Cingjing
"Lia looked around at the sheep, the chalets, and the fog rolling over the ridgeline and said, 'this isn't Taiwan anymore.'"
A high-altitude farm region in Nantou County where rolling green hills, sheep grazing at 1,750 metres, and a European-style guesthouse village feel improbably transplanted from the Alps.
I’d seen photos of Cingjing before we went and assumed, honestly, that they’d been color-graded to look more alpine than reality could deliver. They hadn’t. We drove up the switchbacks from Puli on a cool March morning, windows down, watching the vegetation shift from banana groves to something closer to highland pasture, and by the time we reached 1,750 metres the air had the bite of a place that has no business being on a subtropical island.
Sheep Above the Clouds
Cingjing Farm was established in the 1960s to resettle veterans of the Chinese Civil War and has since become one of Taiwan’s more surreal domestic tourism spots — a working sheep farm on a ridge in the Central Mountains where the resemblance to New Zealand or the Alps is clearly, deliberately leaned into. Twice-daily sheep shows have handlers herding flocks down the hillside for crowds of visitors, which sounds gimmicky and is gimmicky, and was somehow still delightful, largely because the setting around it — green slopes falling away into cloud, distant peaks appearing and disappearing through shifting fog — needs no gimmick at all.
We walked the Qingjing Skywalk, a sheltered path cantilevered off the mountainside with a glass-floored viewing platform near the end. Lia made it about halfway across the glass section before deciding she’d seen enough of the drop beneath her feet and retreated to solid ground, muttering something in French I chose not to ask her to translate.
A European Village That Shouldn’t Work, and Somehow Does
The area around the farm has filled in over the decades with a cluster of guesthouses built in deliberately European styles — mock-Tudor timber frames, a chalet with a bell tower, one place that seemed to be aiming for a vague Provençal look. It should feel kitsch, and does, a little, but after a day on the actual hillside among actual sheep in actual mountain fog, checking into a room with a steep pitched roof and a wood stove felt earned rather than absurd. We ate hot pot that night wrapped in blankets on a balcony, watching the fog roll through the valley below like a tide coming in.
When to go: March through May and October through November bring the clearest skies and most reliable mountain views; midsummer often means afternoon cloud cover rolling in early. Nights are cold year-round at this altitude, so pack layers regardless of season.