Sun Moon Lake

The lake lies in the basin the Qing knew as Shuishalian, the country of the Thao, who fished it and farmed its shores long before Han settlers pushed inland from the Changhua plain in the 18th and 19th centuries. The two halves of the water gave it its Chinese name: a rounder eastern basin likened to the sun and a crescent western one to the moon, divided by the hill that became Lalu Island. Qing officials, missionaries and later Japanese surveyors all described it as one of the sights of the interior.

The lake that exists today is partly man-made. Between 1919 and 1934 the Japanese colonial government built a scheme that diverted water from the Zhuoshui River through a tunnel into the basin and dammed its outlet, raising the water level to drive the power stations below. Farmland and Thao settlements went under, Lalu shrank to a rock, and the community was moved to the site that is now Ita Thao. The power stations made the lake central to Taiwan's electricity supply for decades.

Tourism followed the road. Guest houses and temples spread along the shore after 1945, and the Ci'en Pagoda was built above the southern bank in 1971. The Jiji earthquake of 21 September 1999, centred a short distance away in Nantou, destroyed hotels, roads and much of Ita Thao. Reconstruction remade the lake as a resort under a national scenic area, adding the round-the-lake cycle path, new piers, a visitor centre on the western shore and, at the end of 2009, the ropeway.

The Thao are one of the smallest of Taiwan's officially recognised Indigenous peoples, numbering around 800, and recognition came late, in August 2001, when they were made the tenth recognised group. Their highest ancestral spirits are held to live on Lalu Island, the pestle song is sounded to notify those spirits before a ceremony, and that music — wooden pestles struck on a stone — grew out of the pounding of millet by the women of the community. The harvest ceremonies of late summer remain the centre of the community's year, and much of what visitors see on stage is a shortened, public version of a longer private calendar.

Han religious life is just as visible. Wen Wu Temple, rebuilt when the rising water drowned two older shrines, puts Confucius and the god of war under one roof and draws students before examinations; the Xuanzang and Xuanguang temples on the southern shore were built around relics of the Tang monk and are quieter places of pilgrimage. The lake also carries a layer of mid-20th-century state memory, from the pagoda raised in a mother's honour to the villa where Chiang Kai-shek stayed.

Above all this is a place people come to look at. Photography, cycling and the September swim have given the lake a set of modern rituals of its own, and the seasonal rhythms of tea picking and mist on the water shape how it is shown on postcards and in painting.

Yuchi Township, which contains the lake, is a small rural township of the central hills, and Ita Thao a village at one end of it. Almost everything turns on visitors: hotels and homestays, boat crews, bus and taxi drivers, bicycle hire, the ropeway, souvenir and snack stalls, and the tea gardens and mushroom farms on the slopes behind. Many staff commute up from Puli, the nearest real town, or from Shuili below.

The daily rhythm is unusual for Taiwan. Mornings begin early with photographers and cyclists out for the mist; the piers fill from mid-morning as coaches arrive; and the villages empty in the early evening when day trippers leave, so that Shuishe and Ita Thao are quiet by the standards of a Taiwanese town after dark. Weekends and national holidays reverse this completely, filling the shore road with traffic.

Local debates are the familiar ones of a small resort: how much building the shoreline can take, water levels in dry years — the lake is a reservoir as well as a view, and its level visibly drops in a drought — and how the Thao community keeps control of land and ritual sites in a place whose economy depends on outsiders. Younger residents often leave for Taichung to study or work, returning at festival time.

The lake's signature dish is the fish the Chinese menus call zongtong yu, "presidential fish", a freshwater species said to have been a favourite of Chiang Kai-shek and usually steamed with ginger and spring onion or fried whole. Other lake and river fish, freshwater shrimp and the small fried fish sold in paper bags belong to the same tradition, and mushrooms grown in the humid hills around Puli turn up grilled, in soups and dried in shops along the shore.

Ita Thao's lane is the place for snacking. Wild boar sausage grilled over charcoal, millet wine, mochi pounded to order, fried mushrooms, and the small round tea-scented buns sold hot from ovens are the staples, along with shaved ice in summer. Stalls by the temples and piers sell tea eggs simmered in black tea with shiitake and spices, a smell that hangs around Wen Wu Temple all day.

Tea is the lake's other export. The region is known for large-leaf black teas, above all Hongyu, a hybrid of assam and a native Taiwanese variety sold as Ruby or No. 18, with its notes of honey, cinnamon and mint. Tea houses on the hillside above Ita Thao brew it by the pot with a view over the water, and packets of leaf tea, tea cakes and black tea ice cream are the standard thing to take home.