AT FIVE IN THE MORNING, IN THE HAZE-BLUE period before light catches the mountains, I shuffle off the futon bed and onto the floor next to me. The others still sleep—their breaths catching every so often on their journeys toward waking—as I lace my boots and zip up my fleece, tracking my way silently to the door on rubber-soled tiptoes. The latch is dew-covered, and my hand slips as I press the door shut behind me.
The vale hangs heavy with clouds, and in that blue light, at the right angle, everything glistens. The deepest gash of the slopes is still shadowed, but in minutes the contours of the peaks grow haloed. Sun creeps into the morning around the eastern hillside and onto the terrace on which I stand, slightly chilled but warming at the thought of breakfast to come: coffee and steaming congee with salted turnip omelet.
I have joined a hiking group—ten strangers in all—brought together by a shared desire to escape the city, perhaps, or for the thinning air of high altitude. Some of them have come for Qilai Mountain’s peak, logging its name among the others they’ve reached, and some have come simply to meet like-minded people, those enamored of the mountains. I’ve been drawn here by a sensory longing, a desire for exertion and cold breath in my lungs, for alpine scents.
In the gloaming hours of the night before, our van trundled too close to a cliff’s edge after taking a wrong turn lower down in the valley. From where I stand now, I can see the road and the sheer chalky drop-off, a graying wound in the hillside. Beneath it is darkness, even as dawn works its way into day. I feel a twinge of relief, followed by a momentary shiver at the thought that it might have gone differently.
We set out toward the Nenggao trailhead after breakfast. The road follows a valley segmented by the Wanda Reservoir, a narrow turquoise strip held by the nearby Wushe Dam, construction of which began under the Japanese in the 1930s and was completed only in 1957, under the Nationalists. We pass the tip of the reservoir, known also as Bi Hu (Jade Lake), where sediment clouds the green. I stretch my gaze to the basin below, toward Lushan. The once-busy hot springs resort town has been all but abandoned, following a series of flash floods and mudslides that killed thousands in 2008 and 2009. Photographs of the disasters show buildings choked with the waste of the mountains, drawn downward by water. The mountains tipped multistory human constructions onto their sides. Driving past, I watch the surviving buildings sitting empty, gray as rockfall. Persistently, a handful of shops and hotels remain. The steep roads skirt the edge of a near-swallowed place.
Because of earthquakes and typhoons, the asphalt is in rough condition. The rutted lane was closed until a few days ago, as a small quake last week broke the road in half. With only one route up the mountain, the repairs were swift, shovelfuls of pitch and gravel spread into the gaps. But the road still has the split-open appearance of a loaf of bread.
IN THE EARLY QING DYNASTY, IN THE MID-seventeenth century, Taiwan and its mountains held little importance. The empire and its relationship to the world were understood in terms of five cardinal points—east, west, south, north, and center—with China, 中國 zhong guo (“middle country”), as the heart. Taiwan, by contrast, was viewed as a mere “ball of mud,” well beyond the empire. Even once perceptions of the island changed—by necessity, because of its strategic positioning and wealth of resources—and though the plains and their indigenous communities were absorbed into the “civilizing” project of the empire, the regions beyond the mountains remained an unknowable wilderness.
Geologically, Taiwan’s mountains seem precarious. Along the eastern coast, the peaks were formed by volcanic outflow, cooled lava and rock, and compacted ash fused by heat. In the Central Mountain Range, the bedrock is metamorphic; dappled and banded rock forms forged over time and under pressure from simpler stones. When seen in cross section, the vast movements that have made these mountains possible are clearly visible in parallel bands that run the axis of the land. The tectonic forces that pressed the island into being—from between the plates, beneath the sea—are evident to those who know what to look for. For geologists, Taiwan remains a new island, still in the throes of adolescent development. The mountain chains that first formed Taiwan are between just 6 and 9 million years old. In comparison, gneiss that formed 2,900 million years ago can be found in Scotland, and the volcanic ranges at Snowdonia can be dated to some 500 million years ago.
