Tapo Lake Comes Back to Life

People who travel through the East Rift Valley in eastern Taiwan make sure to stand by the door of their carriage when their train passes by Chihshang so that can buy one of the distinctive boxed meals for which the town is famous.

From the Japanese colonial period to the initial period after Taiwan's retrocession to Chinese rule, the triangular handmade bamboo-leaf-wrapped rice rolls featured crystalline Chihshang rice, along with carrot, lean meat, fried pork, pork liver, and a preserved plum as an appetizer. But the most delectable part was the cherry shrimp that thrived in Tapo Lake.

Nearly half a century has passed, and when one emerges from the Chihshang train station, shops selling Chihshang meal boxes line the street. In the wooden boxes, the rice is still crystalline, and the preserved plum still delicious. But the star attraction of the meal--the cherry shrimp--is missing.

When exercising around the lake, Chihshang residents show their desire to preserve Tapo Lake by clearing away pesky water hyacinth. Pictured is voluntary cultural guide Chien Shu-ying

Chihshang Township

Chihshang Township covers an area of 8269 square kilometers, and has a population of 9812 (as of April 2006). The northernmost town in Taitung County's East Rift Valley, it is bordered on the north by Hualien County's Fuli Township. It is located in the broadest segment of the East Rift Valley. With its fertile soil, clear waters, and mild climate, Chihshang has won citations as producer of Taiwan's best rice for three years running since 2004, and is famous throughout Taiwan as a " land of rice."

In late spring, green-winged teal (above) and common moorhen (below) glide serenely across the waters of Tapo Lake.

Thirty million years ago, the collision between the Philippine and Eurasian Plates caused the Chihshang Fault to thrust to the northwest, forming a fault depression. Subsequently, overflow from the Hsinwulu River and accumulations of spring water resulted in the formation of a lake located 269 meters above sea level, as well as Taiwan's only inland marsh. Even today, the Chihshang Fault is shifting by two to three centimeters annually, and is an important location for Taiwanese and foreign scholars doing research on fault geology.

According to official records dating to 1910 in the Japanese colonial period, Tapo Lake covered about 55 hectares, or roughly the area of 55 soccer fields. But in the recollection of survivors from that era, Tapo Lake must have been at least 100 hectares in area.

At the time, aquatic life such as crucian carp, carp, catfish, swamp eel, and cherry shrimp flourished in the lake. A previous generation of women would use wet paper to cover the eyes of the carp that lived in large numbers in the lake and grew to lengths over one meter, tricking them into thinking they were still in the water, and so letting the women give a still-bucking carp to friends or family in Taitung.

An old photograph of Tapo Lake hangs in a meal box shop. Lush aquatic plants and fishermen can be seen on its surface. "When I was little, the Chihshang Cinema was 300 meters away from the lake, and springs would often bubble up inside!" relates Lai Yung-sung, director of the local Chihtan Development Association. Besides the area actually covered by water and wetlands, the surrounding area was full of fertile bogs.

Paddies in Chihshang Township's Wan-an Village where organic rice is grown bear their cultivators' names to serve as a personal guarantee.

So-called wetlands mark the areas where water and land meet. These areas are often deluged by tides and floods, and include freshwater and saltwater swamps, estuaries, ponds, and sinks.

Wetlands have long been treated as worthless land where weeds flourish. However, river overflow and repeated washings carry mud and nutrients, making the earth particularly fecund. "Why do human beings go where the rushes grow? The reason is here," explains Hsieh Hwey-lian, a research fellow in the Research Center for Biodiversity (RCBAS) at Academia Sinica.

After Aborigines had fished and hunted around Tapo Lake, Chinese and Japanese came to the area. They began to clear the land, drain the water, and build embankments to create land suitable for farming and fishing. As land was reclaimed from water, the wetlands along the shores of the lake were quickly lost.

Around 1975, the rising level of the water in Tapo Lake during typhoons frequently led to severe flooding of homes and farms along the shore. The government therefore constructed a large drainage ditch to divert the floodwaters. Aggravated by the large volume of silt carried into the lake over many years of typhoons, and farmers reclaiming land for cultivating crops, the lake's size shrank in the 1990s from its original 55 hectares to just two! Tapo Lake had seemingly evaporated from Chihshang, and for close to ten years afterwards, people lost their attachment to Tapo Lake.

"The ancients said that you have to be able to appreciate the different characteristics of different land. But humans are accustomed to seeking dryness, insisting on drying out wetlands, which naturally drains the life out of them," says RCBAS research fellow Chen Chang-po.

