Jiji — Taiwan | Shared Latitude

A small railway town rebuilt after Taiwan's devastating 1999 earthquake, now known for its century-old banyan tree and a station full of quiet resilience.

Jiji sits close to the epicenter of the 921 earthquake that devastated central Taiwan in 1999, and I didn’t fully understand what that meant until a guesthouse owner, unprompted, showed us photographs on her phone of the town’s wooden train station lying collapsed on its side. What stands there now is a careful, plank-by-plank reconstruction of the original 1930s Japanese-era building, and it has become one of the most photographed small stations in Taiwan — not despite the disaster, but because of how deliberately the town chose to rebuild rather than modernize.

Riding in on the Slowest Train I’ve Ever Loved

We rode the branch line in from Shuili on a train that seemed engineered for unhurriedness, wooden-slat seats and windows that actually opened, past fields where farmers were harvesting what looked like an enormous quantity of guava. Jiji is famous for its guava, sold from carts right outside the station in bags dusted with plum powder, and I ate my way through an entire bag before we’d even found our guesthouse.

The reconstructed wooden train station of Jiji with its distinctive Japanese-era architecture

The Banyan Tree That Swallowed a Building

A few minutes’ walk from the station stands Jiji’s famous banyan tree, over a century old, its aerial roots having grown down through and around an abandoned building until the structure and the tree are functionally the same object. Lia stood underneath it for a long time, tracing one of the thicker roots with her hand, while I tried and failed to get a photo that captured the actual scale of the thing.

The enormous aerial roots of Jiji's century-old banyan tree wrapped around an old building

Cycling Past the Wu Chang Palace

We rented bikes from a stall near the station and rode out along flat farm roads to Wu Chang Palace, a temple whose bell tower offers a view back over the whole valley. The ride there passes several small shrines still marked with plaques commemorating the 1999 earthquake, understated and easy to miss if you’re not looking, which somehow made them more affecting than a formal memorial would have been.

When to go: November through March offers the most comfortable cycling weather and clear valley views. The guava harvest peaks in autumn, which is reason enough on its own to time a visit for October or November.