Baihe Reservoir (白河水庫)

Last Saturday afternoon, I drove up to the little reservoir which lies in Tainan County's northeastern Baihe district (白河區). Taking route 172 out of Lioujia (六甲區), through Liuying (柳營區) and Dongshan (東山區) districts, it was only a thirty minute drive. Of the two google maps screenshots to the right, the first shows the location of Baihe reservoir in broader geographical purlieu: to the north is Chiayi City and to the south are Tainan's three major reservoirs (Wushantou [烏山頭], Tseng-wen [曾文] and Nanhua [南化]). The second screenshot brings the outline of Baihe reservoir itself into clear resolution with the border between Tainan and Chiayi Counties clearly demarcated to the north. Notice that this image describes Baihe reservoir almost by cardinal aspects: to the east the reservoir takes on a fractal shape comparable to the fantastic Wushantou reservoir; to the west, the reservoir splits into a more substantial southern pool and a more meagre northern splinter. However that image fails to convey several important facts for the tourist; the first is that public access is limited to the southern end of the reservoir, and the second is the fact that the northern splinter of the reservoir is hidden from tourist view behind several intersecting hillocks clothed in copses of bamboo and deciduous trees. In addition, whereas the tourist can make visual contact with the reservoir only from its' southern tributary river to the western spillway (a distance of perhaps somewhat less than a kilometer), the map clearly describes a body of water approximately two kilometers in length on a south-west - north-east axis; much of the reservoir's north-eastern extent is precluded from view by the presence of river reeds stretching out toward the first foothills of the eastern mountains. Although the public access road to the reservoir affords only a limited perspective, it may be possible to find a small farmer's road to drive up into the nearby foothills to the north-east to look down on the reservoir from above - the view from the mountains themselves will come at the price of distance and is in any case likely to be obscured by haze.

Route 172 (going northward) has only one sign for Baihe reservoir; to mark out the little left turn onto the approach road through the trees and bamboo thickets behind which the reservoir lies some few hundred meters away. Instead, the route is signmarked for the various hot spring resorts of the locally famous Guanzihling (關子嶺) area. Reservoirs and water management infrastructure is, of course, strictly a minority interest which has yet to be capitalized upon, although the grounds of the reservoir do offer some landscape shots. Unlike Baihe reservoir's three larger cousins in Tainan, it must be approached on foot (there is a small car park in the grounds for a trivial fee). The grounds preceding the actual reservoir itself warrant only a cursory description: a car park, some conventional landscaping and two buildings at either end - one to house an office of the Southern Water Resources Agency to the south-east, and one to to the south-west to house a seemingly pointless tourist reception office for the "Siraya National Scenic Area". Heavily advertised and signmarked along all of the major eastern roads throughout Tainan County, the "Siraya National Scenic Area" is the government's attempt to "promote" what remains of the long-since displaced Siraya people (an aboriginal group) for tourism. The broader ethical subject of how the aboriginal people should now be treated today makes me feel sick: I would treat them as individuals, not as "peoples"; I would spurn the pluralized collective noun so often used by the Left. What those people need, individually, is property rights and an institutional architecture in which those rights would be acknowledged and preserved.

After parking, I decided to walk up to the south-eastern building which is closer to the entrance. The path slopes upwards at a slight angle, meaning that the view of the water itself remains only a promise until you actually pass the building and reach the fence: what you then see is a trickle of the southern river below. It is fenced off from the further encroachment of wetland reeds by a wall of sandbags. To the right, the way was barred by trees, so turning to the left I climbed a steep, rough and obviously earthquake-damaged stone staircase up a small, tree-covered hill. I stopped to shoot a small spider spinning its little web among the long since wild vegetation, but other than that there were only birds. At the top of the hill there is an old, abandoned and fenced off building opposite an inviting but likewise abandoned stone pavillion obviously designed for picnics. It's one of those strange little places liable to give me a sense of dejavu. This little hill offers charmingly imperfect, picture-postcard views out over the river toward the hills and mountains in an easterly to north-easterly direction; the electricity pylons provide a strong focus to pivot the beige-brown of the reeds below against the blue-green of the mountains and sky in the background. However, the thickness of the trees at the hill's summit - both bamboo and deciduous - obscures all view of the reservoir to the north west. Since there wasn't much to do there except finish my coffee and get bitten by mosquitos, I headed off down the sloping, north-westerly trail to the other side of the hill. Even whilst walking this slope, the trees were so thick as to obscure the reservoir all the way until I reached the bottom and rounded them. Below is a shot of that heavily canopied hill overlooking the tributary river from the northern end of the reservoir's dam (since this image was taken facing south-east, the mountains on the horizon patrol the boundary with Tseng-wen reservoir [曾文水庫] and Chiayi County's Dapu district [大埔鄉])...