There is a pervasive tendency to ascribe mountains with permanence, but at the birth of modern geology, eighteenth-century uniformitarian geologists came up with the notion that mountains were changeable things, formed by the slow but perpetual flux of Earth’s crust. They rejected the notion that the world was shaped quickly, through sudden catastrophic events, like biblical floods. Many resisted this new geology. Christian orthodoxy could make no room for a such a vast history of Earth itself. The mountains were the one thing in the landscape too vast to be moved, too sturdy to be toppled. In order to accommodate such an enormous scale of change, a wholly new perspective of time was needed: the world could not simply be six thousand years old but was surely much older, perhaps infinitely old. Geologists realized that given many millions of years the mountains, too, would wear away or disappear. The great peaks that had been thrust from seabeds would wither once more. That which had “seemed so durable, so eternal,” as Robert Macfarlane writes in Mountains of the Mind, took on a “baffling mutability.”
Two centuries later, I first ventured into Taiwan’s Central Mountain Range. Behind the apparent solidity of these mountains, I would find fragility: landslides, earthquakes, erosion, rockfalls. Water, wind, and rain—the torrents of monsoons and typhoons—can carry more force than stone. With tectonic movement or a wet period, the island’s slopes could be shaken to dust.
When I was twelve, a magnitude 5.4 quake rattled beneath my hometown in southern Ontario. The school term had begun a few weeks earlier, but the dregs of summer were with us still. A group of us had gathered on the lawn outside school, absentmindedly pulling blades of grass from the ground, squabbling over the lyrics to a pop song, when the trembling began. My knees shook as I sat cross-legged, and I thought I was having some kind of nervous reaction, so I pressed them down, not wanting the other girls to see. But when I looked up, they were all trembling too, ever so slightly, the way one might before an exam or a first date.
That small quake rattled a few dishes from their shelves but was largely imperceptible to those who weren’t paying attention. My mother, driving across town to pick me up from school, didn’t notice it at all, and if she had noticed, I cannot say she would have remembered it: small earthquakes were a regular occurrence in her childhood. But for me, born onto a comparatively stable landmass, every detail has remained.
In Taiwan, historical archives record only the most destructive of earthquakes. Before regular monitoring began at the end of the nineteenth century, written reports in government correspondence, diaries, and travel books recounted only those that destroyed towns, killed villagers, brought ocean to land, and rent great gaps in the ground. Prior to the rise of geology and seismology as scientific disciplines in the late nineteenth century, mild quakes were regular occurrences not worth remarking upon.
Modern geological study came to East Asia through a circuitous route. By the mid-nineteenth century, Western geology had roundly challenged the view that Earth was a short-lived, unchanging place, and uniformitarian geologists like Charles Lyell—who drew heavily on the work of the Scotsman James Hutton—had popularized the notion that the Earth’s history could be understood as a slow process of wear, tear, and transformation. Chinese science and philosophy had for many centuries made maps and studies of its territory, conducted seismological studies, designed seismological instruments, and even classified minerals, fossils, and the development of landforms. As early as the Tang dynasty, it was conjectured that the fossils found on mountaintops had once lain far beneath the sea. But in early nineteenth-century China, there was little semblance of a geological science as the uniformitarians knew it.
The sixth edition of Lyell’s Elements of Geology—a field guide of sorts, intended to be paired with his earlier, theoretical Principles of Geology—was the first uniformitarian text to be translated into Chinese. In 1865, translators commissioned by Qing officials set to the ambitious task of interpreting a text with often untranslatable words—fossil names, “Miocene,” “mammoth”—in what came to be titled Dixueqianshi. According to the scholar Mariko Takegami, the act of translation was a trial. The foreign interpreter and Chinese translator had a limited understanding of one another’s languages, and it is said that the process gave the translator nightmares of ossified beasts.
