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Jiji (集集) in Nantou county (南投縣) is a small town that was hard hit by the 921 earthquake (九二一大地震) that was measured at 7.3 on the Richter scale and claimed the lives of 2400 people. The epicenter of the quake was in Jiji and devastated the town. Over the past 8 years, Jiji has been rebuilding and reinventing itself as a tourist area. It’s accessible via the Jiji branch line (集集小火車線), a 27.9km rail line that starts in Ershui and ends in Checheng. There are six stations along the route, with Jiji being the most popular one for tourists.

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I headed down to Ershui early on Saturday morning and boarded the train to head up the Jiji line. My first stop was Longquan, a small station about 5km away from Jiji. Longquan is best known for the Green Tunnel (錄色邃道), a 5km stretch of road lined with camphor trees.

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The various tourist information guides available state that it’s possible to hire bikes near Longquan station. I’m not sure if I was there too early, or the bike hire places are no longer in business, but there was no where to rent a bike. Rather than wait two hours for the next train to come along, I decided to walk along the bike path to Jiji, a distance of about 7km. It was very quiet along the path - even the parts that are open to cars where empty. I saw a few people who’d rented bikes in Jiji (including one family who insisted on giving me some bananas) and headed back to Longquan, but for the most part I was alone for 90 minutes or so.

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Getting closer to Jiji, I came across the Jhoushui river (濁水溪) , at 186km the longest river in Taiwan. The Linwei Bridge crosses over a side branch of the river.

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I eventually met up again with the rail line as it wound its way through the countryside surrounding the town of Jiji.

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In Jiji itself, after stopping for a coffee and some deep-fried mushrooms, I rented a bike and headed along the bike path. The first place I came to was a park with old military equipment. These parks seem almost obligatory in Taiwan’s tourist areas; a throwback to the martial law era, I guess.

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Leaving the park, I continued heading east toward the Mingxin Academy.

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During the reign of Emperor Guangysu (光緒 1875-1908) in the Qing Dynasty, Jiji became a thriving town due to its camphor industry. With a vibrant cultural scene, the Jiji Society was formed with the aim of encouraging literacy and the Mingxin Academy was established. It was completed in 1885, rebuilt at it’s present location in 1908, restored in 1989, destroyed during the 921 earthquake and restored again in 2002.

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Next to the Mingxin Academy is the Taiwan Endemic Species Research Institute (Tesri). TESRI is an experimental and research organization dedicated to surveying and researching the distribution, populations, habitat, threats to and methods for rehabiliation of Taiwan’s endemic, rare and endangered species, and to providing ecological education. Taiwan’s special natural environment has endowed it with a rich flora and fauna, and a diversity and density of species which is renowned over the world. At the same time, its long geographical isolation has given it a high proportion of endemic species. Of its 4,200 or so vascular plant species, 27% are endemic; of its more than 18,500 wild animal species (including mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, freshwater fish, butterflies and other insects), over 60% are endemic.

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Taiwan has been called the “Kingdom of Butterflies”. There are over 400 species of butterfly in Taiwan, 40 of which are endemic. TESRI has a large butterfly garden with many of these butterflies in attendance.

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Proving more popular due to its destruction than it was pre-921 is the Wuchang Temple (武昌宮). What used to be a regular old temple is now one of the biggest drawcards in Jiji after the temple collapsed during the earthquake. The entire first floor was squashed flat, making it one of the more unusual temples you’ll ever see.

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Leaving the temple, the road continues along leading to the big tree, Da zhang shu. Said to be the largest camphor tree in the area, a temple has sprung up next to it.

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The afternoon light was starting to go, so I headed back towards Jiji station. Across the road was a street sign that demonstrates Taiwan’s complete failure to properly romanise Chinese. Although the international standard for romanisation of Chinese characters is Hanyu Pinyin, Taiwan refuses to fully adopt this and continues to use some weird combination of three or four different systems that makes life extremely frustrating for visitors. I’m not sure what they were thinking when they made this sign.

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So, to the station. The original station was constructed in the early 20th century by the Japanese. Like so much of Jiji, it was destroyed in the 921 quake, and was subsequently rebuilt in its original style. It now serves as a popular photo location for Taiwanese tourists, with a busy square out the front and a small market to the side.

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And so that concludes the trip to Jiji. I’ll leave you with a panorama of the Wuchang temple. It was put together from 7 photos shot handheld and merged into the panorama using the photomerge in Photoshop CS3. This is a great tool, assembling the panorama in about 15 seconds using the auto alignment settings. When I first went to make the pan, I used the full-size versions of the photos, and even with 4GB of RAM and a dedicated scratch disk, Photoshop took a while to put them together creating an 800MB file. When the photos were resized before stitching, it only took the aforementioned 15 seconds.

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I hope you’ve enjoyed the trip to Jiji. Remember to click on the photos to see a bigger version.