Eternal Spring Shrine Audio Guide

Eternal Spring Shrine: what does the audio guide cover?

1. 01

   Welcome to ChangChun Shrine

   Welcome to ChangChun Shrine, known in Chinese as 長春祠, tucked into the marble walls of Taroko National Park in Xiulin Township, Hualien County. It stands about 2.3 kilometers from the Taroko entrance, right where the canyon starts to close in around the Liwu River. This is a memorial rather than a temple in the usual sense. It honors the 225 veterans who lost their lives while the Central Cross-Island Highway, Taiwan's Provincial Highway 8, was carved through some of the most difficult mountain terrain on the island. Its setting is dramatic: a shrine built into a cliff, with a waterfall pouring out of the rock just below it. Over the next few stops we will look at why the shrine was built, how its architecture fits the mountainside, what the river is doing in the valley below, and why the site is so fragile. One practical note before we begin: rockfall has damaged the surroundings and part of the trail, so access to the shrine area has been temporarily restricted. It is worth checking current conditions with the park before you plan a visit.

2. 02

   ChangChun Shrine: A Memorial to the Road Builders

   To understand this place, picture the Central Cross-Island Highway under construction. The road was cut through steep gorges and unstable rock, and the work was hard and dangerous. Accidents and deaths were a recurring part of the job. The shrine was built to honor those who died. It enshrines the spirits of 225 veterans who gave their lives in the building of Provincial Highway 8. To console their spirits, the Taiwan Provincial Highway Bureau chose a site in 1958 on the far side of the road, above a gushing spring waterfall, and built the shrine there. So every time you look at the road, the tunnels and the cliff-hugging bends of this corridor, you are looking at what the shrine remembers. It stands as a thank-you carved into the very mountain those men worked to cross.

3. 03

   ChangChun Shrine: Building Into the Cliff

   The shrine is built in a northern Chinese architectural style, and it is fitted into the terrain, nestled between folds of the mountain wall. The result is both delicate and solemn, a small building held in the arms of a huge cliff. Then there is the water. A clear spring bursts out of the rock face and falls in a ribbon of white that never stops, all year round. This is the Eternal Spring Waterfall, and it gives the shrine its name, which means Eternal Spring. It is one of the great sights along the highway. Behind the shrine, the trail turns vertical. A steep zigzag staircase is cut into the sheer rock, with 380 steps in all, and it is known as the Heavenly Ladder. It climbs first to Guanyin Cave, then continues past Taroko Tower to a bell tower. The bell tower is the highest point on the trail, and from there you look down on the winding river, the canyon, and the road with its tiny moving vehicles. A walking loop around the site makes the waterfall, the gorge and the river bends visible from different angles.

4. 04

   ChangChun Shrine: Rivers, Meanders and Falling Rock

   The setting is as much a geography lesson as a memorial. Looking out from the front of the shrine, you see the Liwu River make three turns of more than 90 degrees, upstream and downstream. Geographers call such bends meanders. The shrine sits at the outer, attacking edge of the curve, which is the part of the bank the current strikes hardest, so it is a very good place to read the shape of the river. That same force explains the waterfall below. The river keeps battering and hollowing out the foot of the slope, so the hillside retreats in parallel steps, and over time that leaves a cliff for the spring water to pour over. The rock itself is part of the story. Marble and quartz schist alternate here, and under constant stress they break into fragments that easily give way. In 1987 a serious collapse on the cliff above sent rocks crashing onto a pavilion beside the shrine and destroyed it. Only after 1997 were the pavilions rebuilt and visits to the shrine resumed. Today rockfall has again damaged the facilities and caused part of the trail to collapse, and the memorial tablets have been moved to Sansheng Fomituo Yan, beside the trail entrance.

5. 05

   Before You Head Off

   The trail begins near Changchun Bridge on the old section of the Central Cross-Island Highway. From there a path carved into the rock wall leads down toward the shrine, and the route has long been the way visitors approach it. As you think about this place, keep three things in mind: a memorial to 225 road builders, a spring that has no season, and a river that keeps reshaping the valley it runs through. Each is a different kind of persistence. When you look at the canyon from any viewpoint nearby, try tracing the three great bends of the Liwu River and imagine the road squeezed in beside it. Then ask yourself what it took to put a highway there, and why people chose a waterfall in the cliff as the place to remember them.