Shifen Waterfall

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.