Roughly 3,000 to 3,300 years old.
Ancient trees in Taiwan
Taiwan's oldest trees are almost all conifers found deep in mountain forest rather than in a city park, on slopes too steep for the logging that cleared most of the island's lowland giants. We map 9 trees in 5 cities here. The oldest of them is The Bilu Sacred Tree in Bilu, at over 3,000 years.
The Bilu Sacred Tree, a Taiwan fir put at over 3,000 years, and the Sianglin Sacred Tree, a red cypress whose age is disputed between a newly measured 626 years and a long-quoted 2,300, both stand alone in remote reserve forest rather than beside any town. Chishang's contribution is deliberately different: a fifty-year-old Bishop wood known not for its age but for a shampoo advertisement filmed beneath it in 2001, which turned an ordinary field tree into one of the island's most visited photo stops. Taipei holds the rest of what is mapped so far: a three-hundred-year-old camphor at Zhishan Rock, a stand of Ryukyu pines known as the Common Three Pines, junipers planted at the Confucius Temple in 1962, and a ginkgo on a university campus. Between them they cover most of what an ancient tree can be here, from a shrine-grove giant nobody has fully aged to a tree made famous by something that happened to it decades after it was already grown.
Every place we map in Taiwan
1Taipei4 trees · oldest 300 years2
Alishan2 trees · oldest 1,100 years3Bilu1 tree · oldest 3,000 years4
Chishang1 tree · oldest 50 years5Lulin1 tree · oldest 2,800 years
Alishan2 trees · oldest 1,100 years3Bilu1 tree · oldest 3,000 years4Chishang1 tree · oldest 50 years5Lulin1 tree · oldest 2,800 years7 species grow in Taiwan
Conifers Taiwan Red Cypress 3 · Ginkgo 1 · Ryukyu Pine 1
More broadleaf trees Bishop Wood 1 · Camphor Tree 1 · Chinese Juniper 1 · Taiwan Fir 1
The 8 oldest trees we map in Taiwan
Roughly 2,000 to 2,800 years old.
Roughly 1,087 to 1,103 years old.
Roughly 626 to 2,300 years old.
Photo: Felix Filnkoessl (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Roughly 300 to 320 years old.
Roughly 90 to 105 years old.
Roughly 63 to 65 years old.
Roughly 50 to 60 years old.
Photo: Tze Chiang Hao (CC BY 4.0)
Trees from Taiwan also appear in The Tallest Trees We Have Measured · The Oldest Tree in Every City We Map · The Thickest Trunks We Have Measured. See every city on the map, or open the map to find what is near you.