But the work was considered vital to Qing dynasty China, which was keen to develop and make use of its natural resources, particularly through mining. The pursuit of geological knowledge became inextricably bound up with the prosperity and status of the land and its people. The first Chinese geologists were sent to study variously in Japan, Scotland, England, and Belgium. Likewise, American and German geologists conducted many of the first geological surveys in Chinese territory. Japan, too, engaged European scientists. The Chinese translation of Dixueqianshi became well known in Japanese scientific circles, where readers translated the geological terminology into Japanese, which then made its way back to China. The geological sciences were thus shaped by a process of exchange among the West, China, and Japan.
The early development of seismology and its instruments benefited vastly from research carried out by British researchers working in Japan, which, like Taiwan, is located on the Ring of Fire. John Milne, widely considered to be a founding father of modern seismology, was an English mining engineer. In 1876, he took up a position as a professor of mining and geology in Tokyo and four years later helped found the Seismological Society of Japan. Alongside his fellow British researchers Alfred Ewing and Thomas Gray, Milne began research on seismological instruments, resulting in the development of modern pendulum seismometers.
When the First Sino-Japanese War resulted in Taiwan’s transfer from Qing China to Japan on May 8, 1895, these new sciences became key to understanding the freshly acquired terrain. Two years later, the first Gray-Milne seismometer was installed in Taipei—renamed Taihoku by the Japanese—enabling the official collection of seismic data on the island. Just three years later, amid a much wider survey of the land and its people, Japan commissioned the first geological survey of Taiwan, A Map of Geology and Mineral Resources of the Island of Taiwan, using comparisons with the Japanese landscape to account for the island’s lithic features. These early surveys are a window not just into the origins of geology in East Asia but also into the shifting cultural landscape of Taiwan during the Japanese period.
After two centuries of Chinese rule, the Taiwanese people—both indigenous and the many who had migrated from southern China since the seventeenth century—were subject to the linguistic and cultural dominance of a new empire. Japanese rule was marked by efforts to make official much of what had remained uncharted while Taiwan was regarded as a wild outpost of Chinese civilization. Along with the land surveys, a census was taken and economic studies were conducted. The Japanese sought to map and manage the entirety of the indigenous territories in the remote mountains. Taiwanese students were absorbed into the Japanese educational system, and infrastructure was modernized. Japanese maps were created to show sea routes between Taiwan and Japan, a means for threading the Japanese archipelagos and Taiwan together. A terrain that was once oriented toward the Taiwan Strait and the mainland beyond came to be understood in relation to a new motherland in the east.
Likewise, the arts were used to consolidate Japanese governance. In 1909, as Japanese administrators worked their way inland from the plains, Ishikawa Kinichiro, now considered one of the fathers of Taiwanese landscape painting, was sent to draw topological maps of the Central Mountain Range. According to the art historian Yen Chuan-yin, Ishikawa often sat under military guard, painting the forested slopes. The works Ishikawa produced were then sent on to Tokyo to demonstrate the colonial government’s success in “civilizing” the wilder reaches of the “savage” island. These early visions of the Taiwanese landscape—a body of work which is said to have inspired much of the rural-focused art that came to characterize the island’s painterly style—became forever linked to colonial efforts to open up and survey the remote mountains.
The development of Taiwanese visual arts in the early twentieth century led to the formalization of arts education—Ishikawa taught painting at the Taipei Normal School and was a mentor to many leading landscape painters of the period—and helped channel budding Taiwanese artists toward studying in Japan. The government sponsored art exhibitions focusing on Taiwanese landscape and organized surveys asking locals to rank the beauty of the island’s scenic destinations. Climbing mountains was encouraged as a pastime alongside the arts.
