It may have been destiny — a fate that the victim himself foresaw on a number of occasions.
Prominent local banker Lin Keh-hsiao (林克孝), who had been an avid hiker and mountain climber since his teenage days, fell off a cliff to his death while hiking in Yilan County on Aug. 10, succumbing to a passion for Aboriginal legends that had gripped him for the past nine years.
The 51-year-old president of Taishin Financial Holding Co was climbing Shusuei Mountain (束穗山) with two Aboriginal guides near Nanao Township (南澳) when he tripped and fell while negotiating a narrow trail pass above a steep cliff.
Photo courtesy of Lin Keh-hsiao’s family
The accident occurred in an area so remote that the guides needed 11 hours to reach civilization to call for help after seeing Lin’s lifeless body and it took three days before his corpse was airlifted out of the mountains and sent home.
Lin had been drawn to the area for the first time nine years earlier, when he decided to pursue the legend of an Atayal girl who fell to her death in a turbulent stream at the end of World War II.
His curiosity about the story surrounding the 17-year-old Atayal girl named Sayion led him to spend six years retracing the long-abandoned tribal route she walked from deep in the mountains in southern Yilan County to the coastal town of Nanao.
According to the legend, Sayion was carrying the belongings of her Japanese mentor — a policeman stationed in the mountains — to the coast after he had been called back to Japan just before the end of World War II. She had almost reached her destination when she apparently slipped into the stream and was killed by the fall. The Atayal found her corpse and buried it, along with, they hoped, news of the accident.
Pulling Lin to the story was a song — one he had listened to since childhood and had become fond of — that became the theme song of a Japanese movie based on Sayion’s story, known as Sayion’s Bell.
However, the real lure for Lin was how a “minor accident turned into a great legend.”
The Japanese colonialists used it for propaganda purposes to extol the virtues of following Japanese rule, while the then-Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government made a point of trying to erase it from memory.
At the time of Lin’s death, he had embarked on a new mission that would form the basis of his second book — tracing how a group of Atayal people called the Klesan trekked across the mountains from what is now Nantou County to Yilan about 300 years ago. If anything, the new venture posed greater risks than his pursuit of Sayion’s legend and he knew it.
In one TV interview, Lin joked that he might not find his way home one day in the future because his hobby was leading him to increasingly remote and dangerous destinations, but as he recounted in his book on the Sayion legend, Finding the Way — Moonlight, Sayion and the Klesan, the temptation of discovery was too much for him to resist.
To Lin, retracing Sayion’s trail was a serendipitous pursuit.
“New findings, which bounced out one after another, made them endless new traps, magnetizing me to jump into a series of dreamlike, yet solidly true experiences,” he wrote. “Once I started, I could not stop.”
Though Lin had a doctorate in economics from the University of Washington and taught finance at National Taiwan University (NTU), where he earned his undergraduate degree, his passion for the Atayal legend was not a surprise. Those who knew him said he had a poetic and compassionate side.
He went with his NTU sweetheart for postgraduate studies to the US, where she fell ill with cancer and never recovered. He took care of her until her death and remained single until he was 46, many years after returning to Taiwan. He later fell in love with his secretary and they got married in the mountains near Nanao.
Lin was also a philanthropist, inviting Nanao elementary-school students and teachers to tour Taipei 101; sending LED lamps and translation machines to graduates in the village; sponsoring school choirs to perform in Taipei; and financing roots-seeking programs for Atayal children.
In his free time, Lin hit the hiking trails as often as possible, a hobby he developed during his childhood. He had tamed many mountains in Taiwan and abroad over the past three decades, including the 4,392m tall Mount Rainier in the northwest of the US.
However, he could not escape the thought that the mountain treks needed to pursue his passion for -Atayal culture might come to a sad end.
In his letter to a friend from the NTU Mountaineering Club in 2009 after an NTU alumnus, a medical doctor, fell to his death while scaling the 3,603m tall Siangyang, Lin wrote that he often thought during solo climbs that he might fall and end up stuck in a place where he would not be found.
“If that were to happen, I would miss my family very much and would yell out of my heart to them that I love them. I hope everybody would be strong enough to forgive my negligence,” Lin wrote.
‘DENIAL DEFENSE’: The US would increase its military presence with uncrewed ships, and submarines, while boosting defense in the Indo-Pacific, a Pete Hegseth memo said The US is reorienting its military strategy to focus primarily on deterring a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan, a memo signed by US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth showed. The memo also called on Taiwan to increase its defense spending. The document, known as the “Interim National Defense Strategic Guidance,” was distributed this month and detailed the national defense plans of US President Donald Trump’s administration, an article in the Washington Post said on Saturday. It outlines how the US can prepare for a potential war with China and defend itself from threats in the “near abroad,” including Greenland and the Panama
The High Prosecutors’ Office yesterday withdrew an appeal against the acquittal of a former bank manager 22 years after his death, marking Taiwan’s first instance of prosecutors rendering posthumous justice to a wrongfully convicted defendant. Chu Ching-en (諸慶恩) — formerly a manager at the Taipei branch of BNP Paribas — was in 1999 accused by Weng Mao-chung (翁茂鍾), then-president of Chia Her Industrial Co, of forging a request for a fixed deposit of US$10 million by I-Hwa Industrial Co, a subsidiary of Chia Her, which was used as collateral. Chu was ruled not guilty in the first trial, but was found guilty
DEADLOCK: As the commission is unable to forum a quorum to review license renewal applications, the channel operators are not at fault and can air past their license date The National Communications Commission (NCC) yesterday said that the Public Television Service (PTS) and 36 other television and radio broadcasters could continue airing, despite the commission’s inability to meet a quorum to review their license renewal applications. The licenses of PTS and the other channels are set to expire between this month and June. The National Communications Commission Organization Act (國家通訊傳播委員會組織法) stipulates that the commission must meet the mandated quorum of four to hold a valid meeting. The seven-member commission currently has only three commissioners. “We have informed the channel operators of the progress we have made in reviewing their license renewal applications, and
A wild live dugong was found in Taiwan for the first time in 88 years, after it was accidentally caught by a fisher’s net on Tuesday in Yilan County’s Fenniaolin (粉鳥林). This is the first sighting of the species in Taiwan since 1937, having already been considered “extinct” in the country and considered as “vulnerable” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. A fisher surnamed Chen (陳) went to Fenniaolin to collect the fish in his netting, but instead caught a 3m long, 500kg dugong. The fisher released the animal back into the wild, not realizing it was an endangered species at