Alishan is a mountain forest of thousand-year-old red cypresses in Taiwan, and the narrow-gauge railway that climbs to it was built in 1912 to carry those same trees down to the coast. It now carries people the other way. On the way up it spirals a full loop around Dulishan, then climbs a staircase of four zigzags, reversing at each one, so you ride backwards and forwards in turn, the mountain swinging past the window each way. What it delivers you to is what the saws never reached. Raised boardwalks loop through the cypresses the loggers left standing, the largest forty-three metres tall and thirteen around at the base. Moss and ferns climb the bark, and the air underneath stays cold and still even at midday.
A shuttle train leaves in the dark for Zhushan, at 2,451 metres the highest station in the country. The wait up there ends when the sun clears the Yushan range and lights the cloud lying in the valleys below you. That cloud is also the reason for the tea. Alishan oolong grows a thousand metres lower, inside the fog. The mist cuts the sunlight and the wide day-to-night swing slows the leaf, so it lays in less bitterness and more sweetness; the tea houses pour it for you in rounds from a small clay pot, pale gold and floral. Japanese foresters planted cherries here a century ago, and the mountain holds Taiwan's largest stand of Yoshino, eighteen thousand trees in full flush in late March. All of it stands on Tsou land, cut through by the logging concession, and the Tsou villages ringing it run the firefly walks on the slopes below the forest line. For most of the last century the great draw was one cypress over three thousand years old. It had in fact been dead since a lightning strike in 1956, kept upright and topped with saplings so that it still looked alive. In 1997 half the trunk split away and crashed onto the railway line, and the rest was formally laid down beside the track the following year.