Taiwan Today

Lintianshan Forestry Culture Park showcases natural resource-based economic evolution.
 

The old cypress houses from the Japanese colonial era (1895-1945) in Lintianshan Forestry Culture Park (LFCP) hold a nostalgic attraction and blend comfortably into the natural landscape of eastern Taiwan’s Hualien County. The park’s current bucolic charm belies the fact that this area was once a bustling economic success story and part of the complex jigsaw that became modern Taiwan. In living memory, the now-quiet mountainside was a thriving commercial timber town. Today, thanks to a small band of locals and government entities, it is a recreation resource that opens a window on the spot’s unique role in Taiwan’s industrial transformation. 
 

Logging on Lintian Mountain, Daan Mountain and surrounding areas was started by the Japanese in 1918, and by their heyday in the 1960s, the timber processing sites and residential area were home to over 2,000 people. Once known as Morisaka, or “forested hillside” in Japanese, the area became Lintianshan after 1945 and the logging and timber processing industry continued apace. By 1973, however, as Taiwan segued from an agricultural to industrial economy, the demand for wood declined, and by 1988, logging had stopped completely. Control of the area was assumed by the Cabinet-level Council of Agriculture’s (COA) Forestry Bureau (FB). Although the population diminished as many residents moved away seeking other work, a small group of retired villagers, conscious of the distinctive legacy of their experience, stayed on at the site, and in 2001 the Lintianshan Association for the Advancement of Forestry Heritage (LAAFH) was formed by members of local families. Chair Lin Yu-rong (林玉榮) grew up in Lintianshan during its prime and remembers it as a busy economic hub. Children like Lin who were born to timber processing workers attended the community’s own kindergarten and elementary school, bought supplies in the village shops and watched movies set up in the auditorium. However, a major fire and a governmental policy shift in the 1990s halting all logging in natural forests brought finality to the village’s end-of-an-era ambience.
 

Then in the early 2010s, projects like the COA’s rural rejuvenation campaign came into play. Lin’s group now helps maintain and operate around 10 buildings that have been transformed into leisure venues, food and beverage outlets, and exhibition spaces for promoting local products. “We stay here as part of a culture and way of life that has disappeared in order to connect the past and present,” he said.

Growth Rings

Lin’s group cooperates with the FB’s Hualien Forest District Office (HFDO) to arrange package tours around LFCP that extend to neighboring villages and Indigenous lands. They organize a wide variety of activities including workshops to design souvenirs and training courses for tour guides. Part of plans to attract visitors to stay overnight or longer include buildings earmarked for, or currently undergoing, restoration as visitor accommodation. The park not only offers easy scenic walking trails but also provides studio space for an Indigenous Truku woodworker under a project it hopes to extend to other creative professionals.
 

In 2002 the FB officially established LFCP, working with Lin’s LAAFH to bring about a new chapter in commercial success for the area. Lying in the East Rift Valley National Scenic Area, which spans Hualien and neighboring Taitung Counties between the central and coastal mountain ranges, the park is ideally positioned in spectacular landscapes that attract visitors both domestic and international. In 2006, the Hualien County Government’s Cultural Affairs Bureau listed the 15-hectare tract as a historical village, one of 21 building clusters nationally recognized under the Cultural Heritage Preservation Act.
 

Since then, there has been extensive renovation, most recently through the FB’s Conservation and Redevelopment Program of Forestry Cultural Resources which, with a NT$300 million (US$9.8 million) budget allocated for 2021 to 2024, is funding restoration of heritage buildings and rail lines in the LFCP area. The most ambitious of these connects a 2.5-kilometer-long track to Wanrong Station on Taiwan Railways Administration’s eastern mainline. “The project will benefit residents and tourists as the Lintianshan area becomes a significant Hualien site,” said HFDO Deputy Director Wang Yi-ching (王怡靖). In fact, for visitors in search of a wide spectrum of forest experiences, Hualien presents an arboreal buffet. Historic LFCP occupies a central point between three other HFDO forest recreation areas: Fuyuan National Forest Recreation Area (NFRA), also known as Butterfly Valley, with its suspended rope bridges and flowering trees; Danongdafu in Guangfu Township, the site of installation art exhibitions, colorful flowerbeds and reforestation; and Chihnan NFRA, also a once-thriving logging area.

Dovetailing Elements

Key to LFCP’s mission to establish economic opportunity is a joint management system connecting grassroots groups like LAAFH and relevant authorities including the FB, county government and the Cabinet-level Council of Indigenous Peoples. Through this administration model, LFCP seeks to incorporate all necessary components for a rich visitor experience. 
 

To integrate Lintianshan’s historical assets into a living museum showing Hualien’s former forest economy, surveys and research into the oral history and demographic make-up of the area are essential. Initiatives like the FB’s redevelopment program have set out to document this era and present it to the public at LFCP. As part of a collaborative mechanism, Wang Hurng-jyuhn (王鴻濬), leader of HFDO’s Hualien forestry development research project, has undertaken background investigative work. In his role as professor in the Department of Public Administration at Hualien-based National Dong Hwa University, Wang wrote three books on the area’s commercial logging, starting his research in the 2010s. His first publication on the subject came in 2016 on Halun. The professor and his research teams catalogued the century of industrial development and followed it with volumes on Taroko and Lintianshan in 2018 and 2022, respectively. Wang said that from the post-World War II era through the 1970s, the commercial logging of timber was a major income source for both the public and private sectors in Hualien and a leading driver of the county’s economy. “For over half a century, forestry was the commercial force for a whole chain of wealth creation including logging, timber processing and furniture making, as well as service industries like hotels, eateries and transport. Hualien’s history as a major economic capital has largely been forgotten in the modern era,” Wang added. Today’s visitors are more likely to take in the area’s natural attractions like Liyu Lake and Taroko National Park.
 

Wang’s research gives a more comprehensive picture of the county’s history. For example, the ethnic mix is a direct result of its commercial success. Wang’s surveys indicate that early Hakka and Holo immigrant groups and post-WWII immigrants from China settled there and benefited from the industrial and economic might of logging. To bring the story to a wider audience, Wang led a research team from his school and HFDO, augmented by professional videographers and local guides, on a three-day trip in January 2021 to historical logging sites in the Lintian and Daan Mountain area. The video team produced an HFDO-released documentary, “Morisaka Memories: The Modern-Day Legacy of Hualien’s Lintianshan Forest,” which won October 2021’s film of the month from World Film Carnival agency in Singapore and the Humanitarian Award at U.S.-based Best Shorts Competition in 2021.
 

“We want to tell stories about the land we live on in Hualien, and forestry is an essential part of the narrative,” Wang said. With both grassroots impetus and government support, a full picture of Lintianshan’s past is showcased in the idyllic open-air museum that is LFCP, which in turn acts as a catalyst to the contemporary local economy while utilizing the forest resource in a new way. 

Write to Pat Gao at cjkao@mofa.gov.tw