The Great Camphor of Zhishan Rock

Six Japanese schoolteachers are buried under this camphor. They were killed on this hill in the Zhishan Rock Incident of 1895, in the first months of Japanese rule over Taiwan, and a local hiking record states that the bodies were laid together beneath the big camphor. If the tree's age is anywhere near right, it was already well past its first century when that happened. How near right is the open question. A Taipei heritage account calls it roughly three hundred years old. The hiking record puts it closer to three hundred and twenty and says flatly that it is the oldest tree in Taipei. Nobody has published a girth to settle the difference, so the honest answer is the range rather than a single figure. It survived for a reason that finished off most of its relatives. Camphor was an industrial crop on this island, felled and distilled for camphor oil at scale, and Zhishan Rock was designated protected forest under the Japanese administration. That boundary line is why old growth is still standing on a hill inside the city. Look for it near the Yunong Library, on the open trail rather than inside the ticketed ecology garden alongside it. Our pin marks the hill rather than the trunk, so give yourself a few minutes to find it.