The Takeshi Kaneshiro Tree

A farmer planted this tree so he had somewhere to tie his cattle. Wu A-mu put it in around the 1970s, a single bishop wood in the middle of his rice paddy, good for shade and a tether and nothing else. In June 2013 EVA Air filmed a television commercial under it with the actor Takeshi Kaneshiro, and within a year the tree had a nickname, a fence around its roots, and an estimated NT$500 million a year in visitor spending attached to it. It also had photographers walking into the crop to get the shot. Then on 23 July 2014 Typhoon Matmo pushed it over. Japanese arborists Yamashita Tokuo and Kawaguchi Yoshihisa came out with Taiwanese colleagues, righted it within days and treated it where it stood, and it was replanted on the same spot. It has grown steadily since and came through Typhoon Haikui in September 2023 with a few broken branches. The sponsorship contract expired in 2023 and the official name reverted to the Fengcha Tree, the tea-offering tree. Nobody calls it that. It is about ten metres tall, barely a metre around the trunk, still alone in the paddy, and Mr. Brown Avenue past it is a farm road closed to cars. The usual approach is a rented bicycle from Chishang station and five kilometres of rice with no traffic on it.