At the edge of Taiwan’s rugged northern coast, Yehliu Geopark is a gallery of stone shaped by an artist older than civilization. Wind, water, and time have chiseled the sandstone into surreal forms—hollowed-out thrones, honeycombed altars, and spherical stones balanced like eggs laid by some primordial beast. But the most haunting sculpture is the central basin: a perfect stone disk cradled in the rock, its edges smoothed by centuries of tidal breath, its shallow pool a mirror for the sky.
The Unseen Sculptor
These shapes defy expectation. The “Queen’s Head,” a delicate mushroom rock, balances on a slender stalk as if defying gravity. Nearby, “Dragon’s Teeth” rise in jagged rows, gnawed by salt and wind into something between geology and myth. But the basin is different—its circular symmetry feels almost designed, as if the waves followed a blueprint. Science calls it erosion; the soul whispers of something more.
A Language Older Than Words
Standing here, it’s easy to imagine these stones as relics of a world before humans—a time when the earth’s memories were written not in words, but in stone. The basin, always half-filled with seawater, seems to pulse with the tides, a slow heartbeat. Local legends say such formations are the work of sea spirits or drowned giants. Perhaps they’re not wrong. The ocean has always been a storyteller, and Yehliu’s rocks are its runes.
Do the Stones Remember?
Geologists measure Yehliu’s formations in millennia, but the deeper question lingers: If a rock is shaped by centuries of wind and wave, does it hold those forces within it? Does the “Queen’s Head,” her neck thinned by endless storms, remember the tempests that carved her? Does the basin’s disk, polished by water’s patient hands, still hear the whispers of the sea?
We walk among these shapes as strangers, our lives fleeting against their slow dance with time. Yet for a moment, when the tide pulls back and the wind stills, Yehliu feels less like a park and more like a temple—one where the altars were made by no human, and the prayers are older than language.
The stones do not answer. But if you press your palm to their sun-warmed skin, you might feel the echo of the sea’s oldest song.
