Learning from the Gaoping River

“Do you know where the northernmost boundary of Kaohsiung City is?” Environmental activist Lee Ken-cheng, chairman of Citizen of the Earth, Taiwan, often stumps audiences with this question at public lectures. The correct answer—Yushan (Mt. Jade)—is normally ­unexpected.

Lee says from the heart: “If you think about Kaohsiung, you have to start from Yushan, because this is the perspective of the Gaoping River.”

High mountains, rushing waters

On small and mountainous Taiwan, the ocean brings abundant moisture, which is blocked by the Central Mountain Range, generating an average of 2,500 milli­meters of rainfall per year across the island.

However, the ratio between wet and dry seasons in Taiwan is extreme everywhere but in Northern Taiwan, where it is a relatively balanced 6:4. In Central and Eastern Taiwan it is 8:2, and in Southern Taiwan it is as high as 9:1. In the Gaoping River Basin, 82% of annual precipitation falls from May to December. 

Add to this that Taiwan has steep topography, frequent earthquakes, and loose geology. Heavy rains invariably bring landslides and flooding, with mud and sand making the water in reservoirs turbid, and thus causing periodic halts in the water supply.

Oddly, though Taiwan’s average rainfall is 2.6 times the world average of 970 millimeters, the island is also subject to droughts.

The Qishan River, one of the tributaries of the Gaoping River. (MOFA file photo)

The Gaoping River has five main tributaries. The photo shows the confluence of the Laonong River and the Qishan River.  (photo by Fu Chih-nan, courtesy of Citizen of the Earth, Taiwan)

A river protection movement

The problems of the Gaoping River do not stop there. While it is Southern Taiwan’s “mother” river, it was for a time badly neglected. Lee Ken-cheng still remembers the 1990s, when he became active in the movement to protect the Gaoping River.

At that time, the unmanaged river was polluted by waste from livestock farms and industry, there were many trash heaps along the banks, and there was illegal mining of sand and gravel. Through activism by citizens like Dr. Tseng Kuei-hai, the government finally formed a committee to manage the Gaoping River Basin. Thus far the Gaoping remains the only river in Taiwan with such a committee, and since it was established the environment has improved greatly.

However, consecutive governments have still had to face the problem of severe water shortages in Southern Taiwan during dry seasons. The authorities have tried to initiate a number of large-scale hydrological projects, including a reservoir in Meinong, building aqueducts to carry water from the Zengwen Reservoir, and creating a manmade lake. But all had to be aborted due to natural disasters or their impact on the environment or local industries.

The Shizitou Canal, built in the Japanese era, not only provides water for farmland irrigation, it also serves as a water recreation spot in summer.  (photo by Lin Min-hsuan)

The scenery of the Hakka community of Meinong is much enhanced by its location in the Gaoping River Basin.

Meinong has a prominent white water snowflake industry, and ponds used to grow this plant are everywhere. (photo by Lin Min-hsuan)

The people of the river basin

Fortunately, repeated failures and criticism have been part of a process of finding the right answer. People are still searching for the least destructive way to co-exist with water.

In the end, despite alternating floods and droughts, water is still—along with sunlight and air—one of the three essential elements on which life depends. Through accumulated experiences over many generations, the Gaoping River Basin has gradually developed its own unique culture and civilization.

When we enter the Hakka district of Meinong, there is water everywhere, including the large and tranquil Zhongzheng Lake, white water snowflake ponds, and the Piaopiao River.

Chang Cheng-yang, head of Chi-Mei Community University in Kaohsiung’s Qishan District, was born into a farming family that has long lived in the Meinong area, and he has actively studied the Gaoping River Basin. He notes that it boasts many cultural rituals associated with the river.

In Meinong Folk Village, for example, Guangshan Temple holds a ceremony on the ninth day of the first lunar month in which paper with writing on it is burned as an offering to the god of the Meinong River.

Also, in a location determined by a fengshui expert, a place of worship has been set up in the Folk Village for a certain “Earth God Water Deity,” one of only three places in all of Taiwan with such a shrine. It is this deity who protects the water used by local farmers.

Besides the two main ethnic groups—Hakka and Hoklo—another group lives in the Gaoping River Basin: descendants of Nationalist Chinese soldiers left behind at the Yunnan–Burmese border after the Chinese Civil War. This story goes back to the era of Japanese rule in Taiwan, when the Japanese built a dike in 1938 to solve the problem of frequent flooding along the Ailiao River. This changed the course of the river and created a great amount of new land. Japanese colonists were settled on this land to grow tobacco.

After World War II, when the Japanese departed, they left behind many structures. In the 1960s, the Nationalist government in Taiwan resettled soldiers from the remnant forces on the Yunnan–Burmese border into four local communities here. Today, the area is still a “Little Yunnan” with a distinctive character of its own.

