Traversing the mountains of Taiwan’s Yilan County, a network of forest trails reveals as much about the region’s natural beauty as about its layered cultural history.

Photographs by Naomi Goddard

*Left to right:* A hiker from Taipei on the Chinese Hemlock National Trail; a gateway leading to the same trail.

Writing in the 1890s, Canadian missionary George Leslie Mackay described Taiwan’s Yilan Plain as “a rich, low-lying tract on the east coast, between the mountains and the sea.” Just 40 kilometers southeast of Taipei yet hemmed in by forbidding ranges, this fan-shaped expanse was by then home to an uneasy mix of Han Chinese settlers and indigenous Kavalan people, all farming rice in fertile alluvial soil laid down over millennia by the Lanyang River. Mackay also noted that “heavy vapors driven in from the sea, and floating clouds tapped by the mountain-peaks” made for dramatic landscapes but difficult travel.

The foothills and higher slopes surrounding the plain now make up much of Yilan County, which stretches across Taiwan’s northeast. In Mackay’s time, the region could be reached only by steep mountain footpaths or by sea along a treacherous, rock-strewn coast. Today, it’s much easier: you can get there from Taipei in less than an hour via a four-lane freeway that includes one of Asia’s longest tunnels, drilled through 13 kilometers of mountain.

Yet the highlands of Yilan remain crisscrossed with gu dao—a term translated variously as “historic trail,” “old trail,” or even “ancient trail.” Some are now broad, stone-slab tourist paths; others survive as overgrown dirt tracks. I have hiked many of them since moving to the county six years ago. But just how historic are these trails, really? And who first blazed them?

I posed this question recently to Wu Yong-hwa, a local author who has written four wonderful volumes on the history of Yilan’s mountain trails. He traces their origins to three major historical and cultural strata, beginning with Taiwan’s indigenous peoples—an Austronesian population whose ancestors migrated from the southeastern coast of China at least 6,000 years ago—followed by Han Chinese migrants and, later, the colonial Japanese.

Picture the Yilan Plain as a wide fan opening from the mountains in the west toward the Pacific coast in the east. The trails along its northern radius mostly date from the middle of the Qing era, around the early 1800s. This was when growing numbers of Han settlers—primarily from southern Fujian—began displacing the Kavalan people and repurposing their ancestral tracks to link the burgeoning farmlands of Yilan with the markets of Taipei. Trails in the west and south, by contrast, were opened mainly during the half-century of Japanese occupation, especially in the 1910s and 1920s, when the colonial administration expanded paths, roads, and railways both to extract high-mountain timber and minerals and to pacify “the savages,” as they called Taiwan’s indigenous mountain peoples.

But to find truly ancient trails, you have to go farther south still, into a wild country of plunging gorges and towering peaks that abuts Taiwan’s most forbidding stretch of coast. When Mackay traveled past this shore in 1890, he went by sea to avoid indigenous villages that even then persisted in headhunting. Riding in an open boat manned by six aboriginal rowers, he described high ranges that “stood like dark perpendicular walls” and an encounter with shimmering phytoplankton. “I have seen many wonderful sights in the steamer’s track in the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea, but never before witnessed anything comparable to the phosphorescent glory of that night.” Some of Taiwan’s most dramatic trails lay in the mountains beyond his reach.

*Left to right:* A replica of a traditional Atayal storehouse; hikers on the Pingxi Historic Trail.

THE DANLAN TRAIL

By the late Qing era, the main route across the mountains began in the port of Danshui (also spelled Tamsui), now a district of New Taipei City. Today known as the Danlan Trail, it was never a single track but a tangled network of footways whose surviving fragments form many of the area’s historic trails.

The northern route wound around Taiwan’s northeast coast. Its best-known remnant is the Caoling Trail, a glorious nine-kilometer hike that cuts across the island’s easternmost peninsula between Fulong and Dali. Highlights include a sweeping view of the Pacific at the final pass, where summertime vendors sell sweet jelly and taro-flavored ice cream. The southern route began in what is now Taipei’s oldest district, Wanhua, following the Danshui River upstream before climbing into a highland belt of tea plantations and dropping into Yilan via the broad Paoma Trail, which ends in the hot-spring town of Jiaoxi.

Both the Caoling and Paoma, whose east-coast trailheads lie just 25 kilometers apart, are wonderful day hikes. For my most recent foray, however, I chose a route that lay roughly halfway between them: the Zhonglun Old Trail, a spur of the Danlan’s lesser-known central section. From the small fishing harbor of Gengfang, I made my way inland past a Taoist temple and recreational farm to a set of crumbling concrete steps, which brought me to a steeply sloping orchard. There, a farmer was tending to his pomelo trees.

