Not long ago, plans to build a parking garage and hotel near Bamboo Lake and the Matsao Hot Springs in the Yangming Mountains stirred city residents to protest. People were alarmed, for to them the area is more than just a nearby place to have fun and spend money on weekends and holidays. It is one of the nation's most precious natural resources, one of its six national parks.
For more than two centuries a few households have been living in the tableland between Mt. Chihsing and Mt. Tatun, far from the buzz and bustle of urban life. There were no fancy buildings or leisure facilities up in these mountains and there was poor access to the outside world. Generation after generation, everyone relied on their own labors and the fertile land provided by Heaven.
"My grandfather grew penglai rice and tea, and my father planted mountain vegetables," says Kao Tzu-erh, who used to grow calla lilies here. He now makes use of the skills he gained working as a cook in the city at his own organic vegetable restaurant.
In the Bamboo Lake area, Kao's restaurant is one of no fewer than 10 specializing in stir-fried vegetables. How things have changed since the quiet days of his grandfather! On any weekend or holiday, cars from the city make their way here en masse. The restaurants fill with people, and the road fills with cars. The parking and traffic problems are severe. "The traffic jams start around two in the afternoon," Kao notes. From Bamboo Lake, the traffic is often backed up for several kilometers down the mountain toward Yangte Boulevard.
The lungs of Taipei
"Serving the leisure needs of the populace" is one of the original objectives of the National Parks. But unlike other parks and scenic areas, national parks also have conservation responsibilities. Sixteen years ago, when the environmental movement was going full steam, Taiwan implemented plans for four national parks in just four years. Although many travelers were already familiar with the Yangming Mountains, their volcanic terrain was something missing from other national parks. In their northern part there were many pristine peaks, including Mt. Tatun and the Kuangtsui Range. Beyond these were the north coast and Chinshan. Together they comprised an extensive nature area for northern Taiwan, and they became Taiwan's third national park.
Yangmingshan is at the northern edge of Taipei. The Japanese were the first to lay roads into the region in order to crush anti-Japanese resistance on Mt. Tsao. Stumbling upon the volcanic topography, they built the hot spring baths for which the whole area from Mt. Tsao to Peitou would become famous. From 1924, the Japanese began an effort to "create a forest on Mt. Tatun." They also encouraged local farmers to set up nurseries, which are the forerunners of the flower farms visited by tourists today.
Kuo Chiung-ying, a professor at Chinese Culture University, explains that as the green space and parks within Taipei itself became insufficient to meet the demands of its burgeoning population, Yangmingshan became important for more than just the hot springs and tourist-oriented farms that have been operating there for years. Yangmingshan has become the city's lungs, and on any weekend or holidays long lines of cars head in that direction. The area has an extensive network of roads, some dating to the Japanese occupation, others laid more recently. Yangte Boulevard, the Yangmingshan to Chinshan Highway, the Yangmingshan to Peitou Highway and Balaka Road offer drivers many choices for designing their own travel itineraries. "Few national parks anywhere in the world are so accessible," says Lin Chun-chuan, a professor of geography at National Taiwan University (NTU), who has worked hard for the conservation movement. "You can reach Yangmingshan within an hour by car from just about anywhere in Taipei."
"There are many different ways to approach Yangmingshan, and positioned between Taipei and the northeast corner of the island, many travelers just pass through on their way to somewhere else," says park superintendent Tsai By-lu. Old folk come to get their morning exercise by hiking here, and youths come to gaze at the stars and the lights of the city below. People visit 24 hours a day. Apart from those who visit on holidays and during the flower season, people come in the summer to escape the heat and in the winter to soak in the hot springs. The flow of visitors shows relatively little seasonal variation.
Five years ago, Yangmingshan National Park had 2.5 million visitors, or twice as many as Yushan National Park despite being only one-tenth of Yushan's size. This year the park administration released statistics showing that the running count of all-time visits had passed 12 million.
Try again tomorrow
Yangmingshan has been spared the controversy surrounding the banning of traditional aboriginal hunting in other national parks. But it has had to resolve other problems rooted in recreational activities that predated the park.
