Taroko Gorge is a canyon nearly 19 kilometres long that the Liwu River has sawn straight through solid marble. In places the walls close to a slot barely a dozen metres wide, and above them the polished grey-and-white rock climbs hundreds of metres. The marble swirls and folds because it was squeezed and stretched long before the river ever reached it, and the whole valley is still rising while the water cuts down into it. The Liwu runs a milky blue-green, carrying fine rock ground off those same walls. The canyon takes its name from the Truku, the indigenous people whose homeland this is and who won recognition as a distinct nation in 2004. Getting through the gorge at all is the other half of the story.
The Central Cross-Island Highway was hand-cut into these cliffs between 1956 and 1960, at a cost in lives that the roadside Eternal Spring Shrine, set over a waterfall, was raised to remember. In normal times you walk beneath swallows nesting in the pocked marble of Swallow Grotto, cross red bridges strung above the torrent, and wear a loaned helmet where stone still falls from above. That falling rock is the gorge's living hazard. On 3 April 2024 a magnitude-7.2 earthquake shook the valley, loosing landslides that killed visitors and buried whole trails. Taroko is only partly open now. The highway runs again, but only in five timed windows a day, and it shuts overnight. But Swallow Grotto, the Shakadang Trail and the Baiyang Trail stay shut until at least 2031, and the shrine's own path until 2029. What is open sits at the two ends: Tianxiang, the Lushui trails, and the climbs behind the visitor centre.