Here’s a question I couldn’t shake:

How does a tree become a business that changes the world?

I spent three days digging through the Revised Taiwan Provincial Chronicles: Natural History Volume. I went in expecting a list of native plants. What I found was something else entirely.

This wasn’t a botanical catalog.

It was a playbook for how a small island at the edge of the world used its trees to break into the global market.

From the “miasmic wilderness” early settlers feared, to the “Golden Camphor” that Western powers couldn’t get enough of — these archives aren’t really about plants. They’re about how natural resources get turned into algorithms of trade, power, and survival.

I. What a Tree Is Worth Depends on How You “Read” It

In the world of digital humanities, a plant is never just a plant.

It’s a “dynamic indicator” — telling you where the economy is heading, who holds power, and where money flows.

The flora section of the Revised Taiwan Provincial Chronicles looks like a dry catalog of Latin names and taxonomic classifications. But look closer, and it reads like a data log — acre by acre, the forests of Taiwan were measured, priced, and shipped out.

Taipei became Taipei not because of “strategic geography.” It became Taipei because the camphor trees were there.

Five Places That Shaped Taiwan’s Destiny

Before we go further, remember five names:

  • Mengjia (Wanhua): The northern gateway for forest resources
  • Keelung & Tamsui: The ports where camphor and tea went global
  • Puli (Nantou): The inland monitoring center for camphor collection
  • Nankan (Taoyuan) & Hsinchu: Frontier wilds of buffalo and dense forest
  • Beinan (Taitung): The eastern outlet after mountain development

Connect these five dots, and you get a map of 19th-century Taiwan’s resource extraction network.

II. From Scattered Notes to Data Systems: A 300-Year “Digitization” Campaign

Taiwan’s botanical data wasn’t built in a day.

The first person to try was Shen Guangwen. In his Miscellaneous Notes on Vegetation, he recorded the island’s strange and beautiful flora. But printing in those days was terrible, and most of his work was lost. Call it “Version 1.0” of Taiwan’s botanical database.

By the time the provincial chronicles were revised in the Republican era, the flora section had become a full-blown taxonomic catalog. Take Orchidaceae alone — it takes up a huge portion of the records, documenting hundreds of native species from the high mountains to the coast.

Then came the 1950s and 60s. Researchers like Liao Rijin began systematic studies of Lauraceae and Fagaceae. Plants stopped being “local products” and became computable data.

From “what’s this weed” to “what family does it belong to” — that transformation took three hundred years.

III. The Camphor Algorithm: How One Tree Cracked Global Trade

Why did Taiwan’s administrative center shift north in the 19th century?

Not because Tainan was bad. Because the camphor trees were in the north.

According to the Administrative Evolution Records, late-Qing Taiwan’s major exports were: Indigo, Coal, Tea, and Camphor.

Three out of four grew on mountainsides.

By the late 1800s, Taipei and Yilan had reached 420,000 people. That number pushed Shen Baozhen to make a decision: establish “Taipei Prefecture.”

Not because Taipei had more people — because the northern forests needed to be managed.

Camphor wasn’t just medicine or industrial raw material. It was diplomatic leverage. During the late Qing, the imperial court withheld all customs and internal taxes from camphor and tea to fund military defense — not a single coin sent north.

A tree gets cut down, and turns into medicine. Then into money. Then into warship fuel. Then into a chess piece on the diplomatic board.

IV. Opening the Mountains: Turning “Unclaimed Land” into Balance Sheet Numbers

The expansion of administrative territory was essentially a “data capture” operation.

Under the Ming-Zheng regime, Taiwan operated on a simple model: wherever the army went, administration followed.

By the late Qing, that model broke. The camphor in the mountains was too valuable. The existing officials couldn’t keep up — in their own words, “the whip was not long enough.”

So officials were dispatched deeper into the mountains, to Beinan and Shuishalian.

But opening the mountains cost money. Governor Liu Mingchuan launched a land tax reform. He raised revenue from 1.1 million taels to — actually, it dropped to 670,000 taels.

Wait. Doesn’t that sound wrong?

1.1 million to 670,000? That’s a decrease.

Here’s the catch: the reform uncovered land that had been hidden from tax records for generations. Individual tax rates went down, but the total taxable area expanded. That’s what real “digitization” looks like — turning every plot of land into a number on a ledger.

Even so, the military and administrative costs of mountain governance still required 800,000 taels annually. The math was clear, but the books never balanced.

The lesson: natural resource development requires a transparent fiscal algorithm. Otherwise, all the trees in the mountain won’t save you.

V. Plants Don’t Stay Silent — They Carve Their Names Into Maps

Taiwan is full of place names that tell you what used to grow there:

“Fire-scorched Camphor.” “Camphor Bay.” “Camphor Hollow.”

These were all camphor forests. The loggers came, the trees fell — but the names stayed.

Then there are names like “Sugar Mill Village” and “Stone Cart Village” — markers of the sugarcane economy. Sugarcane followed the settlers; wherever they went, the mills followed.

The beauty of local chronicles is that they preserve raw observations too. Like the “Hang-upside-down Bird” — a species from the Philippines that refused to perch normally. Or the sweet potato — described as “miraculously sustaining life and averting disaster.”

These aren’t scientific data points. But they have more warmth than any dataset.

From “can we eat this” to “this is beautiful” to “this belongs to genus X, family Y” — the journey of plants through the chronicles is itself a history of civilization.

VI. Lessons for Today: The “Sustainability Algorithm” of the Forest

After reading through the chronicles, three questions stayed with me:

First, no data means no governance.

The Qing extracted its “first pot of gold” from the mountains because Shen Baozhen and Liu Mingchuan conducted precise audits of mountain taxes. Modern conservation needs the same — an accurate natural capital ledger.

Second, ecological boundaries define administrative ones.

The evolution from “unclaimed wilderness” to formal districts reminds us: borders shouldn’t be drawn from map lines alone. They need to follow how water flows, where mountains rise, and what trees grow.

Third, cultural DNA and biodiversity are the same thing.

The catalog of native orchids and camphor trees is more than a biological asset. It’s evidence of historical sovereignty and cultural identity. Sometimes, where a tree grows is more convincing than a land deed.

Final Thought

A forest is never just a collection of trees. It’s a historical dataset.

Every camphor tree felled, every shipment of tea exported — these were iterations of Taiwan’s ongoing effort to optimize its “survival algorithm.”

And when we open these yellowed local chronicles today, it’s not for nostalgia.

It’s to read those algorithms — and use them to think about tomorrow.