"Yangmingshan was the first place in Taipei where the government started pulling down illegally erected business signs," says Kuo Chiung-ying, who used to work for the Construction and Planning Administration (CPA). Before the national parks were established in 1985, the CPA began to enforce zoning and building regulations, even requiring the electric lines along the Yangmingshan-Chinshan Highway to be buried underground.
"Over the past few years the moral fiber of the visitors has vastly improved," says Liu Cheng-ming of the park's education division. These days, when guides call visitors to account for littering or picking flowers, most of them acknowledge they are at fault. And the mountain environment is no longer being directly damaged by visitors.
Last year the park headquarters put on a "Walking Through Yangmingshan National Park" nature immersion activity. To receive a certificate and souvenir, participants needed only to buy a booklet and walk along each of twelve trails featured in it before the deadline, taking photos of themselves next to location plaques as proof. Leu Lii-chang, chief of the education division at the park, hopes to use such activities to disperse visitors from a few areas of high concentration and to encourage everyone to do more hiking. Louise Huang, a guide at the park, hopes these encourage participants to come once a month, so they can get a greater feel for the changing seasons on the mountain.
In fact, national parks commonly face pressures caused by too many visitors. To lessen the pressures that visitors put on the natural environment, Yushan National Park in Nantou once tried putting limits on the numbers of people who could visit the park. After several years of trials, Yangmingshan National Park this year went ahead with its own holiday traffic controls, asking people to use new Taipei City buses to reach the park.
But there are so many roads leading to Yangmingshan and the park has so few staff that many alumni of Chinese Culture University and tourists say that they can always find ways up the mountain which dodge the roadblocks. As a result, the visitor controls are facing implementation problems.
Three boxes of fireflies for 3000 people?
Although the park authorities have long been trying to get "Taipei's backyard" back to a more natural state, in the wake of economic development and the advent of the two-day weekend, the parking and garbage problems caused by visitors have only been getting worse.
The educational activities sponsored by the park are planned with the best of intentions, but they are sometimes so over-attended that they can be of little educational value. Sometimes a few boxes of fireflies have had to suffice for several thousand people.
Scenic spots on Yangmingshan have become famous through word of mouth. Apart from Bamboo Lake, which is known today for its stir-fried vegetables, there is also Chingtienkang. One tragic night before the park was founded, hikers lost their way here coming through the grass in a thick fog. Now Chingtienkang has become an outdoor picnic area that can accommodate over 1000 people.
Excessive numbers of visitors bring traffic, garbage and waste water problems, forcing the park staff, whose primary mission is conservation, to spend more and more of their time caring for visitors' needs. Last year, to relieve parking problems on weekends and holidays, the park headquarters announced it was building a multi-story car park near Bamboo Lake at the fork of the access road and the Yangmingshan-Chinshan Highway.
"Bamboo Lake is right at an intersection on the Yangmingshan-Chinshan Highway, where there also happens to be a scenic overlook. A garage can do double duty, giving hikers somewhere to rest and helping to alleviate parking problems," says Tung Jen-wei, the acting chief of the planning department at the park headquarters.
The family businesses that had been operating nearby for generations were eagerly awaiting the garage, hoping that it would bring more customers. But its planned location is now a wetland ecology area supporting the rare grass species grass Isoetes taiwanensis and several endemic species of turtles, tree frogs and cicadas.
A public uproar to protect these animals' habitat ensued. "Has the park headquarters already surrendered to the pressure for recreational facilities?" asked a Taipei housewife in a letter to a newspaper. Under attack from all sides, the park headquarters decided to suspend construction of the garage.
Do national parks need facilities?
But the long-term problems caused by recreational facilities are not going to go away. These private facilities, in fact, existed long before the park was established. Many of them, such as Sun Moon Ranch, are known far and wide. They break the law in various ways, including using national land, building illegal structures, and operating without proper permits.
Yet the fact is that in the plans for Yang-mingshan National Park, both banks of Matsao Creek are classed as recreation areas, and not far away a site was designated for a hotel. The plans clearly state that private concerns should be encouraged to invest in and operate the hotel. But the idea of establishing a large hotel in a national park is controversial.
