Taroko Gorge is nineteen kilometres of canyon on the east coast of Taiwan, and the Liwu River has sawn every metre of it through solid marble. In the tightest stretches the walls stand a dozen metres apart, with hundreds of metres of rock above you. The marble began as a tropical seabed of shells and coral. Buried and squeezed by the collision that raised Taiwan's mountains, it recrystallised into stone, and the grey-and-white banding in the cliffs is that old seabed bedding, bent like taffy. The range is still rising several millimetres a year, among the fastest anywhere, and the river cuts down at the same rate to hold its bed at sea level. That race is why this is a slot and not a valley. The water runs jade green on settled days and grey with sediment after heavy rain.
A road was forced through the gorge with hand tools, its tunnels cut into the marble by men roped over the river, and it still carries you across the gap on red bridges. The Eternal Spring Shrine, white and vermilion, stands over a waterfall on the far bank in memory of the ones who died doing it. An earthquake in April 2024 brought the cliffs down onto that road. The best of it climbs away from the floor. Behind the visitor centre a boardwalk of close to 1,800 steps gains 300 metres in little more than a kilometre. From the top you watch the Liwu leave its marble slot and spread into farmland where it meets the Pacific, and the Truku settlements of Dali and Datong stand higher still. At Tianxiang, where the walls finally open out, a suspension bridge crosses to Xiangde Temple and stone stairs take you up to a pagoda above the trees. The shrine is the thing to look back at. Rockfalls have carried it off more than once, and it has been rebuilt every time.