Alishanで最も古い樹木はどれですか。
The Sianglin Sacred Tree stands on Trail 1, a 600 metre boardwalk near Ciyun Temple inside the Alishan National Forest Recreation Area in Chiayi County. It is a Taiwan red cypress, 45 metres tall and 12.3 metres round by the park's own figures, and it was crowned Alishan's second-generation Sacred Tree on 1 January 2007 after roughly 25,000 people voted for it the year before. Its age is disputed: tourism material has long said about 2,300 years, while a 2022 tree-ring study by National Chiayi University dated the main trunk at about 626.
The dispute has a straightforward explanation. The 2022 study, commissioned by the Forestry Bureau, found that the tree is a merged tree, several red cypress stems that grew into each other over centuries, so the standing mass is much larger than the age of any single dateable trunk would suggest. Neither figure is a mistake, and the older one is still the one most tourism material carries. Dimensions vary a little by source too: the park's own site gives 45 metres of height and 12.3 metres of girth, an older account 43.5 and 13.1, with a diameter at breast height of about 4.1 metres. The tree it succeeded, a red cypress of around 3,000 years, collapsed in heavy rain and was taken down in the late 1990s, which is why Alishan ran the vote at all. Before the crowning this one was known as the Guangwu Cypress, after a provincial governor's belief that it had germinated during the reign of the Han emperor Guangwu. The same boardwalk passes the Thousand-Year Cypress, the Tree of Three Generations and the Tree Spirit Pagoda.