In Ilan County, the town of Tali faces the black rock coast of the Pacific to the southeast, while its back is set against a wall of steep jungle-covered mountains to the northwest. It is roughly centered around the two century-old Tiengung Temple, which rides up the mountains' lower slopes. The staircase to the temple's right side continues past the temple structure and issues into a road of dirt and stone. It is the beginning of a historic foot highway, the Tsaoling Trail. In the early 19th century, this footpath was the first major route to cross the mountains of "the dragon's back" and open up Ilan's as yet untamed and undeveloped seaboard plains. Passing the mountains between Gungliao and Tali, the trail served as the major mercantile highway into Ilan until other routes, including the 2km-long Tsaoling railroad tunnel, were pioneered by the Japanese in the first half of the 20th century.
Taiwan's development hasn't changed Tali too much. Like most of Taiwan's rainy northeast coast, the area remains sparsely populated and barricaded by mountains. The temple, however, is now adjoined by a northeast coast tourism center, and in fair weather, day hikers flock to the Tali trailhead. But in October 2000, when I walked the Tsaoling Trail one overcast weekday afternoon, I had most of its 9km to myself. I was hiking southwards from Gungliao towards Tali, and it was only at the final pass, the spot of the crowd-pleaser vista where the Pacific seems to spread flat 400m below your feet, that I ran into?well, this guy. He was around 30 and sported the complete small-time gangster uniform: slippers with slacks, wide collar, gold chain, betel nut. He spoke Mandarin like a character out of a martial arts movie, and he told me -- I still have no idea why -- that he knew of a stash of buried Japanese gold; it was worth more than NT$1 billion; and only he knew where it was. All he needed to dig it out, he said, was the government's permission. I assumed he was just a harmless whacko, and I let him talk. When it was almost dark, he got on his scooter and drove down the hill and back into oblivion.
Located about 36km up the coastal highway from Tali is Keelung, northern Taiwan's largest port. On March 4 of this year, the Keelung City Government applied to Taiwan's central government for funds to survey and possibly excavate an old Japanese hilltop fort. The application cited a legend that 5,000kg of gold are buried underneath the base, and according to the city, this cache of gold would be worth over NT$1 billion -- if it exists.
Pure coincidence?
The coincidence of these two stories, when I remarked on it, was enough to make Keelung City Government Civil Affairs Bureau Traditional Culture and Ceremonies Section Chief Lin Chen-hsing (
The sole source of the Tawulun legend is this: In 1984, a man surnamed Chen applied to the Ministry of Defense, which then administered the Tawulun fort, to dig up a stash of gold buried under the Tawulun Battery by Japanese soldiers fleeing at the end of World War II. Chen claimed that the source of his own information originated with some unnamed source in Japan. The bureaucratic channels for treasure hunting applications run through the Ministry of Economic Affairs' State Assets Department, which administers Taiwan's buried treasure bylaw, formally and fully known as the Regulations Governing Applications for Excavation and Retrieval of Buried or Sunken State Assets (March 27, 1970). As application rules demand disclosure of the treasure's type, amount, value and location, Chen revealed the figures of 5,000kg of gold and NT$1 billion.
PHOTO: DAVID FRAZIER, TAIPEI TIMES
Chen's application was eventually rejected, because a clause of the buried treasure bylaw forbids excavation on historic sites and sites important for national defense. The Tawulun Battery, which is listed as a Class 2 Historic Relic, could potentially be construed as both. In any case, Chen's story was dismissed as nonsense and the file was tossed into the archives. And that is all Keelung City Government's Lin will reveal about the mysterious Chen.
Now that's all good and interesting, but getting down to basics, is there much of a chance that this rumored gold hoard actually exists?
"In our estimation, the probability is very low," said Lin.
PHOTO: DAVID FRAZIER, TAIPEI TIMES
Most share his opinion, but in the early morning hours of Jan. 21, some people who didn't drove a power shovel into the middle of the Tawulun Battery's former drill ground, where they dug a hole about 2.5m deep covering an area of around 15m2. In the process, the power shovel knocked over sections of two stone walls, doing around NT$100,000 in damage. According to police records, this was the third and most brazen attempt on the supposed treasure (the previous two came in 1995 and 1999), and it ended in a clean escape.
But the more important question, did these midnight raiders get away with anything?
"We don't know," said Lin. "The police are investigating, but they haven't caught anyone yet."
