Qualla: Xiaolin Village Memorial Park

Xiaolin Village Memorial Park: Introduction

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit SSR2000, CC BY-SA 3.0. On the morning of August 9, 2009, at approximately 6:17 a.m., a massive landslide broke loose from the mountain above Xiaolin Village. Typhoon Morakot had been depositing rain for two days — in some nearby mountain areas, more than 2,700 millimeters fell in 72 hours, among the heaviest rainfall events ever recorded in Taiwan. The saturated hillside gave way in a movement covering roughly 2.5 square kilometers and a volume of 27 million cubic meters of debris. It crossed a valley, dammed the Chishan River, and buried most of Xiaolin Village. When the natural dam failed shortly after, the surge buried the rest. More than 400 people died — many of them Taivoan indigenous community members whose families had lived in this valley for generations.

Image: SSR2000 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Xiaolin Village Memorial Park: The People of Xiaolin

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit SSR2000, CC BY-SA 3.0. Xiaolin Village, also spelled Siaolin, was home to members of the Taivoan people — one of the Taiwanese plains indigenous groups whose presence in the river valleys of southern Taiwan predates the Han Chinese migrations by centuries. The Taivoan had survived successive waves of o...

Image: SSR2000 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Xiaolin Village Memorial Park: The Scale of the Loss

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit SSR2000, CC BY-SA 3.0. Typhoon Morakot was the most destructive typhoon to hit Taiwan since modern records began. Across southern Taiwan, more than 670 people died in the storm and its aftermath, with Xiaolin accounting for the largest single loss of life. Estimates of the Xiaolin death toll range in t...

Image: SSR2000 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Xiaolin Village Memorial Park: A Memorial Built from Stones That Fell

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit SSR2000, CC BY-SA 3.0. In the immediate aftermath, Kaohsiung County Magistrate Yang Chiu-hsing proposed establishing a memorial park on the site. The design that resulted is spare and deliberate. The park covers 1.7 hectares and includes an ancestral hall, a bridge, a memorial square, a monument, and a...

Image: SSR2000 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Xiaolin Village Memorial Park: Bearing Witness

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit SSR2000, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Xiaolin Village Memorial Park exists not as a tourist attraction in the ordinary sense but as a place of bearing witness — for survivors, for descendants, for anyone who comes to understand something about what happened here. The ancestral hall acknowledges the Taivoan herita...

Image: SSR2000 | CC BY-SA 3.0