Two Taiwanese sacred trees tell opposite stories at almost the same age.
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. This page maps 7 remarkable trees across 4 cities in Taiwan, each one researched and verified. 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 roughly 300 years2
Alishan1 tree · oldest disputed: about 626 years by the newest study, versus a long-quoted 2,300 years3Bilu1 tree · oldest over 3,000 years4
Chishang1 tree · oldest roughly 50 years
Alishan1 tree · oldest disputed: about 626 years by the newest study, versus a long-quoted 2,300 years3Bilu1 tree · oldest over 3,000 years4Chishang1 tree · oldest roughly 50 years7 species grow in Taiwan
Conifers Ginkgo 1 · Ryukyu Pine 1 · Taiwan Red Cypress 1
More broadleaf trees Bishop Wood 1 · Camphor Tree 1 · Chinese Juniper 1 · Taiwan Fir 1
The oldest tree mapped in Taiwan
Trees from Taiwan also appear in The Thickest Trunks We Have Measured · The Oldest Trees We Have Mapped. See every city on the map, or open the map to find what is near you.