Author Chris van Laak
Photographer Chris van Laak
Editor Julien Huang
Taiwan is a crowded country. With about the same area as Switzerland or a smaller US state such as Maryland, it is home to over 23 million people. The European country and the state — I could have picked many other examples just for the sake of a size comparison — only have a fraction of the population.
Taiwan seems even more crowded when you consider that 2/3 of the country are scarcely populated high-mountain terrain, with forests so dense that many areas seem impenetrable. To keep the balance between nature and civilization, one is tempted to say, “Leave the forests alone.”
Kept out of their forest
For the most part, Taiwan is following this principle of noninterference, and it has been doing so for four decades—not always in a good way, though. For example, the Saisiyat (賽夏族), an Indigenous people whose traditional homeland straddles Hsinchu and Miaoli counties, faced persecution for many decades when they wanted to access forest resources they had been using for centuries. When members of the Pakasan Tribe (蓬萊部落) wanted to enter their Secret Forest in Miaoli’s Nanzhuang Township (南庄), they had to pass government checkpoints that were supposed to prevent illegal logging, without differentiating between traditional practice and illicit commerce.
This was at the tail end of Taiwan’s authoritarian era, during which the state could not be questioned. It is long in the past, but it casts a long shadow, and efforts to heal the wounds are ongoing.
The Saisiyat have always known what’s right for their forest, while it took their counterparts a long time to understand that they could only learn from their Indigenous wisdom.
Colonizing the nature
Even though Taiwan’s vast forests seem like natural havens, large parts of them are surprisingly artificial. For example Miaoli (苗栗), which once featured vast natural camphor forests, saw significant deforestation even before the country became a Japanese colony in 1895. As the Japanese subjugated more and more Indigenous communities, exploitation of the forest increased. In places where the naturally grown resources were depleted, the colonial authorities engaged in replanting, but focused on Japanese species that fetched handsome prices in Yokohama, Nagoya and Kobe—the ports that received most of the Taiwan trade.
The Saisiyat were caught in the middle. This can be felt to this day. Their Secret Forest, for example, is dense with Japanese cedars, a nonnative species that quickly grows into sturdy, straight trees in Taiwan’s subtropical climate. Introduced to Miaoli in the 1910s, they were cut down and replanted many times, a practice that was continued in many forests after the Japanese left in 1945.
Getting it wrong, again
When large-scale deforestation ended in the 1980s (under pressure from burgeoning environmental and civic groups), the dominant idea was to leave the forest alone. What nobody, except the local Indigenous communities, recognized was that new generations of trees could not grow in artificially dense forests when old trees were left standing until the end of their 80-year life cycle. The result is a forest full of seemingly beautiful, large trees—which are slowly dying.
Forest “protection” didn’t just prevent the “renaturalization” of the forest, but it also endangered the lifestyles of local communities dependent on it.
Visitors welcome
Times have changed, but only in the past few years. Thanks to the improved relationship, tourists are now welcome in the Secret Forest, which can be reached by car in about an hour from Miaoli’s Zhunan Township (竹南). The Saisiyat are willing to share some of its secrets, which lie in the spiritual significance of the place, in which they, for example, connect with their ancestors. Forest Corner (里山賽夏PakaSan-森林小站), a Saisiyat-run coop, offers tours in the forest that can be booked through their Facebook page.
Restaurants have also sprung up along the way into the forest, such as Chun Gu (春谷), where visitors can taste other secret treasures of the forest, such as wild oranges of a kind that only grows here.
There are many noteworthy forests in Taiwan, but this one strikes the right balance between accessibility and remoteness; it is dense and wild, but inviting in its lushness.
From “mountain rats” to forest managers
Aside from opening the forest to tourists, the rapprochement has brought another benefit. The local community, represented by the Miaoli County Saisiyat Indigenous Forestry and Labor Cooperative, and the central government’s Forestry Bureau have since 2022 cooperated on bringing new opportunities to the area—especially in a field that was previously off limits: Logging and forest management.
Not only are there no more arbitrary limits to how the Saisiyat can use the forest in traditional ways—for hunting, foraging and, to some degree, logging—but individuals who previously engaged in illicit logging are integrated as well.
Previously, some locals had indeed engaged in felling protected tree species, which fetch high prices on the black market. In the Taiwanese media, they were often portrayed as greedy individuals who chose to betray their communities’ values.
In reality, it was despair.
In 2018, members of the Pakasan Tribe who remained in the area only earned NT$4,000 per month on average, said Ken Chih-You (根誌優), a tribal elder who heads the Indigenous forestry cooperative.
Attracting international partners
The economic prospects of community members who want to stay and make a living on their ancestral land have greatly improved in recent years. According to Forestry Bureau Director Lin Hwa-Ching (林華慶) the average income of those who rely on the forest has tripled since the cooperation began.
The Saisiyat and the Forestry Bureau are finally on the same page, said Ken.
And it is not just those two stakeholders. On a sunny Monday morning last month, Lin, Ken and other representatives met in the Secret Forest to sign a memorandum of understanding with Takashi Irisawa, the president of Japan’s Ryukoku University, which is a stalwart of the Satoyama Initiative to protect biodiversity in cultural landscapes.
A cultural landscape—this is after all what large parts of the Taiwanese forest are: Places where nature and culture have coexisted for millennia.
The wisdom of the Saisiyat, who have cultivated the forest since time immemorial, is an invaluable treasure for those who seek to protect the forest, in Nanzhuang and elsewhere, and finally more people recognize and find beauty in it.