Baihe reservoir itself, although it has a certain scenic charm, is a comparatively trivial body of water; with a storage capacity of just 9.69 million cubic meters (effective: 6.91 million cubic meters), it is approximately one tenth that of Wushantou reservoir to the south, or - to really distend the comparison - it is one sixtieth (yes, 1/60) of Tseng-wen reservoir. Baihe reservoir provides irrigation water to an area of less than 3,000 hectares which is 4.3% of that of Tseng-wen reservoir (曾文水庫) and 4.2% of Wushantou reservoir (烏山頭水庫). It is comparatively tiny. My first impression of the reservoir was immediately distilled as "a glorified pond", though this is partly because the reservoir is deeper than might initially be suspected and partly because, as mentioned, much of the reservoir is obscured by nature. And yet Baihe reservoir boasts a spectacularly steep spillway seemingly out of proportion to the meagre visual span of the reservoir itself - the contrast is intriguing and impossible not to notice. Where that part of the reservoir visible to the public is cloistered in by trees and small hills to the north and south and encumbered by the encroachment of reeds to the east, the spillway from the dam itself roars down some two hundred meters or so into a wide, echoing valley below - one which has recently been quarried out further with the effect of embellshing the contrast. The apparent mismatch however, is not entirely unjustified. Despite the modest circumference of the reservoir as it appears to the public eye, it has a depth guage at the spillway gates of 110 meters, though this depth will be a mere artifice of the reservoir bed's curvature - which I suspect was excavated at the behest of the engineers during the construction of the dam in the early 1960s. Certainly, as the southern tributary river enters the reservoir, surrounded as it is by reeds, the depth is unlikely to be anything more than a few meters and so the topography of the reservoir bed must be strikingly uneven - a few meters of river water flowing almost immediately into a hundred meter ditch just behind the dam's floodgate.


Fitting with the coziness of its picturesque appearance, Baihe reservoir hosts a small flotilla of those ubiquitous, plastic-pipe rafts which the Taiwanese use for fishing. As I was getting ready to leave in fact, two of the locals grabbed one of these things and headed off toward the northern splinter of the reservoir hidden from view behind the tree-claden hillocks. On seeing that, I immediately thought "eutrophication"; in addition to being dammed, the reservoir is constantly exposed to incoming water through two rivers coming down from the mountains, both of which pass through obviously fertile land. Along with Agongdian reservoir, which suffers from a similar problem (a large quantity of mud transferred through its' tributary river), Baihe reservoir is apparently one of five eutrophic reservoirs in Taiwan. There is a pumping tower adjacent to the public walkway onto the dam, but no information whatsoever is provided as to how often this is used (wild guess: once or twice a year) or the condition of the reservoir. The dam itself is only a short walk of a couple of hundred meters across and is not especially impressive, except for its' spillway - as already mentioned above. The lower reaches of the dam are however, covered in vegetation, which is an obvious sign of heavy eutrophication. The only attempt at interpretative signage at the entire site is this small sign which, in addition to mentioning that the reservoir was constructed in 1965 for the dual purpose of irrigation and flood control, is noteworthy for its clumsily overt psychology - like too much make-up or something:

"Stand on the dam and look at the shoreline slopes, the verdant plant cover, the mist that hangs over the water all year, and the surface reflecting an infinite expanse of green, and you will feel yourself lost in a beautiful landscape painting."

Whatever, woman. I don't need you or anyone else to tell me how I will feel. What I would like to have are facts, particularly facts concerning the design and construction of Baihe reservoir and facts concerning the engineers who worked on the reservoir from 1961 until 1965. Did they learn anything from the problems at Agongdian reservoir (阿公店水庫) further to the south in Kaohsiung County? I would also like to know about the reservoir's flood control effectiveness, and facts about its relative state of eutrophication over the years, possible fish stocks and other wildlife.

It's a shame when an information panel does so little to inform but so much to pander to the uninterested. I at least am not uninterested - that is why I went to see Baihe reservoir in the first place.