The Bilu Sacred Tree

Two Taiwanese sacred trees tell opposite stories at almost the same age. Alishan's, the island's most famous, was struck by lightning in 1956, half collapsed in a storm in 1997, and was finally cut down in 1998 after the damage made it unsafe. Bilu's has taken a different path: over 3,000 years old, about 50 metres tall and 3.5 metres across, and by both Hualien County's own tourism office and an independent Taiwanese account, still full of life, with lichen trailing along its branches. It stands roughly 2,000 metres up in the mountains, at a rest stop built onto the Central Cross-Island Highway specifically because of it, with a car park, a small cafe, a trail and a pavilion and nothing else to draw a stop at this exact bend in the road. The tree also marks an ecological seam: this is roughly where the highway's cold-climate conifer forest gives way to warmer broadleaf forest, a transition Hualien's tourism office calls valuable for watching the two mix. Getting here means driving the Central Cross-Island Highway itself, a mountain road that is an attraction in its own right, so this is a destination reached deliberately rather than passed on the way to somewhere else.