In 1985, as part of a Taitung County Government plan to develop Tapo Lake into a scenic and recreational area, land occupied by farmers was reclaimed, so that the process of dredging out sludge could be begun. From 1992 to 1998, the Chihshang Township Office obtained more than NT$100 million in funding, making plans for a Tapo Lake Scenic Area that would occupy 28 hectares. After more than ten years of "construction," the unfortunate Tapo Lake had been all but ruined.

To make it easier to control access and collect fees, the lake was enclosed by a red brick wall. And to stabilize the lake's water level, the entire shore was fortified with an embankment built of rocks and concrete. In order to expand the recreational options, the bottom of the lake was dredged, and a total of 600,000 cubic meters--the equivalent of 40,000 15-ton truckloads--of outside earth were brought in and unloaded into Tapo Lake to form two artificial islands.

On these islands, paved bike lanes were laid, and even more absurdly, a basketball court was built. The recreational area also had a campground, metal-roofed huts for barbecues, an outdoor stage, a children's playground, and an arched concrete bridge and red steel bridge that ran out to the islands. In all, the area covered by manmade facilities was more than one third that of the actual lake area.

But as the physical facilities appeared, the townspeople, who still held in their memories the past natural splendor of Tapo Lake, became increasingly resistant to this reconstructed "artificial" Tapo Lake.

The reconstruction of Tapo Lake, together with a lakeside parking lot that cost NT$60 million and used steel-reinforced concrete to cover a 450-meter long canal, were both selected by the media as among Taiwan's worst public works projects in 2004, arousing the townspeople's opposition.

Besides damaging the appearance of the lake, inappropriate construction methods robbed the area's abundant flora and fauna of their habitat. The concrete embankment that replaced soil along the periphery of the lake usurped the most important part of the wetlands, the transition zone, preventing the life there from being able to reproduce. The large-scale dredging of the lake bottom removed the seeds of aquatic plants, and the excessive water depth that resulted from the dredging made it inhospitable to plants. All this was exacerbated by the influx of agricultural wastewater, which only quickened the disappearance of the lake's bountiful plant and animal life. It was then that the townspeople were shocked to find they had "lost" Tapo Lake.

There was no longer any sign of the goby fish, loaches, swamp eels, catfish, crucian carp, and cherry shrimp that had once swum the lake's water, of aquatic plants like the lotus flowers, duckweed, reeds, water willows, cattails, denseflower knotweed, and wild arrowhead that had once floated on the water surface, or of more than 100 species of birds, including moorhens, white-breasted waterhens, Baillon's crake, and Formosan pheasant.

What proliferated instead was the non-native water hyacinth that kills off ponds. It had grown into large mounds after being dredged up by excavators hired for more than NT$1 million. These plants were taking over the lake's surface with amazing speed, squeezing out the plants that originally grew in the lake, while also preventing the fish and shrimp underwater from getting any sunlight.

Influenced by misguided notions about how to develop the area, Tapo Lake was at one point spoiled by too many concrete structures, robbing it of its vitality. The picture shows the lake before the recent restoration.

"Kuanshan Township beside Chihshang built a water park, creating an attraction where none existed before. They spent the same ten years and NT$200 million as we did, but the construction we did was a mistake, and we ended up losing an attraction instead," says Li Yeh-jung, Chihshang's current mayor, with a wry smile.

After the 921 Earthquake of 1999, government funding for this kind of project all but dried up, but this gave Tapo Lake a respite.

In 2000, a group of local teachers, civil servants, telephone company workers, and environmental activists formed the Chihtan Development Association, working with the local community to develop a consensus and begin to give voice to the residents. The hope was to be able to reconstitute the original character of the Tapo wetlands.

After a new administration took over following the 2000 county chief executive and mayoral elections, with the support of former chief executive Hsu Ching-yuan and former Regional Planning and Development Department director Lu Wei-ping, the project to undo some of the construction around Tapo Lake that had begun five years before entered a new phase with the four-year Tapo Lake Restoration Project, which aimed to remove inappropriate facilities.

Soil liquefaction in the earthquake had led to construction delays, and some facilities had even collapsed, so that misguided projects initiated in the past had not been completed and subjected to acceptance inspections. Then too, not enough time had elapsed to declare existing facilities unusable. The prospect of spending more than NT$100 million to demolish and remove these facilities was not an easy one for government agencies to face, accustomed as they are to doing things "by the book." Not only did going ahead with the demolition entail determining who was responsible for the initial debacle, but there would be the pressure of a public backlash against the wasting of public funds. Most government agencies in such a situation are therefore willing to let an error stand uncorrected rather than deliberately disturb a potential hornet's nest.

