The old logging village of Lintianshan

These images are displayed in Hualien County's Lintianshan (林田山), which between the 1920s and early 1970s was a centre of Taiwan's timber industry. According to this article, at one point over 2,000 people lived here. Now just a handful of households remain. Lintianshan itself is at the base of the mountains; the actual felling was done at higher elevations, reached by a network of narrow-guage railroads (see the pictures below) and cable links. In the photo above, notice the man on the right has a baby strapped to his back!

Industrial accidents were surely very common given the absence of helmets and harnesses, not to mention the precipices and unstable cliffs which characterize Taiwan's mountains.

To get an idea how far Lintianshan's logging railway penetrated into the interior, see maps 27 and 28 in the Central East Taiwan section of taiwanrailways.com.