Baxian Caves: Archaeology and Sacred Geography on Taiwan’s Coast

Along Taiwan’s remote east coast, a run of cave mouths opens out of a limestone cliff above the Pacific — dark, weathered hollows that once sat below the waterline. Baxian Caves, named for the Eight Immortals of Chinese folklore, hold the oldest confirmed evidence of human life anywhere on the island, layered underneath more than a century of shrines, altars and incense smoke. Odyssey’s Taiwan Lantern Festival small group tour stops here on its coastal drive between Hualien and Chihpen, a quiet counterpoint to the lantern-lit nights earlier in the itinerary. It is a place where geology, prehistory and living religious practice sit stacked on top of one another in the same cliff face.

Baxian Caves and Taiwan’s Deepest Prehistory

The caves sit on a cliff above Provincial Highway 11, roughly 100 metres above current sea level, in a stretch of coastline shaped by a very long argument between rock and ocean. Originally formed at the waterline by wave action, they were pushed upward as the Philippine Sea and Eurasian tectonic plates ground against each other over hundreds of thousands of years — the same forces that continue to lift Taiwan’s eastern seaboard today. More than ten distinct caverns are cut into the cliff, varying widely in size and depth, and the visible pockmarking along the rock face makes the uplift easy to read even without any geological training.

This is also, as far as archaeologists can currently tell, the site of the earliest human presence anywhere in Taiwan. The wider journey through the Taiwan Lantern Festival tour moves between ritual, coastline and civic history; Baxian Caves adds prehistory to that list, on a timescale that dwarfs everything else on the itinerary.

How much walking does a visit to Baxian Caves involve?

Expect a short, moderately steep climb rather than a level stroll. A visitor centre sits at the base of the cliff, reached by paved paths, and stone steps lead up from there to the main caves, which are arranged across two levels of the rock face. There is no lift or ramp to the upper caves, so travellers who find stairs difficult are better served spending their time at the lower level and the visitor centre exhibits, which cover the same history at ground level.

The Oldest Human Presence in Taiwan

The site’s significance surfaced almost by accident. In March 1968, geologist Lin Chao-chi of National Taiwan University noticed rock layers during a survey that looked worth a closer look. Between 1968 and 1970, archaeologist Sung Wen-hsun led an excavation team that confirmed what those layers implied: a pre-ceramic, pre-agricultural culture had lived in and around these caves long before anything else known in Taiwan. Lee Chi, then director of Academia Sinica’s Institute of History and Philology, gave the culture its name — Changbin Culture, after the surrounding township — following his own visit to the dig soon after the first finds came in.

The people who left these tools behind used no pottery, no polished stone and no agriculture; their implements were single-faced flakes struck from pebbles gathered on the beach below, supplemented by tools of bone and antler. Because the last Ice Age had lowered sea levels enough to expose a land bridge across the Taiwan Strait, researchers have generally assumed these early inhabitants walked in from what is now mainland China in pursuit of migrating game, though similar stone-tool traditions in the Philippines, Vietnam and Indonesia have also led some archaeologists to argue for an arrival by sea from Southeast Asia. No human remains have yet settled the question either way.

How old are the tools found at Baxian Caves?

The earliest flaked stone tools recovered here date back roughly 30,000 years, which is what makes Baxian Caves the oldest confirmed site of human habitation in Taiwan. Later, more detailed excavation work at the same caves has narrowed some of the flake-tool layers to a range of about 27,000 to 15,000 years ago. Archaeologists group this entire pre-ceramic toolmaking tradition under the name Changbin Culture, and its use of the caves appears to have tapered off roughly five thousand years ago, well before Taiwan’s Neolithic farming cultures took hold elsewhere on the island.

From Sea Caves to Sacred Ground

Long after the last Changbin toolmakers moved on, the caves acquired a second identity. Han Chinese settlers who arrived later attached a folk legend to the site: that the Eight Immortals of Chinese mythology, associated with the mystical Penglai Islands, had rested here on their travels. That story gave the caves their present name and drew temple-building in its wake — statues of the Eight Immortals themselves, but also Buddha, Guanyin and local earth gods, installed inside caverns that had sheltered people for tens of thousands of years before any of these traditions existed. The Amis people, who have lived along this coast since at least 1500 BC, knew the caves by an older name, Lohan, simply meaning “caves.”

Are the shrines still inside the caves today?

Some are, though considerably fewer than in past decades. For years, local worshippers kept altars and statues inside several caves, and one cavern served as an elderly hermit’s home until as recently as 2017. That year, Taitung County’s government, together with the East Coast National Scenic Area authority and the local township office, completed the reclamation of all thirty caves in the area under Taiwan’s Cultural Heritage Preservation Act, in order to protect the site’s archaeological value. Some shrines and statues have since been relocated or removed, but incense still burns in a number of the lower caves, which continue to function as informal places of worship alongside the exhibits on Changbin Culture.

Baxian Caves in the Day’s Journey

On the tour, Baxian Caves is the second of two coastal pauses on the drive south from Hualien to Chihpen. The morning stop is Sanxiantai, where three immense rocks and a scalloped footbridge sit just up the coast; the geology there is younger and more dramatic to look at, but tells a related story of a shoreline still being remade by sea and tectonic pressure. The previous day’s drive had already passed the marble sea cliffs covered in our article on Qingshui Cliff, so travellers arrive at Baxian Caves having already had two days to notice how much of Taiwan’s east coast has been carved, lifted and folded rather than simply eroded flat.

How long does the tour spend at Baxian Caves?

Odyssey’s published itinerary doesn’t set out an exact number of minutes for this stop; it is treated as a brief pause between Sanxiantai and the overnight stop at Chihpen’s hot springs, with the Program Leader judging the pace against the day’s road time. In practice that is generally enough to walk from the visitor centre up to two or three of the accessible caves, read the display panels on the Changbin Culture finds, and continue on to Chihpen in time to enjoy the hot springs before dinner.

A Layered Landscape, Not a Single Story

What makes Baxian Caves worth the stop is less any single fact than the stack of unrelated stories the site is asked to hold at once: a cliff still rising out of the sea, tool-users who arrived here tens of thousands of years before anyone wrote anything down, and a religious layer of Eight Immortals, Buddhas and earth gods added only in the last few centuries. It is a theme that surfaces again later in the tour at the Holy Monk Shrine at Sun Moon Lake, where a very different set of beliefs has been laid over Taiwan’s landscape in an equally deliberate way. Between the two sites, and everything the tour visits in between, Taiwan’s coastline turns out to be less a backdrop for travel and more a record of who has passed through it, and when.

Few stops on the tour ask travellers to hold quite this much time in their head at once — thirty thousand years of toolmakers, a few hundred years of temple-building, and a cliff face still being pushed skyward by forces that have nothing to do with either. It is a fitting quiet pause between the lantern-lit nights of Taipei and the hot springs waiting at Chihpen, and one more reason the coastal half of this journey rewards close attention rather than a quick look out the coach window.