Ishikawa’s paintings of the island reflect the sentiments of the time: while his Japanese watercolors are rendered in delicate hues with Mount Fuji a soft analogue for all mountains, his Taiwanese paintings are more fully saturated and less formally composed; the hills and forests are crass and unsubtle. Bold greens and bright hues marked out in strong strokes characterize the island’s heat and bounty. In his painting The Second Highest Mountain in Taiwan, Snow Mountain’s peaks are a light-smeared white, the slopes a blotted marine blue. The trees are not delicate adornments, but immoderate, deep-hued shapes in the foreground. Images like Ishikawa’s—in paintings, maps, and surveys—sought to position the island within the broader empire, to render the teeming island knowable.
MY EARS POP AS WE CLIMB HIGHER. THE SMALL van trundles along the gravel shoulder that serves as a parking lot. Vehicles cluster the side of the road; other hikers have made an earlier start. I step out, tighten my pack, and feel the chill of altitude prickle my skin. Clouds dapple the tips of the green mountain crests, and sun pours through the gaps. The morning will warm up. I tighten my laces and venture toward the narrow track.
The head of the Nenggao Cross-Ridge Trail is just east of Wushe. The town is marked by its history: In late October 1930, the Wushe Rebellion marked a last stand of indigenous resistance to colonial rule. A group of Seediq people, led by their chief, Mona Rudao, ambushed and killed more than 130 Japanese officials and families attending a sports day. They had seen decades of land enclosure, which followed the North American models of forcing indigenous communities onto reserves, as well as forced labor—camphor and cypress logging in traditional territories. This resulted in mounting daily tensions between Japanese police and villagers. In the weeks that followed, the government deployed some 2,000 troops and police officers to retaliate, alongside more than 1,000 rival indigenous people, playing local tribal hostilities to their favor. The Seediq took to the mountains, which they knew far better than the Japanese. The military then resorted to heavy artillery and aerial bombardment with gas bombs to quash the uprising, said to be the first use of chemical warfare in Asia. Decades later, the uprising would be propagandized by Chinese Nationalists seeking a tale of Taiwanese opposition to Japanese rule. But Wushe’s history is a telling case of resistance amid centuries of erasure of the island’s indigenous communities under both Japanese and Chinese regimes.
In the decades preceding the uprising, Japanese officials had made use of older indigenous trails to suppress local tribes and form a direct passage between the western and eastern sides of the island. The Nenggao Trail was used primarily by police and, following the turnover to the Chinese Nationalists after the Second World War, by Taiwan Power to route an east–west transmission line. Informational placards, an aging kiln used by Japanese police, and suspension bridges built by Taiwan Power remain now: the remnants of this fragmented past litter the mountainside.
But there are relics, too, of a longer territorial tale, told in the scarred stone, where boundless swathes of rock have been laid bare. Brittle slate, argillite, and phyllite, cleaved and folded together, make up these mountains. As steady as I imagine rock to be, the trail is a shattered reminder of its fragility.
In 2009, in the course of just a weekend, Typhoon Morakot brought more than 2,500 millimeters of rain to Taiwan, more than three times the United Kingdom’s average yearly rainfall. The region around Nenngao was badly affected. Huge swathes of the mountains slipped down toward the Choshui River.
This slate belt in the Central Mountain Range is just one such region on an island plagued by landslides, susceptible to threats from ground and sky. Landslides take place through the force of gravity and the agency of water or wind. Earthquakes make the slopes more susceptible to rain’s damage. In ranges where shale, slate, and schist predominate, landslides are always a possibility, triggered perhaps by the force of a single quake or the deluge of a powerful storm—or, in unlucky cases, both. Around Taiwan, where land has been cleared for plantations or mineral excavation, to say nothing of the worsened storms wrought by climate change, much of the risk is anthropogenic.
