Alishan's narrow-gauge railway was built to empty the mountain of its trees. Japanese engineers finished the line in 1912 to bring red cypress down to Chiayi, and over the next three decades the logging operation cleared close to 9,800 hectares and shipped some 3.47 million cubic metres of timber out, wood that went into shrines and palaces back in Japan. What the saws never reached is what people now climb the mountain to see: roughly forty Formosan red cypresses standing on the boardwalks above 2,200 metres, several of them past a thousand years old and the largest close to 2,300. The railway that carried their neighbours away is the other reason to come. It lifts you 71 kilometres from 30 metres at Chiayi to a 2,216-metre terminus, spiralling once around Dulishan, reversing through four zigzag switchbacks and threading more than fifty tunnels while the forest outside turns from tropical to temperate to alpine.
Most visitors set an alarm for four in the morning and take a second train up to Zhushan, at 2,451 metres the highest station in Taiwan. The sun comes up over the Yushan range and, on the right morning, lands on a white sea of cloud packed into the valleys below. By midday it is a gentler mountain: mossy boardwalks, cold air that smells of wet cedar, and the tea villages far downslope — Shizhuo, Longmei — where Alishan's high-mountain oolong grows. In late March some 18,000 Yoshino cherries planted in the Japanese era come into bloom; from April the valleys below fill with fireflies. And the line is whole again: Typhoon Morakot broke it in more than 400 places in 2009, and trains only ran from Chiayi to the top once more on 6 July 2024.