The Sianglin Sacred Tree

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.