After the storm, researchers using satellite imagery estimated that the area had suffered more than a thousand landslides, their riverine streams of shale and slate visible on the maps. At home, before setting out, I looked through diagrams of mass wastings, through statistics on rainfall and emergency warning systems, and through geological studies of the island’s worst slides. The mountain might slough its old skin off in a range of ways—as a large rockfall, as debris flow, as a single portion detached and deposited downhill. I pulled images of the area up on my computer screen, zooming in on the largest landslide, which looked like its very own range, mountains in miniature formed by the contours of splintered rock on its scarps. I could follow its course downhill, flowing into the vale as water from a torrent, joining in tributaries with other rockfalls on the ascent. From the map’s scale, I plotted its size: half a kilometer across, a pale scar reaching deep into the green depths below. The image—snatched from a satellite beyond the sky—had its drama. But in the face of the landslides on Nenggao, knowing their mechanics does little to allay my terror.
I am not especially afraid of heights: I dabbled in rock climbing as a teenager and took a genuine pleasure in scaling walls and small slopes. But I’ve grown clumsy as an adult, suffering occasional bouts of fainting or motion sickness. Confronting the first small landslide, I begin to doubt my own footing. I wonder if, perhaps, this will be the moment I forget entirely how to walk. A hard-packed line of grit traces the route across, compacted by the hikers ahead, but there is an unnerving height to the landslide, stretching as it does from the cliffside above to the treed reaches below. Until my legs prove themselves to be working normally, I press myself forward, focusing solely on another hiker’s pack directly ahead of me. Only when I have expunged any irrational worry of sending myself over the edge with a nervous twitch or unwilled leap can I take in the view.
Rock-felled trees and the remains of a metal bridge sit broken below, surrounded by scree. I swallow my breath, troubled by the force of it, and keep walking. We pass a small land god shrine—common in these mountains for those who wish to pay their respects—and then reach the first outpost, the Yunhai power station, where the group pauses for a snack, relieved for a moment of our weighty packs. I’ve overpacked and am already tired. But time runs short here. I force a cluster of dried mangos and nuts down and take a small swig of water before shouldering my pack for the afternoon.
The largest landslide sits a short distance away, and we approach it in single file. The green trees open to a mass of gunmetal and heather gray slipping into the distances below and above. On the satellite image, I was able to confine the space of the landslide between my thumb and index finger. My understanding of its magnitude on the screen was clipped, intellectual, and cold. The first slide was navigable because it was short. The second stretches half a kilometer ahead of me, exposed to air and height and little else. A moonwalk, perhaps, or a scorched battlefield might come close.
I take my first steps on the landslide, which slopes downhill into the packed mounds of gravel that form the mountain wall. Every movement exudes a smell of dust and heat, a sensation magnified by the chomp of my boots on the brittle ground. The path winds into a clavicle of the mountain, emerging on the other side in a great, lumbering swerve that leads around a bend and disappears. DO NOT LINGER, a sign at the landslide’s edge states in bold letters.
I quicken my pace and attempt to take in the wasteland’s enormity. It stretches to a height farther than I can fully see, a crisp line of gray forming a dark edge against the sky. The trees on either side are a hard seam of shadowed life, abruptly ending at the mineral border. Below the trail, slate, banded metamorphosed schists, and quartz sit tumbled together, a geologic record spilled over by the force of gravity. I keep moving. Sunlight glints off the occasional crystalline stone, giving the slope a fine sparkle, faint enough to miss in the lava-dark overflow. As if by instinct, my eye seeks out the sprouts of green that have sprung up in patches, returning vegetal life to the world of stone.
Pines are among the first trees to restore landslide areas in these mountains, stretching their roots to knit strength back into the earth. Reforestation projects now seek to speed up this work of nature. Where soil has eroded and typhoon winds and monsoon rains have degraded a slope, regeneration can be difficult. But where seedlings take hold and “tree islands” grow up, the slopes fare better. The trees draw moisture to the soil, and heavy winds are slowed by their crowns. The groves attract birds seeking shelter, who in turn sow the seeds of further growth. Unseen beneath the ground, the work of root systems begins to stabilize the soil structure. So when the forests disappear from the slopes, the mountains, too, are not long for this world. Landslides tell us how little is eternal.