"Want to come and climb Yushan with us?" In recent years, friends have frequently greeted me with this question. Embarrassingly, although born and bred in Taiwan, in my more than 40 years I have never made it to the summit of any of the island's hundred tallest mountains, let alone Yushan. In fact, the only real brush I have ever had with mountaineering was a China Youth Corps trip to Mt. Tahsueh during the winter holiday of my first year at senior high school.
In my youthful enthusiasm for that novel adventure I blithely forgot that I had always only barely made the grade in terms of physical fitness, and busily set about buying my first rucksack, my first pair of hiking boots, and a full set of warm outdoor clothes. In the biting cold of the seventh day of the lunar New Year, I excitedly set off on my first aeroplane flight, to Taichung where the group was to assemble. For the next week, I tramped along twisting mountain paths on legs that became ever more unwilling. It seemed that the glittering snow-covered trails would never reach an end. For the first time I made the painful discovery of how small and feeble I was, and I learned a true respect and awe for the mountains.
On the evening before we were to climb to the summit, we arrived at 369 Cabin. There I saw the velvet black sky studded with countless shimmering stars, large and gleaming as if they must have been painted there, and seemingly so close that I might reach out and touch them. The cabin had neither water nor electricity, and as the north wind whistled outside we sat in a circle around a candle as the older students leading the group told ghost stories and instructed us on what to do if we should happen to come face to face with a black bear.
The next day, despite the best efforts of the group leader, who carried my rucksack, and the older boys and girls who told me jokes to try to cheer me up, my leaden feet and flagging spirits made me give up halfway. I didn't make it to the summit, and thus missed my chance to stand on Taiwan's second highest peak and look down on the mountains all around.
The disappointment I felt has stayed with me to this day. But at least I had seen and struggled with the mountain, and this has brought an extra sense of richness to my life. For although Taiwan bristles with high mountains and is surrounded by ocean, in fact most of its people, having grown up under policies of restricted access to the mountains and the sea, are strangers to both, and fearful of them. During the intense cold snap around this year's Chinese New Year, a mountain rescue party ascended Mt. Chilai to bring back a graduate student from National Taiwan Normal University who was on a field trip to study sambar deer. But the student rebuffed his would-be rescuers, and insisted on staying to continue his research. The incident aroused much media discussion.
"The mountains are not so dangerous," says Puyuma Aboriginal scholar Sun Ta-chuan-it is just that people today view them from the perspective of the flatlands and the cities, and imagine them to be full of perils and dangers. If we free our minds of this prejudice and give ourselves more opportunities to get to know our mountains and forests better, if we open our hearts to them and learn from them, we will gradually come to realize that in fact the mountains are good friends to humankind. At the Holistic High School, an experimental school in Miaoli County, mountaineering is a formal part of the curriculum, and from their early teens children not only climb some of Taiwan's highest peaks, but even set their sights on summits such as Mt. McKinley, the tallest in North America at over 6000 meters. The school firmly believes that only by climbing ever higher, ever further, in ever more remote locations, can the youngsters better understand what lies deepest within themselves.
By the same token, after several years of promotion "Jade Mountain studies" has emerged as a highly arduous "shortcut" to understanding Taiwan. To understand this land of ours more deeply, Sinorama senior writer Coral Lee and photographer Chuang Kung-ju, armed with humanistic interest and a historical perspective, visited Yushan several times to write our cover story for this month, in the hope that by modest and sincere study we can convey the wisdom of this great and ancient mountain.
Now that March and Spring are here, why not cast off the stress of work and let the mountain forests wash your soul clean!
