A Piece of Wood the Sea Brought Back, Made Into Art

Drive north on Provincial Highway 11 from downtown Taitung and, thirty minutes in, you pass a place called Jialulan (加路蘭).

Most people drive straight past it. They don't even hold onto the name.

But if you're willing to stop, you'll find this is the gentlest place in Taitung where the discarded becomes art.

kararuan — the place for washing hair

"Jialulan" is a transliteration of the Amis (阿美族) word kararuan, which means "the place for washing hair."

Long ago, the Jialulan coast had freshwater springs and streams that ran down into the sea, and the Amis women would come here to wash their hair and their clothes. The people kept the name as a reminder for the generations after them — the water here was once very clean.

Today the Jialulan coast is a small coastal recreation area run by the East Coast National Scenic Area. Step off Highway 11 and you reach the Pacific in thirty seconds — no fences, no fee, and a parking lot — which is part of why it's so beloved.

A gift the typhoon brings

Every typhoon season, trees from deep in the Central Mountain Range are washed out to sea by the floods, and the Pacific carries them back to the shore — this is driftwood.

For a long time, driftwood was treated as waste, cleared away and burned by the authorities.

But from 2008, the East Coast National Scenic Area began handing the driftwood to artists — woodcarvers, architects, Indigenous craftspeople — to turn the discarded into art.

The Jialulan coast was the first stop in this movement. The whales, cocoons, waves, chairs, and oddly shaped open-air installations you see here today are all made from trees the typhoons returned to the shore.

This isn't an "exhibition." These are living works, left out by the sea for the long haul — blown by the wind, struck by the waves, sat on by visitors, and slowly weathered by time.

What Jialulan teaches you is this — nothing is ever truly waste. It just hasn't met the right pair of eyes yet.

How to spend your time at Jialulan

Jialulan is made for a short stop.

The 30-minute version

• Park and step out
• Walk the driftwood art trail (15 minutes)
• Walk down to the rock shelf by the sea (to see the tide out)
• Take a few photos

The 1-hour version (deeper)

• Everything in the 30-minute version above
• At low tide (check the tide table), walk out to the far end of the sea-carved rock shelf
• Look for coral, sea anemones, hermit crabs
• Find a rock, sit down, listen to the waves for 20 minutes, and do nothing at all

The half-day version (paired with Dulan and Sanxiantai)

• 05:00: Sunrise at Sanxiantai (三仙台) (summer)
• 07:30: Breakfast at Chenggong Fishing Harbour (成功漁港)
• 10:00: Art on the Jialulan coast
• 12:00: Lunch in Dulan (都蘭)
• 14:00: The Sintung Sugar Factory (新東糖廠) art colony in Dulan

The small things easy to miss

1. June to September each year: the East Coast Land Arts Festival (東海岸大地藝術節) brings new works to Jialulan, with the permanent and temporary pieces on show together
2. Before 06:00 at dawn: no one here, and the sound of the sea is full-bandwidth
3. At low tide: the rock shelf reaches 20 metres out to sea, and you can walk to places usually covered by the water
4. The small Amis village beside Jialulan: five minutes up the coast to the north there is a ceremonial altar that is not open to outsiders — please keep your distance

Why Jialulan is worth a 30-minute stop

For a traveller behind the wheel, the greatest thing about Jialulan is — it gets you out of the car.

That stretch of Highway 11 from Taitung to Dulan, Sanxiantai, and Changbin (長濱) is so beautiful it makes you not want to stop. But a road this beautiful has a trap — you start to believe "the view through the window is enough," and you miss the kind of jolt you only feel standing at the edge of the sea.

Jialulan is the "rest stop" on Highway 11 — it isn't so grand that you'll want to take a hundred photos, nor so involved that it costs you half a day of planning. It simply tells you to step out, walk a few paces, look at a piece of driftwood, look at a stretch of sea, and then get back on the road.

And that 30-minute stop is often the image you'll find yourself returning to most, long after the trip is over.

A closing note

We are getting better and better at "fast" — fast transport, fast photos, fast check-ins, fast on to the next spot.

But what Jialulan teaches you is this — slow can be an art form too.

Those pieces of driftwood drifted on the sea for months, washed ashore, and were made into art by an artist; their unit of time is the year, not the minute. The 30 minutes you stand before them is the only way you can fall into step with that sense of time.

Next time you pass Jialulan, please stop.

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Further reading:

• Pair it with Dulan: One Sugar Factory, a Band of Artists, a Stretch of Sea
• The Sanxiantai sea bridge: Across Eight Arches, to the Islands Three Immortals Left Behind
• To travel the whole east coast: East Coast Tribes, 3 Days