Shifen Waterfall
Broad curtain-style cascade on a river bend, twenty meters high and forty meters wide, ringed by mining-era rail and hiking trails.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Shifen Waterfall in Taipei's Pingxi mining hills opens with a strange fact: for years visitors paid a toll to see Taiwan's widest waterfall, collected by local officials who had no legal right to charge for it. It traces the valley's history from Japanese-era coal mines and the 1921 railway built to haul that coal, past a town whose school once swelled past a thousand children, and looks at the odd backward-sloping rock the current has carved into swirling potholes beneath the falls. Look closely at the layered stone as you walk the tracks past the cascade.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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