Taiwan's Mountains and Hiking Culture

30-Second Overview: Taiwan's land area is less than nine-tenths that of Switzerland, yet it packs in 268 peaks exceeding 3,000 meters — the highest density in the world. In 1971, a survey engineer named Lin Wen-an selected "Taiwan's Hundred Peaks," igniting half a century of summit culture. But it was not until 2019 that the government formally declared "opening the mountains," freeing Taiwanese from the need to navigate layers of permits just to enter their own mountains. This is a story about an island and its fraught, passionate relationship with the heights.

In April 1900, a 23-year-old Japanese man shouldered surveying equipment and climbed upward from the direction of Alishan. His name was Mori Ushinosuke. He had arrived in Taiwan three years earlier as a military interpreter and become captivated by the island's mountains.¹ That day he and anthropologist Torii Ryuzo challenged Yushan (Jade Mountain). Torii reached the west peak; Mori stepped onto the north peak. Over the next thirty years he traversed virtually every alpine tribal settlement in Taiwan, leaving behind more than twenty high-mountain plant species bearing his name: Rhododendron morii, Cleyera japonica var. morii, Angelica morii.² He was the first person to conduct a true "comprehensive survey" of Taiwan's mountains.

But for those who lived within the mountains, these peaks had never needed naming by outsiders.

Tongku Saveq: Mountains Older Than Nations

Yushan (Jade Mountain), 3,952 meters — the highest peak in Northeast Asia. The Bunun people call it "Tongku Saveq" (東谷沙飛), meaning "sanctuary" — the last refuge of the ancestors during the time of the great flood.³ The Atayal call Xueshan (Snow Mountain) "Babo Hagai" (Stone Mountain). Dabajianshan is the Atayal sacred mountain "Papak Waqa," and tribal members must perform blessing rituals before ascending. The Tsou regard Yushan as a sacred mountain; certain peaks are considered residences of ancestral spirits and may not be climbed at will.

These names preceded the Chinese-language name "Yushan" by thousands of years. During the Qing Kangxi era, Yu Yonghe's travelogue "A Brief Account of My Journey to Taiwan" noted viewing this mountain from afar: "the summit is gleaming white as jade" — and so the name "Yushan" (Jade Mountain) came to be. During the Japanese colonial period it was renamed "Niitakayama" (meaning "the new high mountain, higher than Fuji"), then changed back to Yushan after the war. The mountain never moved. Its name cycled through four rounds.

📝 Curator's Note
A mountain's naming history is an island's power history. Whoever has the right to name it has claimed sovereignty. But the Bunun never needed to claim anything — they were always there.

Taiwan's five mountain ranges (Central Range, Xueshan Range, Yushan Range, Coastal Range, Alishan Range) are the product of the collision and compression between the Eurasian Plate and the Philippine Sea Plate. The Central Range runs 270 kilometers north to south like a spine through the entire island, with more than 170 peaks above 3,000 meters. From sea level to nearly 4,000 meters, the vertical distance spans only a few dozen kilometers, with climate shifting from subtropical to alpine subarctic. This "compressed vertical world" allows Taiwan to contain, within a tiny area, a complete ecological spectrum from camphor broadleaf forests to high-mountain grasslands.

The Father of the Hundred Peaks

In 1971, to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the Republic, the China Alpine Association planned an audacious undertaking: a complete traverse of the Central Mountain Range. Two teams — blue and white — departed from the northern and southern ends respectively, ascending sixty peaks above 3,000 meters in the Central Range, finally converging at Qicai Lake.⁴

The man behind this initiative was Lin Wen-an. A survey engineer who had been climbing since the Japanese colonial era, he knew Taiwan's mountains so thoroughly that he could recite the course of nearly every ridge. Inspired by Fukada Kyuya's "One Hundred Mountains of Japan," Lin Wen-an, Hsing Tien-cheng, Tsai Ching-chang, and Ding Tong-san (later called the "Four Heavenly Kings of the Alpine World") began selecting Taiwan's Hundred Peaks list.⁵

The selection criteria were threefold: an elevation of at least 10,000 feet (about 3,048 meters), a named designation on maps, and preference for those with triangulation points. But objective criteria alone were insufficient — they added the subjective judgment of "extraordinary, precipitous, majestic, and beautiful." One hundred peaks were finalized, and from these nine most representative were chosen: the Five Sacred Peaks (Yushan, Xueshan, Xiuguluan, Nanhu Dashan, Beida Wushan), the Three Sharp Summits (Central Sharp, Dabajianshan, Dafen Sharp), and the One Wonder (Qilai Main Peak).

On December 5, 1972, the Hundred Peaks Club was formally established atop Yangtou Mountain, with Lin Wen-an as chairman. That year Hsing Tien-cheng became the first person in the postwar era to complete all hundred peaks. From that point on, "completing the hundred" became the ultimate achievement for Taiwanese mountaineers — a checklist requiring years or even decades.

💡 Did You Know
In May 2025, trail runner Gu Ming-zheng completed all one hundred peaks in 34 days, covering a total distance of 940 kilometers with 97,700 meters of cumulative ascent. This record compressed "completing the hundred" from a life project into an extreme athletic event.

But Hundred Peaks culture also had side effects. When mountaineering became a checklist exercise, the triangulation point at the summit became just a backdrop for photos, hikers rushed to tag summits while ignoring roadside ecology, and the obsession with "collecting peaks" sometimes eclipsed genuine understanding of the mountains themselves.

Half a Century of Locked Mountains

Between Taiwan's people and their own mountains stood a half-century lock.