There are also the indigenous peoples who were the first to live here. These include Bunun people living along the upstream part of the Meinong River, Hla’alua people residing in the Meinong and Qishan river basins, and Kanakanavu people mainly active along the upper reaches of the Qishan River. 

Two local indigenous rituals—the Miatungusu (Sacred Shell Ritual) of the Hla’alua, (which is listed as intangible indigenous cultural heritage) and the Pasika’arai (River Ritual) of the Kanakanavu—represent the deep relationship between the Aboriginal peoples who have lived here for so long and nature’s waters. It is rare indeed that two different rituals related to rivers have appeared in the same river basin.

Chang Cheng-yang, head of Kaohsiung’s Chi-Mei Community University.

The water quality in the century-old Erfeng Canal is excellent, comparable to tap water.

A hyporheic water project, which is easier to build and less environmentally disruptive than conventional reservoirs.

Inspiration for water diversion

Clearly water is essential to all ethnic groups and indeed to all life. However, nature can also be destructive, as shown by the floods of 1959 and of 2009. Fear of water combined with the need for water is perhaps the most salient feature of the lives of people in the Gaoping River Basin.

Ting Cheh-shyh, professor emeritus in the Department of Civil Engineering at National Pingtung University of Science and Technology, has lived all of his 70 years in this river basin, and still recalls the 1959 flooding, when he and his mother were forced to take refuge on the roof of their family home. The event left him in profound awe of the power of water, but also prompted him to dedicate himself to a related field of study.

As a scholar, Ting actively sought solutions to the flooding problem before finally hitting upon the answer from a “hyporheic water” project built in the era of Japanese rule. 

Ting explains that the mainstream way of using water resources in Taiwan is to build surface reservoirs and weirs. But Taiwan is a narrow island with high mountains whose steep slopes offer only limited water storage capacity. Moreover, Taiwan has frequent earthquakes making for loose geology, causing severe sedimentation in reservoirs.

Ting, who specialized in groundwater research, ­studied the Erfeng Canal in Pingtung County’s Laiyi Township, which is a hyporheic water system designed by Japanese engineer Nobuhei Torii and completed in 1923. He discovered that this approach better suits Taiwan’s environmental ­conditions.

Put simply, hyporheic water is subsurface water (shallow groundwater) that flows in the “hyporheic zone,” the porous space beneath and alongside a riverbed, where ground­water and surface water interact. Even when river­beds dry out during the dry season, water is still present just below the surface, forming an invisible “underground ­reservoir.”

Back in the day Torii put hyporheic water to good use, building a barrier within the bed of the Linbian River in Pingtung to divert the flow of water and provide irrigation water for farming. His system is still in use today.

Work on the Erfeng Canal began in 1923, and in 2008 it was listed as a cultural heritage site.

Hyporheic water is filtered through subsurface sand and gravel, making it quite clean.

Chengqing Lake, which draws its water from the Gaoping River, is itself an important water source for the Kaohsiung area, nourishing the fertile soil of civilization. (photo by Fu Chih-nan, courtesy of Citizen of the Earth, Taiwan)

Ting Cheh-shyh, who is nicknamed Torii after a Japanese engineer who built an early hyporheic water project in Taiwan, considers this concept to be an excellent solution to Taiwan’s water resources problem.

Resilient island

Ting says that hyporheic water projects have many advantages. For example, the engineering is easier than for a conventional reservoir, they cost less, maintenance is easier, there is less impact on the local environment, and so long as the quantity of water extracted is not excessive there won’t be any subsidence. They meet all the criteria for sustainable development.

Furthermore, with the water being filtered by sand and gravel as it penetrates underground, its quality is comparable to tap water. Even during typhoons, when surface water becomes turbid, hyporheic water remains clear. It can even be used for hydropower. In short, more hyporheic water projects will make it possible to use flood-season waters during the dry season.

After more than 30 years of advocacy, Ting has persuaded the government to use this approach. Today there are nine hyporheic water projects in the Gaoping River Basin supplying 1 million cubic meters of water per year to nearly 4 million people.

Thanks to these, despite the fact that Southern Taiwan experienced a major drought for three years starting in 2021, with precipitation levels reaching record lows in successive years, it was not necessary to limit the water supply in the Greater Kaohsiung area.

Ting Cheh-shyh says that water can both float a boat and sink it, and that crisis brings opportunity. The Gao­ping River is a critical source of water for Southern Taiwan, and although it has posed many challenges for Taiwan’s people, this “mother” river has a unique water culture that is teaching us how to build a resilient island and giving us a lesson in the value of every drop of water. 

Interplay between light and shadow produced by the clean flowing water in the Erfeng Canal water intake tower.

The Zhuliao water intake station, built in 1913, is also a hyporheic water project.

Hydrological infrastructure in Taiwan has been heavily influenced by that in the US. The photo shows the Feitsui Reservoir in New Taipei City, which has limited storage capacity because of the steep topography.