Wanted to visit the small canyon, outside of TaiChung, but I heard the government had closed it off.
Does anyone know if this is true? Have they re-opened it?
Taiwan’s ‘Grand Canyon’ — a creation of the 921 Earthquake by Richard Saunders (the China Post)
Thanks
Search terms to help people find this post: Zhuolan, Zhuo lan, Chuolan, Chuo lan, Chuo-lan, Juolan, Juo lan, Jhuolan, Jhuo lan, 卓蘭
Motorbiking to Zhuolan - blog with nice photos - click here.
The place is variously named Zhuolan, Chuo-lan, Juolan, Jhuolan etc. (卓蘭 in Chinese characters). Such is Taiwan’s romanisation mess :s Happy searching.
By the way, Richard Saunders’ books about hiking in Taiwan can be bought from The Center and Caves Bookstore, among other places. (My goodness - Caves Books really should consider bilingualising their web site.)
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great pics. sounds like a fun trip
Never heard of it. Looks cool. But calling it “Taiwan’s Grand Canyon” is like calling Taipei “Paris of the Orient”, like calling stinky tofu “Taiwan’s Chateaubriand”, like calling Chen Shui Bian “Taiwan’s Winston Churchill”.
[quote]Until recently, this place was a well-guarded secret, and it was only when pictures of it appeared in a local tabloid paper at the end of last year and footage of the place was shown on television news, that the floodgates opened and the existence of what one TV reporter christened Taiwan’s ‘Grand Canyon’ became common knowledge. . . .
it was the “great earthquake” that created the crack that became the canyon[/quote]
I spent a summer at the real thing and hiked across it twice. It’s immense. So wide in some places you can’t see the other side and so deep you can’t see the river below.
No one could keep that a secret and it was created over millenia, not by a single event.
[quote=“Mother Theresa”]Never heard of it. Looks cool. But calling it “Taiwan’s Grand Canyon” is like calling Taipei “Paris of the Orient”, like calling stinky tofu “Taiwan’s Chateaubriand”, like calling Chen Shui Bian “Taiwan’s Winston Churchill”.
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Not as ridiculous as calling Shifen Falls the Nicaragua of Taiwan. 
[quote=“Muzha Man”][quote=“Mother Theresa”]Never heard of it. Looks cool. But calling it “Taiwan’s Grand Canyon” is like calling Taipei “Paris of the Orient”, like calling stinky tofu “Taiwan’s Chateaubriand”, like calling Chen Shui Bian “Taiwan’s Winston Churchill”.
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Not as ridiculous as calling Shifen Falls the Nicaragua of Taiwan. [/quote]
my words exactly !! And the Taiwanese mean “nicaragua” to MEAN Niagara Falls.
[quote=“tommy525”][quote=“Muzha Man”][quote=“Mother Theresa”]Never heard of it. Looks cool. But calling it “Taiwan’s Grand Canyon” is like calling Taipei “Paris of the Orient”, like calling stinky tofu “Taiwan’s Chateaubriand”, like calling Chen Shui Bian “Taiwan’s Winston Churchill”.
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Not as ridiculous as calling Shifen Falls the Nicaragua of Taiwan. [/quote]
my words exactly !! And the Taiwanese mean “nicaragua” to MEAN Niagara Falls.[/quote]
I know. The first time I saw that I imagined all kinds of scenerios. The area around Shifen is pretty jungly so perhaps there had been a lot of guerilla activity at one time. Or it was a communist holdout. But no, it was just a typo.
Well, as a matter of fact, Guangming Village in Shiding Township, not too far from Shifen was the site of the Luku Incident (鹿窟事件) in late 1952 and early 1953 at the height of the White Terror. Acting on reports that the village was a base for guerrilla forces under the command of the Taiwan Provincial Branch of the Chinese Communist Party, police rounded up local villagers and tortured them in Guangming Temple. In the ensuing days, more than 400 villagers from Shiding, Sijhi, and Ruiefang were arrested and 35 executed. 98 others were sentenced to a total of 865 years in prison. Luku village was effectively wiped out. There is a memorial park near the temple on Taipei County Route 33, which is the road that runs on the other side of the Shuiding River parallel to Highway 106, which is the road to Pingsi and Shifen.
Modern researchers believe that the CCP’s Taiwan branch was in fact active in the area but that the vast majority of the people executed or imprisoned were innocent farmers and miners.
Wow, Thanks, Feiren. So the Nicaragua analogy holds in some ways. That will make for a quirky little aside in the next LP.