacial relict
• Formosan Black Bear — Also dependent on large, rarely visited primary forests, another indicator of the integrity of Taiwan's mountain forests
• Taiwan Forest Ecosystems — The ecological coordinates of cloud forests, the five precious conifers, and giant trees; the Heaven Sword is the highest point of this system
• Taiwan National Parks — Shei-Pa National Park and Forestry and Nature Conservation Agency lands are the final refuges of these giant trees

References

Image Sources

This article uses five CC / public-domain images, all cached under public/article-images/nature/, stripped of EXIF data, and converted to WebP to avoid hotlinking source servers:

• Taiwania (wild, Nantou) — Shihchuan — Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 (hero)
• Taiwania foliage and tree form — KENPEI — Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
• Cloud forest in Shei-Pa National Park — Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Dabajianshan (Daan River headwaters) — Alan Wu — Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Bunzo Hayata — Sasaki — Wikimedia Commons, Public domain

Video: "Taiwan's Tallest Tree" Daan River Heaven Sword Sacred Tree Full Documentary — official channel of the Nature Conservation and Environmental Information Foundation (TNF).

Photos of the Heaven Sword itself, Steven Pearce's life-size portrait, and stills from Island of Sacred Trees are copyrighted materials (and the image rights for Island of Sacred Trees are currently under dispute). This article does not use them. For relevant visuals, see the TNF official documentary above and channels released by the rights holders.