PHOTO: DAVID FRAZIER, TAIPEI TIMES
Located on a hilltop that overlooks the western approach to the Keelung harbor, the Tawulun Battery is now something between a park and a historical site. Concrete vaulted shelters and storerooms carved out of the rock of the hilltop are accessible, and the stone trenches serve as walkways through the tree-filled compound. Signs in the fort's parking lot, however, warn of car thieves, and along the road that winds up to its entrance, there are no structures for a little over a kilometer. So even though Tawulun is only a 10 minute drive from downtown Keelung, it is indeed out of the way enough for someone to bring in heavy machinery in the middle of the night, excavate, and then get away.
No one knows exactly when the fort was first built, though records show that it was manned by Ching Dynasty troops as early as 1841, the time of the first Opium War. It subsequently recorded use in the Sino-French War of 1884 to 1885 and was later converted into a battery by the Japanese for use in World War II.
Disappearing tunnels
Long-time residents of the area around the fort say that in addition to structures which remain -- gun mounts, ammunition chambers, barracks and trenches -- the Japanese also dug tunnels underneath the compound. The tunnels can no longer be found, a fact which now serves as the nominal premise for the Keelung City Government's under-land survey. The title of the land survey proposal to the Ministry of the Interior reads: "Survey and Exploration of Underground Strategic Tunnels at Keelung's Tawulun Battery."
The more timely reason behind the plan, however, is to debunk the myth of the buried billions and effectively save the fort's ruins from future treasure hunters. As Lin put it: "We're not excavating the site because we want to find gold, but to protect this historic relic."
But what if this was that one legend out of a zillion that was true, and all that gold was really down there?
"It would all belong to the government," said Lin. Then picking right up to answer the next logical question, "The Japanese no longer have a claim."
The proposed budget for the survey of the .75 hectares site of the Tawulun Battery is NT$3 million. If approved and funded by the interior ministry, implementation would take around three months, and measurements would be taken at three depths: 2m, 10m and 15m. With available equipment, the gold should be possible to spot, even though it could be in a relatively compact bundle (with a mass of 5,000kg, the gold would have the weight of five mid-sized automobiles, but would only take up a quarter of a cubic meter, or the size of a small refrigerator).
Since the survey does involve some reasonable expense, Keelung City Government has done its homework. In addition to consulting area residents and local historians, they also tracked down and interviewed the former Japanese commander of the fort, a man surnamed Kubo. Besides his name and rank, however, all Lin will say about him is that he is 80 years old and lives somewhere in Japan.
"We have been in contact [with Commander Kubo] as part of our preparation," he said, "but we won't release any more information about him or what he told us."
Tawulun aside, legends of buried Japanese treasure continue to circulate all throughout southeast Asia. The tales generally find a historical basis in the Japanese army's looting of national treasuries during and preceding World War II. With Japan's sudden defeat in 1945 -- as the stories go -- the loot was buried in secret, often booby-trapped locations, to eventually be reclaimed after the war. Treasure hunters from Japan, the US and elsewhere have returned to many of the rumored sites.
The motherload was known as Yamashita's gold, and was supposed to be hidden somewhere in the Philippines. At present, an organization of Filipino veterans called Forgotten Claimants of Yamashita-World War II Treasures Versus Marcos Estate Inc claim that millions of dollars in gold, platinum and gems were in fact unearthed and even served to finance much of the presidency of Ferdinand Marcos. They are still trying to prove that the treasure stores were either shipped or converted and placed with Swiss banks.
Thailand's gold dream
More recently, in April of 2001, the prime minister of Thailand, Thaksin Shinawatra, declared the possibility of paying off Thailand's entire national debt through what he then believed to be a find of Japanese loot near the Burmese border. Chasing a story of underground railroad cars loaded with gold bars and skeletons bearing samurai swords, he flew to a national park site that was also once the location of the Japanese-built "death railroad" linking Thailand and Burma. He was eventually to find that like so many other stories, this one was pure bunk.
Tawulun, in fact, is not even the only buried Japanese gold story in Taiwan. Chengchih history professor Hsueh Hua-yuan (
According to nearly 70-year-old Yang Kuo-yi (楊國義), a guide at the Tali visitor's center and lifelong resident of Taiwan's northeast coast, the Japanese did bury weapons as they left the island, but not treasure.
"The Japanese spread stories [of buried treasure] as they were fleeing in order to protect themselves. They'd tell the local people, `I buried some of my property, and you can have it,' but these were just lies that they hoped would protect them," he said.
But none of this can conclusively prove that NT$1 billion worth of gold bullion is not buried under a nearly forgotten fort overlooking Keelung. Only land surveys and digging can do that. If the interior ministry approves the budget for Keelung City's survey, work could commence as early as April. Then we may just find out.
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