"This whole matter is a valuable object lesson. The local and county governments were willing to work together to rectify a public works project gone wrong. To restore the natural environment, they had to face severe administrative pressures," read the citation for the first "Charming Locales" prize, awarded in 2005 by the Ministry of the Interior's Construction and Planning Agency in recognition of the courage that the relevant parties had shown in rectifying past errors and restoring Tapo Lake, and at the same time alleviating the shame of being responsible for one the nation's ten worst construction projects.

The first priority in restoring Tapo Lake was to remove all concrete structures, with the construction materials put to other uses as much as possible. For example, the steel bridge that no one had ever used has been turned into a rest pavilion in Chihshang Park.

The concrete embankment that ran along the lake's edge has been removed and replaced by a gently sloping lawn. A wooden promenade has been built around the lake, passing sometimes through green areas, and at other times veering close to the water's edge, so that the public can enjoy many faces of Tapo Lake.

Most movingly, every few steps along the wooden walkway, one can discover little heaps of water hyacinth. This is the result of an initiative begun by environmental activists. Today pulling out water hyacinth has become a collective habit of most Chihshang residents.

"Looking across the pond, the light of the sun and shadows of the clouds meander..." goes a poem. The words seem to describe the cheeriness of Tapo Lake that brightens the spirits of those who visit.

Although their efforts won the recognition of the Charming Locales award, Taitung County's Department of Regional Planning and Development and the citizens of Chihshang Township are not content to rest on their laurels. This year they are working together on the second phase of the restoration of Tapo Lake. Not only are they aiming to restore the original appearance of the lake, but they want to give it a healthy constitution.

In April, on the cusp of summer, RCBAS researchers Chen Chang-po and Hsieh Hwey-lian, together with the Regional Planning and Development Department, Chihshang's township chief, and community groups, gathered to participate in a Tapo Lake restoration workshop.

Chen, who has visited Tapo Lake four or five times, does not believe that restoration is as simple as removing extraneous facilities. Rather, it means that before removing manmade structures, the question of what Tapo Lake itself possesses must be investigated. What is residents' ideal of what functions Tapo Lake should serve and what it should look like? After setting clear objectives, the land must be restored, and then the flora and fauna. "Blindly removing facilities is also a kind of error," stresses Chen.

An example of a misguided restoration effort was the planting work commissioned by the Department of Regional Planning and Development in the hope of rapidly restoring Tapo Lake to a verdant lushness. The idea was to "create" scenery, and therefore non-native species such as the large dawn redwood and flame trees were planted. In the end, however, because these trees could not withstand the strong seasonal northeasterly winds that buffet Tapo Lake, only bare trunks are left.

In like manner, to enrich the flora in the aquatic plants park, Hygrophila pogonocalyx, an aquatic plant native to Taiwan's western coast was introduced. Now, it is vigorously reproducing in Tapo Lake in eastern Taiwan, crowding out local aquatic plants.

The question, "Do exotic aquatic plants need to be introduced into Tapo Lake to turn it into a tourist botanical park?" has been answered both in the affirmative and the negative. "Past efforts to renovate Tapo Lake resulted in many inappropriate additions. This time around, it may be that some plants are being introduced that really shouldn't be," says Chien Shu-ying.

Another question to be answered is whether precedence should be given to protecting the pheasant-tailed jacana that lives in the water caltrop ponds, or the ring-necked pheasant that lives on land? The former requires more plants that float on the water's surface, such as water caltrops and water lilies, as food sources. The latter requires thicker vegetation in which to find cover. Different choices will impact the created environment and the types of vegetation planted.

"Looking across the pond, the light of the sun and shadows of the clouds meander..." goes a poem. The words seem to describe the cheeriness of Tapo Lake that brightens the spirits of those who visit.

A vast majority of manmade structures have already been removed from Tapo Lake, and its development is now moving toward creation of a natural ecology. But how can a sustainable balance be achieved between Chihshang residents' recreational needs and the natural habitat?

"There is no need to exclude people completely from Tapo Lake. Humans are not necessarily invaders, as they can also be guardians," says Chen. He hopes that the people of Chihshang, who have already greatly reduced their footprint around Tapo Lake, can go a little bit further for the sake of the living things around the lake.

As an example, might it be possible to open up just half of the promenade that circles the lake? Though the public likes using the path, it robs the ducks and other birds who live around Tapo Lake of any place to take cover.

However, for the townspeople, only recently able once again to enjoy the lake, strolls along the three-kilometer-long path have already become a habit. Even local environmental activists do not want the public to suddenly stay away from the lake again.

After discussion, Chen made a new recommendation, to expand the "green corridor" portion of the promenade around the lake, increasing the amount of foliage so that waterfowls would have a more sheltered and less disruptive environment for reproducing and living. At the same time, the townspeople largely agreed to redefine the artificial islands, only a fifth of which had been removed at great expense, as island sanctuaries for birds, with people forbidden.