From the 1950s onward, the KMT government implemented strict entry controls under the pretext of military security. Want to climb? First apply for a Category A mountain entry permit, a Category B mountain entry permit, and pass police review. The mountains were not places you could simply go — they were restricted zones.

This lock held for nearly seventy years. On October 21, 2019, Premier Su Tseng-chang announced the "Salute to the Mountains" (向山致敬) policy: five pillars (opening the mountains, information transparency, convenience of service, education and outreach, clear accountability) that integrated the multi-agency entry application process into a one-stop platform.⁶ Except for national defense necessities, areas with fragmented and dangerous terrain, indigenous sacred sites, and conservation zones, mountains were opened comprehensively.

After the opening, Taiwan's mountains were immediately flooded with people. Combined with the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic bringing overseas travel to a halt, "can't go abroad, so let's go hiking" became a national movement. The numbers speak: in 2019, there were 207 mountain accidents with 27 deaths; in 2020, they surged to 454 accidents and 41 deaths — more than doubling.⁷ Suburban hiking accidents grew at the most alarming rate, up 230%.

Freedom arrived. But were people ready for it?

Chang Po-wei and the Search-and-Rescue Revolution

On February 27, 2011, Chang Po-wei, a student at Chungshan Medical University, set out alone to climb Baigu Mountain (Paigu Mountain) and became lost, calling for help. The Nantou County Fire Department deployed more than 600 personnel over 51 days of searching — and found nothing. On April 19, two civilian hikers entered the mountain and found the body on their second day.⁸

51 days versus 2 days. That contrast shook Taiwanese society.

Chang's parents filed a state compensation lawsuit. The first instance court ruled against the fire department, ordering 2.67 million NT dollars in damages. But the second instance reversed this — the High Court ruled that "citizens have no right to demand zero risk in mountaineering" and overturned the damages, a verdict upheld on final appeal.⁹ The ruling was controversial, but what the case truly changed was the search-and-rescue system itself: it sparked discussion about professionalizing mountain search-and-rescue and brought to the surface the reality that "firefighters are not mountain rescue specialists."

📝 Curator's Note
The legacy of the Chang Po-wei case is not the legal verdict but the question it raised: to what extent does the state bear protective obligations toward citizens who enter the mountains? That question has yet to reach consensus today.

The Angel's Tear and the Limits of Carrying Capacity

At an elevation of 3,310 meters, tucked between Xiangyang Mountain and Sanchaxian Mountain, Jiaming Lake lies quietly — Taiwan's second-highest alpine lake, called "the Angel's Tear."

Its origin is itself a scientific debate. In 2003, Professor Chi Shih-cheng of the National Kaohsiung Normal University Geography Department determined, based on cirque steps, terminal moraines, and glacial striations found on-site, that this was a cirque lake left from the glacial era. But other scholars proposed a meteorite impact hypothesis. A 2015 study by Yang Chien-fu and colleagues concluded that a meteorite roughly ten meters in diameter might have struck here approximately 100,000 years ago.¹⁰ However, Chu Hsiao-tsu of the Central Geological Survey found no coesite or stishovite — minerals that would be expected from a meteorite impact — at the lakeside, and considers the probability of a meteorite origin to be only about 2%.

Origins may be in dispute; the scenery is not. The Xiangyang and Jiaming Lake mountain huts each provide 70 bed spaces, plus campsites accommodating a total of approximately 176 people. The huts operate on a lottery system with monthly application openings and extremely low success rates. This system is not designed to inconvenience hikers — the carrying capacity of these high-mountain grasslands is simply that small. There are no fish in the lake (the elevation is too high), and the surrounding area hosts endangered plants like Isoetes taiwanensis (Taiwan quillwort); one careless footstep could eliminate a species.

The Mountain as a Mirror

Taiwan's hiking population of 5 million faces 268 peaks above 3,000 meters. Three high-mountain national parks (Yushan, Shei-Pa, Taroko) guard the most sensitive mountain zones, but management resources will always lag behind the swelling crowds. The 92 beds at Paiyun Lodge are nearly impossible to secure during peak season. Leave No Trace principles are gradually taking root, but the trampling on Jiaming Lake trails, garbage on Yushan, and waste management at alpine campsites remain ongoing battles.

Climate change is pushing the snowline upward and making extreme weather more frequent. The accumulated millennium of mountain wisdom held by indigenous peoples — weather observation, plant identification, route judgment — is being rediscovered and valued. Tribal guide programs have found a crossroads of ecotourism and cultural transmission for Atayal communities like Smangus and Bunun settlements like Luanshan.

Lin Wen-an died in 1975, never seeing the later explosion of Hundred Peaks culture. Mori Ushinosuke disappeared in 1926 on the ship returning to Japan — believed to have jumped into the sea. What he cherished most throughout his life were always the mountains of Taiwan.¹¹

A hundred years later, the mountains remain in place. What has changed is the people at their feet: from restriction to opening, from fear to frenzy, from conquest to learning to coexist.

The surface of Jiaming Lake reflects the sky. Whether or not anyone is watching.

Further Reading:

• Taiwan's Forest Ecosystems — From camphor broadleaf forests to fir conifer forests: the complete ecological zones distributed along vertical elevation
• Taiwan's Alpine Ecosystems and Glacial Relicts — High-mountain grasslands above 3,000 meters and the glacial-era relict species left behind
• Taiwan's National Parks — Management and conservation of the three high-mountain national parks: Yushan, Shei-Pa, and Taroko
• Trail Culture and Civic Stewardship — Leave No Trace movement and local practices of citizen participation in trail maintenance
• Taiwanese Indigenous Ecological Wisdom and Conservation — How a millennium of mountain wisdom dialogues with modern conservation

References