Architect Huang Sheng-yuan and his firm, Tian Zhongyang Architectural Firm, approached the commission with a clear intention: to refuse the conventions of monumental grief. Cherry Orchard Cemetery uses cast-in-place concrete as its primary building material — a choice that preserves the texture of the wooden formwork, giving walls a warm, wood-grained surface rather than a cold, institutional finish. Slanted walls, geometric corridors, and natural light filtering into the columbarium create spaces that feel contemplative rather than oppressive. There are no large standing memorials. There is no extravagant ornamentation. The columbarium niches hold no photographs, a deliberate decision to reduce psychological pressure on visitors. Behind the tomb of Chiang Wei-shui, a grassy slope invites people to sit. The Zone D columbarium received the Best Work Award at the Taiwan Residential Architecture Award in 2010.

Cherry Orchard Cemetery spans 45.6 hectares across the mountainous terrain of Jiaoxi Township, at elevations between 750 and 800 meters. Planning began in 1999 under Yilan County Magistrate Liu Shou-cheng, with an investment of NT$846 million; the cemetery opened in 2009. The setting is genuinely arresting. From the upper sections of the grounds, the entire Lanyang Plain unfolds below — the green patchwork of rice fields giving way to the coastal lowlands, and beyond them the Pacific Ocean, with the volcanic cone of Guishan Island visible offshore on clear days. The Central Mountain Range walls the western horizon. It is a landscape that places human scale in appropriate relation to something much larger, which is, in its way, what a good cemetery does.

The cemetery's most historically significant resident is Chiang Wei-shui, born in Yilan in 1890, died in 1931 at forty years old. Chiang was a physician who became one of the central figures of Taiwan's resistance to Japanese colonial rule — not through arms, but through cultural and political organizing. He founded the Taiwanese Cultural Association in 1921 and helped establish the Taiwanese People's Party, the first legal political party in colonial Taiwan. His most famous piece of writing, "Certificate of Clinical Diagnosis," described Taiwan as a patient suffering from severe cultural malnutrition, and prescribed education and solidarity as the cure. He has been called "Taiwan's Sun Yat-sen," though the comparison flatters neither man's distinctiveness. Chiang was originally buried in Taipei's Dazhi district, later moved to the Liuzhangli Cemetery. On October 17, 2015, in a ceremony hosted by Yilan County Magistrate Lin Tsung-hsien and Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je, his remains were brought home to Yilan and interred in a specially built section called Wei Shui Hill. The 300-meter Snow Valley Trail through the cemetery takes its name from his courtesy name, Xuegu.

Cherry Orchard Cemetery is a public facility managed by the Yilan County Government's Funeral Management Department, open to Yilan residents. The facility offers three forms of interment: family columbarium niches holding between four and eighteen urns, individual columbarium sections, and eco-friendly natural burial — tree burial — in which cremated remains are placed in the earth without a permanent marker, becoming part of the landscape. The largest family columbarium accommodates up to 120 urns, though plots are limited and many are already reserved. The philosophy behind the options reflects something of the place's broader character: there is space here for families who want permanence and for those who want their loved ones to dissolve quietly back into the hillside, under the cherry trees, with the plain spread out below.