Wushantou Reservoir (烏山頭水庫) Trip

Wushantou Reservoir lies very close to the Lioujia District of Tainan County, where the plains begin to meet the first foothills marching away into the distant mountains of Nanxi and Nanhua further out to the east where the other two reservoirs lie (Tseng-Wen [曾文水庫] and Nanhua [南化水庫] respectively). It is also the oldest of the three having apparently been constructed between 1921 and 1930 under the direction of the Japanese civil engineer Hata Yoichi during Formosa's colonization by the Japanese*.


Of course, the public information on Yoichi in English was not subjected to any sort of quality control, but the basic factual claims are clear enough, if sorely lacking in detail; I could have read a few pages on this fellow and not thought my time wasted.


The mapped layout of Wushantou Reservoir shown above is actually quite uninformative, since it shows only those spots deemed by the authorities to be of interest to visitors whilst failing to give a proper geographical description of the reservoir itself - notice how the reservoir is presented merely as a blue area fading to white as it disappears off the top of the board. For me this is a negative because the geography is actually quite interesting; from the top of the levy, Wushantou appears much smaller to the eye than either Tseng-Wen (曾文水庫) or Nanhua (南化水庫), and yet it is a fair size as its' disintegrated, chaotic-cactus-like appearance on this irrigation map below indicates.


Note the position of Tseng-Wen reservoir at the top of the map with its' two outflowing rivers to the north and south. The contrast is due to the fact that Wushantou reservoir lies well to the west of the mountains (which, though not shown on that map, cover the entire white area to the top of that image) with its minor constituent pools lying in the little troughs between the hills and ridges with small feeder streams running between and connecting them. It is possible to catch glimpses of some of these constituent pools from way up on the mountainside beneath the electricity pylons on route 174, but they cannot be rendered comprehensible from a single encompassing point unless it be from the air.


The blue mountains blocking the horizon of this image straddle the County districts of Dongshan to the north and left (with the Guanziling hot springs), Lioujia in the centre and Danei to the south and extreme right; on the other side of them is Nanxi district where the much larger Tseng-Wen (曾文水庫) reservoir can be approached. Wushantou reservoir itself however, seems to deflect all approach but from the west (which I think of as the "front") - even as it invites with glimpses of little half-villages on the other side...


Toward the south end of the western levy from which the reservoir is viewed (and from which these images above were taken) there is an unremarkable little mansion behind a grove of trees elevated on a natural hill, within which there is a statue of Jiǎng​ Jiè​shí (蔣介石, and known in the west as "Chiang Kai-shek" the "generalissimo", even though he was an incompetent general and mass-murderer of civilians**).


Wushantou reservoir must have been a favourite spot of the KMT leadership, since, to this very day, the staircase to the hill is prefaced by an immaculately maintained helicopter landing spot!


The statue itself is mounted on a plinth inscribed with the usual hagiographic guff, though the red lithographs*** set into the lower sides of the thing are remarkable for their anachronistic appearance today, highlighted by the mocking stains of already age-tinted birdshit.


Whilst the statue and all other artifacts on that hill were either rusting away, cracked, broken or in a general state of disrepair, the trees populating the grove were evidently being trimmed once in a while and generally looked after. They were mostly Junipers with a few Rosewoods, and one or two of a tree in which I have some interest: the Camphor tree (牛樟樹).


Aside from the petroleum base, camphor is the chief ingredient in anti-mosquito creams such as Tiger Balm, Mentholatum cream and Green Oil.


Blurry as this picture is (even on automatic focus, it's not easy to focus on little camphor berries in the breeze - and they were slightly too high to be got hold of between thumb and forefinger), it does at least give some detail on the camphor berrry. Back in the 1860s, the Americans (and later the Brits) had realized that camphor could be used, in conjunction with nitrocellulose, to produce the world's first plastic: celluloid. During the brief period of forty years or so between the ratification of the treaty of Tientsin in 1860, and the handing over of Formosa to the Japanese in 1895, Taiwan may well have been the world's foremost exporter of camphor (which other countries were exporting it?) - fulfilling a critical function in the global market for celluloid-based products (e.g. camera film, dolls, stationary), much like the semi-conductor industry in Taiwan today fulfills a critical function in the global market for consumer electronics products. This is another aspect of Taiwanese history which many Taiwanese are themselves unaware of.


Back to the red-propaganda nonsense; this one is on the east side of the 蔣介石 statue and features a fairly poor etching of a row of P40s (with cockpit canopies retracted) many of which were later captured by the (other) commies.


This image above shows the dictator gesturing toward what would seem to be the north end of Wushantou reservoir - he was perhaps inspecting repairs to the dam, as the water is released through a series of large pipes to the north end of the reservoir, set beneath its clay levy from which the previous images above were taken.


This image shows the dam outlet from an angle off to the left with the flat line of the levy clearly visible above. Of course the pipes will have been refitted in recent years but it's remarkable in a young country like Taiwan that this is a more than 80 year old piece of (Japanese) civil engineering still serving the agricultural needs of the farmers in Tainan County's central plains today.

To the left of that last image (hidden by the tree), there is a small building housing a museum dedicated to the history of the reservoir and the people involved in making it. I spent a little time in there, but it contained more than enough to suck me in for at least an hour, so I decided to quickly cool off under one of the showers they had built in the family play area, head off back to Lioujia to get some 雞肉飯 (chicken rice) and a beer and then see if I could drive around to the other side - the east side - of the reservoir and take some pictures from there while the light was still good.

Alas I didn't find any proper access roads leading down to the reservoir from the east side; route 174 just kept climbing into the mountains. There were however, a few tiny farmer's trails snaking away into the bamboo, strewn with dead leaves. There were no signs so I drove the bike a little way down one of these and then decided to get off and walk. After about 20 minutes going steeply downhill to what I hoped may have been one of Wushantou's constituent pools, I entered a little clearing full of lime bushes (青檸喬木) planted in rows beside a dried up stream with a few banana trees at the back.


A half of one of those limes, cut into two pieces, is what I put in my gin and tonic at night. It was eerily quiet down there next to that dried up stream; I was trespassing in any case, so I was concerned to get out quickly lest I be discovered and have to apologize to the owner and explain what I, some random foreigner, was doing wandering around with a professional-looking camera in his grove of immaculate lime bushes.

That little foray was disappointing (though not without interest and a certain disturbing discovery**** on my way back up the trail), and so I headed back to shoot the reservoir from the west side some more before heading off home.


The light had changed by this time due to the heavy clouds rumbling in from the mountains out east and I began to think I might get soaked. On the way back I stopped to photo the blue wharehouse of a steel rod supplier (for the yacht industry in Kaohsiung).


Given the circumstances in which I left Wushantou, it struck me as somewhat serendipitous to come across this apparition from Conrad's book. The inadequacy of words, indeed.


* Formosa was of course occupied by Japan from 1895 to 1945, following the Sino-Japanese war over Korea; yet it was actually the British Foreign Office which was partly responsible for this turn of events since it was they who issued a defacto sanction to the deal by indicating to the Qing their unwillingness to intervene on behalf of British trading interests on Formosa (I have papers for this somewhere which, if my memory serves me well, include copies of the written correspondence between the British Consul and the Foreign Office).

** It was under his rule that the KMT instigated periods of "White Terror" both in China and on Taiwan.

*** 1970s KMT propaganda, as evinced by the modern-looking train.

**** Of which I'd rather not say anything at this point (and for very good reason, so don't ask - I may relate what it was I found at some point in the future, but not now). Please bear in mind that this is my blog, and I am, in some ways, my own most important reader.