Alishan is a mountain forest area in Chiayi County, reached by a narrow-gauge railway built to carry cypress down to the plains, and known for its sunrises, its sea of clouds and the giant red cypresses left standing in the recreation area. Its Sacred Tree is a title rather than a fixed tree. The original fell in the late 1990s, and the cypress carrying the name today was chosen by about 25,000 people in a public vote, on a 600 metre boardwalk near Ciyun Temple.
0 of 2 visited in Alishan
Taiwan Red Cypress (Chamaecyparis formosensis) · 626-2300 years · Alishan National Forest Recreation Area
This tree was elected. Alishan's original Sacred Tree, a red cypress of around 3,000 years, was wrecked by storm damage and taken down in the late 1990s, and the Forestry Bureau put the succession to a public online vote. About 25,000 people took part, this cypress won, and on 1 January 2007 the county magistrate crowned it Alishan's second-generation Sacred Tree. Before that it went by Guangwu Cypress, after a provincial governor's conviction that it had germinated during the reign of the Han emperor Guangwu.
Its age is genuinely in dispute, and both numbers are worth carrying. Tourism material has said roughly 2,300 years for decades, some of it stretching to 3,000. Then a 2022 tree-ring study by National Chiayi University, commissioned by the Forestry Bureau, dated the main trunk at about 626 years and explained the gap: what looks like one enormous stem is a merged tree, several red cypresses that grew into each other over centuries. The bulk is real. The single great age is not established, and the older figure is still the one most of the tourism material carries.
The park's own record gives it 45 metres of height and 12.3 metres of girth; an older account says 43.5 and 13.1. It stands on Trail 1, a 600 metre boardwalk near Ciyun Temple that passes the Thousand-Year Cypress and the Tree of Three Generations on the way, so it is a short walk in and not the only giant on it.
Photo: Felix Filnkoessl (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Taiwan Red Cypress (Chamaecyparis formosensis) · 1,100 years · Alishan Forest Recreation Area
For most of a century this cypress was overlooked in favour of a neighbour that the newest dating makes about five centuries younger. No. 28 has been known since Japanese rule, yet it was passed over because the better-known Sianglin cypress stands a few hundred metres away. Today it is one of Alishan's official New Eight Sights, reached by footpath and boardwalk to a viewing platform in the forest below Shouzhen Temple.
Like many of the giants here, it is a merged tree: several red cypress stems grown into one mass. The official figure, from the Forestry Bureau's survey, dates its largest trunk to between 1,087 and 1,103 years. That puts it in rare company. When National Chiayi University cored 43 of Alishan's red cypresses in 2022, most came out under 800 years, far younger than the legends attached to them, so a thousand-year trunk is the exception on this mountain rather than the rule.
The measurements depend on who held the tape. Chinese Wikipedia gives 14.7 metres round the fused mass at chest height; the park's own page gives a diameter of 4 metres, which works out nearer 12.6. The park puts its height at 45 metres.
One naming trap: an article on Alishan's giants also gives No. 28 the Sianglin name, which belongs to the elected cypress by Ciyun Temple, dated in 2022 at about 626 years. They are two different trees, and this is the older one.