“You’re by yourself?” he asked.

Yes, I said.

“Don’t come down too late,” he grunted, ominously.

I continued up through bamboo and scrubby trees. Beyond an abandoned farmhouse—its roof beams long since collapsed, waxy taro leaves protruding from the floor—the path turned to dirt. As I rounded a bend, a pair of tiny muntjac deer scampered ahead of me, letting out their signature alarm call: Ark! Arrk! Arrk!

The trail narrowed, becoming steep and windy. The mountains here rise sharply—I would climb about 400 vertical meters in the space of an hour. As I paused to take a breath, I noticed a brilliant blue sky showing through the perforations of the low canopy. It occurred to me that I could have taken a different trail a few kilometers farther along the escarpment and ascended by way of a couple thousand stone steps (I tried counting them once but lost track around 1,500). But that would’ve been a different experience. Today, I chose a path that was more raw and less cooked.

Finally reaching the ridge, I turned left at a trail junction, hoping to link up with a wonderful section of track I’ve hiked before. Under a canopy of runty, moss-covered cypress trees, the path had me blasting through a shag carpet of ferns so dense that, save for the marker flags, it felt close to bushwhacking. Then I heard voices. Other hikers. I scrambled down a crag and suddenly was on the hiking equivalent of a multilane expressway. This was the Pingxi Historic Trail, a century-old forest road originally used to transport timber.

A few minutes farther along, a viewpoint with some benches looked out over the Pacific to the big, double-hump volcano in the middle of Yilan Bay: Turtle Island. The source of the voices was here too: a young Taiwanese foursome—two men, two women—talking about property investments and running-shoe brands. I let them be and headed down the trail. Pingxi literally means “peaceful stream,” and the serenity here, amid Japanese cedars growing tall and arrow-straight under the protection of the ridge, was nothing short of stupendous.

Part of the Jianqing Trail follows the overgrown tracks of an old Japanese-built logging line.

TAIPINGSHAN

In 1895, after China’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese War, Taiwan went from being a province of the Qing Empire to the first overseas colony of imperial Japan. The new administration quickly set about surveying those parts of the island that had eluded Qing control, especially the high central mountains and much of the eastern seaboard. By the 1920s, the Japanese had not only connected Yilan to Taipei by train, they had also extended rail lines to the upper slopes of the Taipingshan range to log its cedar and camphor forests. Before long, the mountain railways also began carrying tourists.

Wu Yong-hwa, whose family has lived in Yilan for eight generations, grew up in the town of Luodong, once the region’s main commercial hub and gateway to the Taipingshan logging boom. He told me that the restoration of historic trails across Taiwan was sparked by the United Nations naming 2002 the International Year of Ecotourism. Taiwan followed suit by protecting natural areas and marking old walking routes; in Yilan, the local government hired Wu to identify scenic sites around the county. He handed them a list of 182.

The Taipingshan National Forest Recreation Area has opened several trails that offer one- to three-hour hikes through some utterly unique mountain settings. With an average elevation of 2,000 meters, the Chinese Hemlock National Trail rather bizarrely combines a mountaintop with a bog. It begins above the Taipingshan Villa complex at an old Japanese shrine, now converted into a Taoist temple, and leads over boardwalks through a primeval forest of Chinese hemlock, red cedar, and cypress. Bathed in perpetual mists and exposed to ocean winds, the trees twist and contort like the figures in Rodin’s Gates of Hell. One of Wu’s books on Taipingshan is poetically titled Songs of Cloud Forests.

On my first visit, a mild afternoon last summer, what struck me most about the trail was its unearthly quiet. There were no insect noises and only a few faint birdcalls; mostly, there was the soft hum of distant, rushing wind. When I stopped and stood still for a moment, a bird—hidden in the dim forest canopy perhaps 20 or 30 meters away—ruffled its wings. The sound cracked through the silence like thunder.

But this is only one of several astounding short trails on Taipingshan. On a later outing, I followed the Jianqing Trail, walking through spectral fog along an old logging line whose narrow-gauge steel rails and timber ties lay overgrown with plush, lime-green moss. It was pure Zen. I also hiked the trail up to the summit of Wangyangshan, or “Ocean-facing Mountain.” Most people come here to take in the sunrise. When I reached the 2,054-meter peak at noon, the viewing platform was completely engulfed in clouds. I sat there with a few others as the mist drifted over us, turning the mountaintop into a kind of sensory-deprivation chamber.

