Yehliu's Queen's Head owes her face to an accident. Around 1962 chunks broke from the top of an ordinary mushroom rock on this cape north of Taipei, leaving a silhouette so like the bust of Nefertiti that the name stuck. The same erosion is now taking her back: 3D scans put her neck at 138 centimetres around in 2005 and 118 by 2023, and the park expects it to snap. She is one of hundreds of mushroom stones on a sandstone promontory that runs 1,700 metres into the sea, lifted there by two colliding tectonic plates. Each cap is a concretion, a lump of sandstone that lime cemented rock-hard on the Miocene seabed. The stone beneath never got that armour, so salt, spray and wind hollow it away until the neck fails. The same imbalance carves the cape's candle rocks, its knuckled ginger rocks and its honeycombed reef.
At low tide the platform reads less like a park than an alien seabed: pools sunk into the honeycomb, crabs in the hollows, stems no thicker than an arm holding up boulders the size of a car. Walk on to the wooded tip and the cape changes character: this is the best migrant trap on mainland Taiwan, and each spring tired birds drop into its scrub — Siberian rubythroats, paradise flycatchers — more than 300 species logged on a headland you can cross in half an hour. The sea is the other constant: no railings out here, only a red line painted on the rock, and in 1964 a Yehliu fisherman drowned going in after a student the waves had taken. Today the cape is ticketed and crowded: the Queen has her own roped queue, a scanned replica stands by the entrance, and for two weeks each summer the park reopens after dark to throw light across the stones.