Early this year land near Matsao hot springs was acquired by a financial conglomerate, which wants to build a hotel there even grander than what is called for in the park's plans. The group is currently in the process of applying for a permit to clear the land. In the future, it will apply for a construction permit and a business operating permit. If these go through, Matsao could have an international tourist-class hot springs hotel.
Kenting National Park, a famous tourist area, is also surrounded by many hotels, but there is a difference between Yangmingshan and Kenting. Kenting is far from any city, and since Matsao is so close to Taipei, many question if there really is a need to build a hotel there. "Taipei already has so many luxury hotels," says NTU horticulture professor Linn Yann-jou. Candy Shiau, who works in the guide office at the park, argues that when people come to the park they ought to get close to nature by camping rather than moving modern facilities to the mountains. What worries people even more are safety concerns: the possibility of landslides given the unstable volcanic geology, the proximity of the Chinshan Fault, and the destructive potential of Matsao Creek itself.
"There used to be a pathway that went up the slope behind the Matsao Bridge," Kuo Chiung-ying recalls, but after a severe landslide in 1986, not only were the path and the plant cover entirely washed out, but "a large amount of mud and rocks flowed onto the bridge, causing it to collapse."
Caught between strong opposition to the plan and the need for new infrastructure made more urgent by the larger crowds coming with the advent of two-day weekends, superintendent Tsai By-lu affirms that there is still room for discussion on the hotel issue.
The fate of a tourist attraction?
Because it receives more visitors than other national parks, extra care needs to be used in adopting control measures at Yangmingshan. "Control over travelers' behavior and the numbers of visitors are particularly important," stresses Lin Yann-jou. Once the park has put proper controls into place, visitors should be free to make the remaining decisions. "This involves the concept of a public asset. Not everyone should have the right to use it; it's important to exclude unsuitable people, so that even more of the right kind of people can use it."
Take Bamboo Lake. People go there to eat stir-fried vegetables, and many may think that only wild vegetables or mountain-grown crops are served up there, "but where do you see large swathes of vegetables planted near Bamboo Lake?" A lot of these vegetables are in fact purchased at the Taipei central wholesale market. Kuo Chiung-ying says that many tourist farms sell produce that wasn't grown on them.
Lin Feng-tyan, an associate professor at the Graduate Institute of Building and Planning at NTU who is examining land use and zoning at the park, makes a case for building codes that designate specific engineering techniques and require environmental assessments. Another option would be for the nation to buy back development rights from local residents and slowly absorb their land into the park to prevent population growth and increasing numbers of illegal businesses.
The special scenic area of Liuhuang Canyon is another example. During the Qing dynasty Yu Ronghe came here looking for sulfur. In more recent times one businessman set up a hot springs facility here and another built a free-range chicken restaurant. The park authorities tore down these two structures, and opened the canyon to visits by the public. Other buildings, including Lungfeng Canyon's Fengling Villa, have been demolished, and the Park Headquarters is commissioning lawyers to launch law suits against ten other business owners.
The campaign against illegal businesses will continue. Yet, regarding the commercial signs lining the Yangmingshan-Chinshan Highway and Balaka Road, Tung Jen-wei says, "If you take one down, the proprietor has already prepared ten more to take its place. You just can't win." Making matters still worse, at the beginning of next year, 51 temporary park workers will lose their jobs as part of the central government's budget-cutting efforts.
Communing with nature
Recently, an international conservation organization declared that both Kenting National Park and Yangmingshan National Park suffer from too much human activity and don't deserve the title "national park." Lin Jiun-chuan, a professor of geography at NTU, says that he doesn't take such judgments too seriously. The important thing, according to Lin, is that if we have feelings for this piece of land, then we should treat it well.
Yangmingshan has many endemic species of plants and animals, including rare rhododendrons, grasses and tree frogs, and it has a volcanic topography that can only be seen in only one place in all of mainland China: Changbaishan. "Yangmingshan is unique and irreplaceable," asserts Kuo Chiung-ying.
