Before the dams and the renaming and the earthquake, Lalu was large enough that people lived on it. It divided Sun Moon Lake into two distinct bodies of water — one curving like a crescent moon, the other round as the sun — and that geography gave the lake its name. The Thao people, who have called the shores of this lake home for generations, knew the island as Lalu. During the Qing dynasty, settlers called it Pearl Mountain. Japanese administrators renamed it Jade Island. After 1949, the Nationalist government renamed it Kwanghwa Island. The island accumulated names the way contested places do — each one a claim, each one a displacement of the one before. What remained constant through all of it was the island itself: small, forested, surrounded by the green water of Sun Moon Lake, and carrying a significance for the Thao that no government renaming could erase.
The Thao are one of Taiwan's indigenous peoples, and Sun Moon Lake is the center of their world. Their oral tradition tells of hunters following a white deer through the mountains — the deer led them to the lake, and what they found was not just beauty but abundance: fish, fresh water, a place to live. Today, a marble statue of that white deer stands on Lalu Island, a quiet acknowledgment of the founding story. The Thao have endured successive administrations that treated the lake as a scenic resource and the island as a landmark, without always considering what the place meant to the people who had been there longest. Lalu is not merely a geographic feature to the Thao — it is spiritually significant, a place tied to their identity and their history in a way that resists reduction to tourist attraction. Visiting with that awareness changes how the island appears across the water.
The pattern of renaming Lalu tracks the larger history of colonial authority over Taiwan. During Qing dynasty settlement, the island acquired the name Pearl Mountain — a Chinese reference to its appearance, displacing the Thao name. Under Japanese rule, beginning in 1895, it became Jade Island. Then in the 1930s, the Japanese built a dam that raised the water level across Sun Moon Lake. The island, once large enough to support habitation, was almost entirely flooded. What remained was a small forested rise barely above the water's surface. When the Nationalist government relocated to Taiwan in 1949, the island received yet another name: Kwanghwa Island. Each renaming asserted authority over a place the Thao had never ceded. The word "Lalu" itself is Austronesian — a word that carries meanings related to "after" or "later," shared in related forms across languages from Taiwan to Indonesia — and it survived through the Thao community's use, quietly, until there was political space to say it out loud again.
The 921 earthquake struck on September 21, 1999, with Jiji as its epicenter. The shaking was felt across central Taiwan, and at Sun Moon Lake, portions of Lalu Island sank further into the water. A wedding pavilion that the local government had built on the island in 1978 was destroyed. The physical island shrank again. But in the years that followed the earthquake, something shifted in how Taiwan addressed indigenous place names. Growing recognition of Taiwanese Aboriginal rights brought with it a reconsideration of the names that colonial administrations had imposed. Lalu Island was restored to its Thao name — the name the community had used all along, the name that colonial governments had simply refused to acknowledge. The earthquake diminished the land. The renaming, when it came, restored something that land cannot contain.
Lalu Island today is small — a forested rise in the middle of Sun Moon Lake, visible from everywhere on the water. It is not, and has not been for nearly a century, a place where people live. Out of respect for the Thao people, who regard the island as the dwelling place of their highest ancestral spirit, tourists are no longer permitted to board the island. Visitors can view it from ferries crossing Sun Moon Lake and from the pontoon walkways around its edge, looking toward the white deer statue that stands on the island's shore as an acknowledgment of the Thao founding story. The island's significance exceeds its physical dimensions. Sun Moon Lake is central Taiwan's most celebrated scenic area, and Lalu sits at the literal center of it, visible from the cycling paths along the shoreline, from the pagodas on the hillsides above, from the ferries crossing in every direction. The Thao community maintains a presence at the lake and continues to assert the cultural importance of this place. To visit Lalu is to visit a location where history — colonial, natural, political — has left visible marks, and where a people's relationship to their own homeland has, slowly, been partially acknowledged.
Lalu Island sits at 23.856°N, 120.911°E in the center of Sun Moon Lake, Yuchi Township, Nantou County. From the air, the island is clearly visible as a small forested landmass surrounded by the lake's distinctive shape — the moon-crescent southern arm and the sun-circle northern section. Sun Moon Lake itself is one of the most recognizable geographic features in central Taiwan from altitude, its unusual twin-lobe form distinguishing it from other mountain reservoirs. Nearest major airport: RCMQ (Taichung International Airport), approximately 35 km to the northwest. The lake sits at approximately 748 meters elevation in a mountain bowl; approach from the west through the hills east of Taichung. Recommend viewing altitude 1,500–2,000 meters to see the full lake geometry and the island's central position within it. Morning light from the east illuminates the lake surface most dramatically.