Dayuling (, el. 2565 m), formerly Hehuan Pass (), is a mountain pass in

Taiwan Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia, at the junction of the East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, with the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the northwest, Japan to the northe ...

transversing the

Central Mountain Range The Central Mountain Range is the principal mountain range on the island of Taiwan. It runs from the north of the island to the south. Due to this separation, connecting between the west and east is not very convenient. The tallest peak of th ...

between Hehuanshan and Mt. Bilu (畢祿山), within

Taroko National Park Taroko National Park () is one of the nine national parks in Taiwan and was named after the Taroko Gorge, the landmark gorge of the park carved by the Liwu River. The park spans Taichung Municipality, Nantou County, and Hualien County and is l ...

. Administratively, it is located in Xiulin,

Hualien County Hualien County (Mandarin Wade–Giles: Hua¹-lien² Hsien⁴; Pīnyīn: ''Huālián Xiàn''; Hokkien POJ: ''Hoa-lian-koān'' or ''Hoa-liân-koān''; Hakka PFS: ''Fâ-lièn-yen''; Amis: ''Kalingko'') is a county on the east coast of Taiwan ...

near the border with

Nantou County Nantou County (; Hokkien POJ: ''Lâm-tâu-koān''; Hakka PFS: ''Nàm-thèu-yen'') is the second largest county of Taiwan by area, located in the central part of the country. It is also the only non-coastal county in Taiwan. Its name derives fro ...

Description

Dayuling is located at the intersection of

Central Cross-Island Highway The Central Cross-Island Highway () or Provincial Highway 8 is one of three highway systems that connect the west coast with the east of Taiwan. Construction The construction of the Central Cross-Island Highway began on July 7, 1956 and was ...

and Provincial Highway 14A. As the highest point of the Central Cross-Island Highway, Dayuling is typically considered as the dividing point of the highway into its west and east sections. To the west, the highway passes through a short one-way tunnel known as the Hehuanshan Tunnel (合歡山隧道) before descending to Lishan. To the east, the highway passes through Tianxiang before dropping into Taroko Gorge. Meanwhile, Highway 14A branches away to the south, climbing to its peak at Wuling. Dayuling's surrounding area is known for its high-altitude agriculture, producing high-mountain tea, apples, and peaches.

History

Originally, a trail was built by the

Atayal people The Atayal (), also known as the Tayal and the Tayan, are a Taiwanese indigenous people. The Atayal people number around 90,000, approximately 15.9% of Taiwan's total indigenous population, making them the third-largest indigenous group. The pr ...

passed near Dayuling. During the Japanese occupation of Taiwan, the Governor-General of Taiwan,

Sakuma Samata General Count was a general in the Imperial Japanese Army, and 5th Governor-General of Taiwan from 11 April 1906 to May 1915. Biography Sakuma was born in Abu District, Nagato Province (present day Hagi, Yamaguchi), as the younger son of Ok ...

, ordered the construction of a road through the same trail as part of the five years plan to governing aborigines to better transport supplies in the

Truku War The Truku War (), is series of events happened between May and August 1914, involving the Truku indigenous group uprising against colonial Japanese forces in Japanese Taiwan. The conflict's main scope was to dominate the area around the area t ...

. After the change of power to the Kuomintang, the Nationalist government began building the Central Cross-Island Highway between 1956 and 1960.

Chiang Kai-shek Chiang Kai-shek (31 October 1887 – 5 April 1975), also known as Chiang Chung-cheng and Jiang Jieshi, was a Chinese Nationalist politician, revolutionary, and military leader who served as the leader of the Republic of China (ROC) from 1928 ...

visited the pass in 1958, renaming the site as "Dayuling" after the story of Great Flood of Gun-Yu (Gun-Yu is alternatively known as Dayu) as a reference to the difficult construction.

Geology

Dayuling is located within a

stratum In geology and related fields, a stratum ( : strata) is a layer of rock or sediment characterized by certain lithologic properties or attributes that distinguish it from adjacent layers from which it is separated by visible surfaces known as e ...

known as the Dayuling Formation (大禹嶺層), a subset of the Bilu Formation (畢祿山層). The stratum was first identified by geologist Zhaoxia Chen (陳肇夏) in 1979. The 2,200 meter thick layer is composed of

slate Slate is a fine-grained, foliated, homogeneous metamorphic rock derived from an original shale-type sedimentary rock composed of clay or volcanic ash through low-grade regional metamorphism. It is the finest grained foliated metamorphic ro ...

phyllite Phyllite ( ) is a type of foliated metamorphic rock created from slate that is further metamorphosed so that very fine grained white mica achieves a preferred orientation.Stephen Marshak ''Essentials of Geology'', 3rd ed. It is primarily compo ...

, and

quartzite Quartzite is a hard, non- foliated metamorphic rock which was originally pure quartz sandstone.Essentials of Geology, 3rd Edition, Stephen Marshak, p 182 Sandstone is converted into quartzite through heating and pressure usually related to tec ...

Nummulite A nummulite is a large lenticular fossil, characterized by its numerous coils, subdivided by septa into chambers. They are the shells of the fossil and present-day marine protozoan ''Nummulites'', a type of foraminiferan. Nummulites commonly vary ...

fossils were found near Dayuling, the first in Taiwan. Due to the

foliation In mathematics ( differential geometry), a foliation is an equivalence relation on an ''n''-manifold, the equivalence classes being connected, injectively immersed submanifolds, all of the same dimension ''p'', modeled on the decomposition ...

of the rock, the construction of Hehuanshan Tunnel at Dayuling proved to be difficult and prone to collapse.

References

{{reflist Mountain passes of Taiwan Landforms of Hualien County