Louise Huang, who has been a guide at the park for ten years, says that the scenery at national parks shouldn't be used for financial gain. "National parks should as much as possible maintain their original natural appearance, but every year Yangmingshan is being changed," she says angrily.
"Yangmingshan is already famous. It needn't sponsor promotional activities like it does during the flower season," says Kuo Chiung-ying. Tourist activities in Yang-mingshan ought to lean toward those that are peaceful and informative. Recreation should be something that refreshes.
Last year's "Hiking the 12 Trails" activity was very popular. The nature walks that have been held over the last five years have also earned the public's favor. Huang Hsiao-tsui, who works in the guide office, remembers that the year before last guides asked those who were going on the Chingtienkang Nature Walk to wear straw shoes and use a shoulder pole to carry their personal articles. They then set out along the old "Fish Road," gaining an understanding of what the people of earlier generations had to go through. After walking the route, an old woman in her eighties said that she had never been so happy in her life, which greatly moved the activity organizers.
Indeed, the organizers reap as many benefits as the participants. For last year's nature walk on Tsaikungkang, the park headquarters invited the American naturalist Joseph Cornell, who brought a rich store of nature experience. When guide Liu Cheng-wu leads a walk, he finds a quiet spot and asks everyone to listen to the sounds of nature: the wind, the calls of birds, the chirping of insects. He hopes that by quieting their minds they can come to feel nature. "Nature has a peaceful power" says Candy Shiau. The mountain also deserves credit for re-energizing the headquarters staff, enabling them to handle their growing load of management duties.
Conservation and access
Kuo Chiung-ying believes that the park staff and conservationists shouldn't view visitors from an adversarial standpoint, setting up obstacles to their coming up and enjoying the mountains. "The more divorced people have become from the land, the more impatient they have grown. This is reflected in the degradation of the environment," says Candy Shiau. "Hence, everyone should come up into the hills and get close to nature."
"In its first decade, Yangmingshan National Park focused on building its 'hardware.' The visitors' centers, rangers' stations and other installations have largely been completed. In the next decade the emphasis should be on 'software' and planning," says Tsai By-lu. Everyone now is hoping for fewer "hardware" construction projects in the park and more vitalizing programs and activities. As for the visitors, will they come here all muddle-headed or will they grow and develop along with the park? There must be some way to help them other than by building a parking garage.
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Up on Chingtienkang in Yangmingshan National Park you can see water buffaloes living a life of leisure on a vast carpet of grass. It's a nice place to go in the summer.
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Visitors rub elbows with each other in the crowded "front park" area of Yangmingshan. Hardly what you imagine a national park to look like!
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Yangmingshan, the only national park in Taiwan with volcanic topography, has many impressive peaks and abundant geothermal heat, which creates hot springs and fumaroles. The Hsiaoyukeng fumarole shown here faithfully spouts steam year in and year out.
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These ruins were once the site of the Matsao Hot Springs facility. The original plans for the park designate it as a recreation zone without facilities. But a financial conglomerate is applying to build an international-class hotel on a nearby empty piece of land which was zoned for a hotel.
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Even with clear legal controls, villas are rising on Yangmingshan at an alarming rate.
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Plans to build a parking garage in wetlands with rare flora and fauna near Bamboo Lake sparked protest.
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After conservationists protested, construction of the parking garage at Bamboo Lake was halted. Now a fence keeps the cars and people out.
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Try "walking" the mountain. The quiet power of nature awaits your discovery.
Yangmingshan, the only national park in Taiwan with volcanic topography, has many impressive peaks and abundant geothermal heat, which creates hot springs and f umaroles. The Hsiaoyukeng fumarole shown here faithfully spouts steam year in and year out.
These ruins were once the site of the Matsao Hot Springs facility. The o riginal plans for the park designate it as a recreation zone without fac ilities. But a financial conglomerate is applying to build an international-class hotel on a nearby empty piece of land which was zoned for a hotel.
Even with clear legal controls, villas are rising on Yangmingshan at an alarming rate.
Plans to build a parking garage in wetlands with rare flora and fauna near Bamboo Lake sparked protest.
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