Nov. 26 to Dec. 2
The Tsou people called it Patungkuanu, which the Qing officials directly translated into Batongguan (八通關). The Japanese called it Niitakayama, or “New High Mountain,” after discovering that it was taller than Mount Fuji. And Westerners called it Mount Morrison, after the captain who sighted it when setting out from Anping (安平) in today’s Tainan.
Today, it’s known as Yushan, or Jade Mountain — and has been since Dec. 1, 1947. The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was quick to eradicate Taiwan of Japanese names after World War II, and Niitakayama reverted to its Qing Dynasty name.
Photo courtesy of National Taiwan Museum
The following passage is found in a Qing record from 1685, just two years after the empire annexed Taiwan: “When the weather is fair, it looks like a white stone from afar. That is why it is called Jade Mountain.”
HOLY MOUNTAIN
Jade Mountain was not the only name that appeared in Qing annals; there was also White Jade Mountain (白玉山) and Snow Mountain (雪山).
Photo courtesy of Fang Chin-chin
For most of the Qing Dynasty it was still uncharted Aboriginal territory, with an 1805 report describing the inhabitants as “savages that appear from nowhere, taking the heads of every person they see. Most people stay away from this area out of fear.”
By 1874, however, the Qing changed their policy of separating Aborigines and Han Chinese, and started building roads up the mountain.
Yushan has long been sacred to both Bunun and Tsou Aborigines. The mountain appears in many legends from both groups as a refuge to a great flood, which turned the peak into an island. In many versions, the waters receded after a crab defeated a giant snake or eel that was clogging up a major river. The Kanakanavu people have almost the same legend except it was a pig who defeated the snake/eel.
Photo courtesy of Yushan National Park Headquarters
The Tsou and Bunun also share tales of Yushan being the source of fire, which they sent a Taiwanese blue magpie to retrieve, giving the bird its reddish beak color. The species of the bird varies by story.
Li Yi-ching (李怡靜) writes in the study The Aborigine in the Legends of Yushan (玉山傳說中的原住民) that the main difference between the two peoples is that the Tsou believe they were created on the top of Yushan while the Bunun originated further to the west and only moved to Yushan after the flood.
Yushan remains a source of legends until this day. For example, many believe in a demon wearing a yellow raincoat that appears near Yushan’s south peak, giving hikers directions that will lead them off a cliff.
Photo: Chen Hsin-jen, Taipei Times
‘NEW HIGH MOUNTAIN’
Even though the Qing didn’t cede Taiwan to the Japanese until 1895, Shiga Shigetaka’s Theory of Japanese Landscape, published in 1894, already included Taiwan and referred to the mountain as “Taiwan’s Fuji.”
According to the book Yushan History (玉山史話) by Lin Wen-chun (林玟君), it was such a huge deal for the Japanese to discover that Yushan was higher than Fuji, that the Meiji Emperor personally gave it the name Niitakayama on June 28, 1897. The official edict refers to the mountain’s previous name as “Mount Morrison.”
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
For the first few years of Japanese rule, there was much variation between the names of Yushan’s many peaks. The current designations of north, east, south, west and main peaks were standardized around 1904.
The exact height of Yushan also varied during the early Japanese era, ranging from 3,900 meters to 4,300 meters. Using new technology, the Japanese settled on 3,950 in 1925 — just two meters less than its official height today.
Niitaka became a popular name for places, ships, stores and businesses in Taiwan. Lin writes that when the Japanese government coded their orders for the bombing of Pearl Harbor as “Climb Niitakayama 1208,” with the number referring to the attack date (Japan time, as it was still Dec. 7 in Hawaii).
DECAPITATION ON MAIN PEAK
In the few years following Japanese defeat, the mountain was still referred to as “Xingaoshan,” the Mandarin pronunciation of Niitakayama, but eventually “Yushan” took over.
Instead of using Japanese measurements, Taiwanese officials went with the 3,997 meters surveyed by the US Army Forces Far East in 1957. This gave rise to the idea of building a 3-meter statue of the late Control Yuan President Yu You-ren (于右任) to reach 4,000 meters.
Before Yu died in 1964, he wrote a poem expressing his longing for his homeland of China: “Bury me on a high mountain so I can gaze toward my homeland; although I can never see it again, I will never forget it!”
The statue, facing west toward China, was unveiled in 1967 to a crowd of about 80 hikers chanting “Long Live President Chiang” (蔣介石).
As the KMT’s authoritarian rule waned in the 1980s, hikers began defacing the statue, sparking a debate on whether to keep or remove it. With the matter unresolved, a group cut off the statue’s head in 1995, but the park authorities retrieved and reattached it.
A year later, the entire statue was removed and thrown into a ravine, never to be found again. It was quickly replaced by the large stone which hikers pose with today.
Taiwan in Time, a column about Taiwan’s history that is published every Sunday, spotlights important or interesting events around the nation that have anniversaries this week.
June 2 to June 8 Taiwan’s woodcutters believe that if they see even one speck of red in their cooked rice, no matter how small, an accident is going to happen. Peng Chin-tian (彭錦田) swears that this has proven to be true at every stop during his decades-long career in the logging industry. Along with mining, timber harvesting was once considered the most dangerous profession in Taiwan. Not only were mishaps common during all stages of processing, it was difficult to transport the injured to get medical treatment. Many died during the arduous journey. Peng recounts some of his accidents in
“Why does Taiwan identity decline?”a group of researchers lead by University of Nevada political scientist Austin Wang (王宏恩) asked in a recent paper. After all, it is not difficult to explain the rise in Taiwanese identity after the early 1990s. But no model predicted its decline during the 2016-2018 period, they say. After testing various alternative explanations, Wang et al argue that the fall-off in Taiwanese identity during that period is related to voter hedging based on the performance of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Since the DPP is perceived as the guardian of Taiwan identity, when it performs well,
A short walk beneath the dense Amazon canopy, the forest abruptly opens up. Fallen logs are rotting, the trees grow sparser and the temperature rises in places sunlight hits the ground. This is what 24 years of severe drought looks like in the world’s largest rainforest. But this patch of degraded forest, about the size of a soccer field, is a scientific experiment. Launched in 2000 by Brazilian and British scientists, Esecaflor — short for “Forest Drought Study Project” in Portuguese — set out to simulate a future in which the changing climate could deplete the Amazon of rainfall. It is
The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on May 18 held a rally in Taichung to mark the anniversary of President William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20. The title of the rally could be loosely translated to “May 18 recall fraudulent goods” (518退貨ㄌㄨㄚˋ！). Unlike in English, where the terms are the same, “recall” (退貨) in this context refers to product recalls due to damaged, defective or fraudulent merchandise, not the political recalls (罷免) currently dominating the headlines. I attended the rally to determine if the impression was correct that the TPP under party Chairman Huang Kuo-Chang (黃國昌) had little of a
RSS