Then, suddenly, the mists parted and we were looking down over a great cloud sea, touched on the far horizon by the blue of the Pacific. “It’s like being in an airplane!” I heard a woman exclaim.

*Left to right:* A sea of clouds in the Taipingshan National Forest Recreation Area; a river in the hills of Nan’ao Township.

NAN’AO HISTORIC TRAIL

In Yilan’s southern mountains, the so-called “savages” the Japanese sought to pacify were the Atayal. This indigenous group traditionally lived in some of Taiwan’s harshest climates and terrain. They practiced headhunting into the early 20th century, and Atayal women tattooed their faces. Outsiders regarded them as fearsome people. The Nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek—which assumed control over Taiwan after Japan’s 1945 surrender and later retreated to the island in 1949—was no exception. It embarked on policies of forced relocation and assimilation that ultimately dislodged the Atayal from their mountain strongholds.

The Atayal have a flood myth that recounts how their lands were once flat, until a great deluge forced their ancestors to flee into the mountains. When the waters receded, they left behind a landscape of vast canyons, plunging waterfalls, and torrential rivers—the dramatic terrain of Taiwan’s central and northern highlands, the Atayal’s traditional homeland.

Li Cheng-cheng, a Taipei-based ethnologist and mountaineer who has organized several documentary expeditions with the Atayal, likens the area to a “little Amazon” because of its high ridges and dense river systems—geographic partitions that once shaped Atayal tribal society. The waterways, he wrote in a recent article, are “like a tangled network of tree roots, extending deep into the Nan’ao mountains and forests, each stream once linking one community to the next.”

At the Atayal Culture Hall in the village of Nan’ao, Ungay Pe’ung, a 45-year-old cultural preservationist, told me how her father grew up in one of the last tribal communities to be forced down from the mountains, a process that was completed in 1967. He was 13 at the time. Only in the last decade, after she began working at the center, did Pe’ung start asking him about the old ways of life: hunting wild game, farming sweet potatoes and taro, the art of never getting lost.

In the early 2000s, tribal elders from an abandoned mountain village called Piyahau began discussing the restoration of the ancient trail to their ancestral lands. A decade or so later, Taiwan’s Forestry Bureau opened the 3.8-kilometer Nan’ao Historic Trail as the first stage of a proposed 27-kilometer hiking route to Piyahau—a plan ultimately scrapped because of frequent landslides.

The trail starts at an old Japanese police outpost beyond the mountain hamlet of Jinyang, itself a winding 15-minute drive from Nan’ao village. From there, it runs for much of its sinuous length alongside—and at times far above—the Nan’ao South River. The drop-offs can be precipitous, with some sections carved directly into cliff faces and others clinging to ledges of dirt and loose shale, braced by rebar stakes and metal fencing. The trail’s two suspension bridges, by comparison, seem incongruously robust: thick cables anchored to the mountainsides with bolts the size of basketballs.

Crossing one of those bridges over a mighty gorge, I was struck by the world the Atayal once inhabited. Under persistent gray skies, it felt like a mountain netherworld—a daunting, fantastical realm that outsiders like me have only recently been privileged to enter.

*Left to right:* A view of Turtle Island from the Pingxi Historic Trail; Ungay Pe’ung at the Atayal Culture Hall in Nan’ao.

Lay of the Land

Yilan is one of the easiest counties in Taiwan for car-free hiking, with many popular trails accessible via a train station followed by a short walk or bus ride. That said, you’ll still need to hire a round-trip taxi to reach the start of the Nan’ao Historic Trail from Nan’ao Station. Likewise, getting to the Taipingshan National Forest Recreation Area requires a long drive from Luodong, though there is a daily bus service for those relying on public transit.

With hiking such a popular pastime in Taiwan, there’s no shortage of apps and online resources to help plan your route. Start with the Forestry and Nature Conservation Agency website Taiwan Forest Recreation for up-to-date trail conditions. Taiwan Trails and Tales is another comprehensive guide, with detailed coverage of lesser-known routes across Yilan and eastern Taiwan.

For those looking for more than a day trip to Yilan, book a stay at The Archipelago (from US$270 a night), a cruise ship–inspired resort overlooking Wushi Harbor in Toucheng, at the northeastern edge of the Yilan Plain. Highlights include onsen-style hot spring baths and cuisine by acclaimed chef André Chiang.

This article originally appeared in the March/May 2026 print issue of DestinAsian magazine (“Trails through Time”). Buy a single issue or subscribe here.

Hiking through Time in Northeast Taiwan