Another conflict between manmade scenery and animal ecology can be seen in the sloped lawns along the north shore of lake. Hsieh points out that under ideal conditions, wetlands should be supported by a transition zone--the area infiltrated by lake water--that rises by at least one meter above the lake over a distance of at least ten meters. That way, organic matter can be transported to the most fertile parts of the wetland by changes in the water level, providing for the growth of different aquatic plants.

"While it may look like nothing more than vacant land, the transition zone is only for viewing. Entry is forbidden. Educating the public to forego lounging and romping on the green grass and acknowledge the importance of the muddy transition zone is a challenge," says Hsieh.

Outdoor s tage

The original appearance of the lake has been largely restored, but eliminating pesticide contamination is the key to restoring the cherry shrimp featured in Chihshang boxed meals. In the past, Tapo Lake was fed by the Hsinwulu River and natural springs, but now its main sources of water are stream water from the Chinyuan Community and runoff from crop fields upstream. Pesticides are carried into Tapo Lake by agricultural runoff, becoming one of the main reasons that the shrimp have disappeared.

This year, the second phase of the restoration project began, focusing on water quality and ecological restoration. Tapo Lake's water temperature, depth, adicity, organic content, and clarity will be monitored. Then, using a water management system installed along the routes of water flowing into the lake, agricultural runoff will be cleansed before it enters. This project will cost NT$133 million over three years. The objective is to gradually bring back cherry shrimp to Tapo Lake.

Riding a bike slowly around the surrounding area, one hears the gurgle of water. Looking into the distance, clouds huddle against the mountain range along the coast, and the entire valley shows not a single utility pole. In Wan-an Community, the green shoots in more than 50 hectares of organic rice paddies stand especially straight.

Visitors are surprised to discover that to ensure the rice plants get enough rest during the night, screens have been placed on all the street lights so that they will not shine on the fields.

Blessed with expansive views of mountains and fine water, unspoiled by excessive manmade illumination, Chihshang is Taiwan's home for superior rice and a center for promoting organic rice. Day or night, Chihshang Township emanates a healthy aroma. Chen Chang-po and Chien Shu-ying, one a scholar from outside and one a local resident fond of the place, have seen a vision of a "healthy township" emerging during the restoration work on Tapo Lake.

"Looking across the pond, the light of the sun and shadows of the clouds meander, asking from whence the clear water comes" wrote Song-Dynasty scholar Zhu Xi, as if he were writing about the life of Tapo Lake. Today, the people of Chihshang Township are doing their utmost to bring Tapo Lake fully back to life, and in the future, their children will be able to experience for themselves the meaning and sensibility of this piece of verse as they sit on the shore of the lake.

In late spring, green-winged teal (above) and common moorhen (below) glide serenely across the waters of Tapo Lake.

Scientific name: Neocaridina denticulata sinensis.

Habitat: streams, rivers, ponds.

Diet: omnivorous.

Tapo Lake's signature species, important as an indicator of restoration success.

Subject organism for water and toxin testing performed by the Environmental Protection Administration's Bureau of Environmental Inspection.

Compared to freshwater fish such as Taiwanese flower horn fish, carp, and goldfish, cherry shrimp are highly sensitive to agricultural pesticides.

Compared to the Oriental river prawn, grass shrimp, and hunter shrimp, the cherry shrimp is the most sensitive, most widespread, and of the greatest ecological value.

From a presentation on Tapo Lake by Chen Chang-po of RCBAS.

In order to remove the artificial islands and non-native water hyacinth plants, excavators have been pressed into service. The restoration of Tapo Lake is an example par excellence of a "subtractive development project."

The reappearance of dragonfly nymphs in the lake serves as an indicator that the water is clean.

The sculpture at the entrance, called "Five Knives"

The earth walls between fields that are used as footpaths by farmers when weeding serve to identify organic rice paddies. Chihshang Township is one of Taiwan's main centers for organic rice, and local residents have been cited for producing the island's best rice for three years running.

The red steel bridge called a "bridge over troubled waters."

"Looking across the pond, the light of the sun and shadows of the clouds meander..." goes a poem. The words seem to describe the cheeriness of Tapo Lake that brightens the spirits of those who visit.

Tapo Lake and the people of Chihshang are like family, and the revitalization of the lake serves as a valuable reference for other areas in Taiwan undertaking similar projects.

The campfire area

This is the cherry shrimp that was once featured in Chihshang meal boxes, and that is now slowly making a comeback in Tapo Lake.