The lake with a sacred island
Sun Moon Lake is the largest water body in Taiwan and the centre of Thao territory. Power, tourism and ritual share the shore.
Nantou.
Nantou is the county at the centre of Taiwan, folded around the Puli basin and the Sun Moon Lake basin and rising eastward into the Central Mountain Range. It has no coastline. The county holds the lake and the Thao community that lives beside it, the tea slopes of Lugu, the paper workshops of Puli, and the epicentre of the 1999 earthquake that reshaped several towns.
Nantou
Paper, after the earthquake
The 1999 earthquake flattened much of Puli. Taomi Village rebuilt around a paper church, and the town's paper mills turned toward visitors.
Read
The tea that came back from Fujian
Dong Ding oolong began with plants carried across the strait in the 1850s. The roast, not the leaf, defines it.
ReadPlaces
Sun Moon Lake
Taiwan's largest lake, 748 metres up in Nantou, held sacred by the Thao and ringed by temples and trails.
Puli
A basin town of paper workshops and earthquake memory, at the geographic centre of the island.
Dong Ding
The mountain in Lugu where a Qing scholar's tea plants became Taiwan's best-known oolong.
Photo credits and rights
-
The low town of Nantou, with the mountains rising behind it.brian25_tw / CC BY-SA 2.0 · CC BY-SA 2.0 Photo source ↗ Rights information ↗
-
The busy pier at Sun Moon Lake, with the mountains rising behind the water.LowensteinYang / CC BY-SA 4.0 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Photo source ↗ Rights information ↗
-
The Paper Dome at night, its paper tubes lit from inside.Mk2010 / CC BY-SA 3.0 · CC BY-SA 3.0 Photo source ↗ Rights information ↗
-
Finished oolong leaves rest in a shallow tray after the withering and rolling of the harvest.Waliy sherpa / CC BY-SA 4.0 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Photo source ↗ Rights information ↗
