This tree was elected.
Photo: Felix Filnkoessl (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Taiwan Red Cypress
Chamaecyparis formosensis
Taiwan red cypress is a mountain conifer, and its oldest specimens are often not one tree at all. We map 3 of them, in 2 cities.
In 2022 National Chiayi University cored 43 of Alishan's red cypresses and found most of them under 800 years, far younger than their legends, because what looks like one great trunk is often several stems grown together. That study took Alishan's Sacred Tree, elected by about 25,000 online voters in 2007, from a long-quoted 2,300 years to about 626. Its neighbour No. 28, passed over for most of a century, has a largest trunk dated to between 1,087 and 1,103 years. The biggest of them stands below a cliff on the Alishan Highway at Lulin: 20 metres round, second in the official ranking only to the Da'an River tree, and put by the Forestry Bureau at about 2,800 years, a figure no core has yet tested.
Alishan
For most of a century this cypress was overlooked in favour of a neighbour that the newest dating makes about five centuries younger.
Lulin
Taiwan's second-largest tree stood about 40 metres from a highway for years, and the people driving past saw only the top of it.
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