Yu Shan

Where is Yu Shan?

Yu Shan is part of the Yushan Range, Taiwan.

You will find it in: Taiwan.

Summit: 23.470° N, 120.957° E

The story behind it

The Chinese name means jade mountain, because in winter the snowy summit looks like a piece of pale green stone. While Taiwan was under Japanese administration the peak was renamed Niitakayama, new high mountain, after surveyors worked out that it beat Mount Fuji by 176 metres. The first recorded climb to the top was made in 1900 by the anthropologists Torii Ryuzo and Mori Ushinosuke. The rock up there was once the floor of the sea, and hikers can spot fossils of sea creatures in a cliff about a kilometre before Paiyun Lodge. Taiwan sits where the Philippine Sea Plate presses against the Eurasian Plate, and that slow shove is what lifted Yu Shan out of the water. Frost usually covers the summit from November to March. Yushan National Park, opened in 1985, is the largest in Taiwan and shelters the Formosan black bear, the sambar deer and the mountain hawk-eagle.

Find it on the globe

Yu Shan is there as a small peak with its own shape — a horn, a ridge, a volcano — standing on the surface. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.

It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.