Taroko Gorge

Taroko is a canyon cut through marble. The Liwu River, a short and violent stream that falls from the Central Mountain Range to the Pacific in about 55 kilometres, has sawn its way down through rock that began as lime-rich sediment some 230 million years ago and was later pressed and heated into marble. Taiwan is still being squeezed upward by the collision of the Philippine Sea and Eurasian plates, a few millimetres every year, and the river keeps pace by cutting down. The result, over roughly 19 kilometres of its lower course, is a slot of grey-white walls so close in places that the road has to tunnel through the cliff rather than squeeze beside the water. It is one of very few river gorges in the world cut entirely through marble.

What rewards a slow look is the stone itself. Wet after rain, the walls show bands and swirls of grey, white and dark green where the original layers were folded under pressure, and the riverbed below is strewn with pale boulders polished smooth by floods. At Swallow Grotto (Yanzikou) the cliffs are pocked with small holes worn by water, and swifts and swallows nest in them and stream in and out above the torrent. At the Tunnel of Nine Turns the road and footpath twist through the rock face with the opposite wall almost within reach. Higher up, the Zhuilu Cliff rises sheer above the river, and a narrow old trail, barely wider than a footstep in places, clings to its face. Side valleys add a different mood: the Shakadang Trail follows a clear, blue-green tributary for about four kilometres, starting at a bridge guarded by more than a hundred carved marble lions.

The gorge also carries a human story. Its name comes from the Truku, an Indigenous people who crossed the mountains from the upper Zhuoshui River and settled along the Liwu; they still live in the area. The Japanese colonial government made the region part of a national park in 1937, and after 1945 it lapsed until Taroko National Park was re-established in 1986, now covering about 920 square kilometres of peaks, forest and coast. The road through the gorge is the eastern end of the Central Cross-Island Highway, built between 1956 and 1960 with a workforce that included many army veterans. The Eternal Spring Shrine, set on a ledge above a waterfall that never runs dry, was built to honour the 212 workers who died on the project; landslides have destroyed it more than once, and the present shrine dates from 1989. The same instability that makes the canyon so steep also reshapes it: the April 2024 Hualien earthquake sent large rockfalls into the gorge and changed parts of its walls.

Getting there

The gorge lies in Xiulin Township, and the usual base is Hualien City on the coast to the south, where tours, buses and taxis leave from beside Hualien railway station. The nearest airport is Hualien Airport (HUN), about 20 kilometres away, with domestic flights. The closest station on the Taiwan Railway line is Xincheng, roughly 7 kilometres from the park headquarters at the mouth of the gorge.