Puli sits in a broad valley ringed by green ridges, roughly equidistant from Taiwan's east and west coasts, its north and south tips. This is not coincidence — the town has long served as a gateway to the island's mountainous interior, a staging point for trips into the Central Mountain Range, to Hehuan Mountain, toward Taroko Gorge. The geographic center of Taiwan is marked just outside of town on Tiger Head Mountain, a fact locals mention with quiet pride.

The basin holds a lush, mild climate — subtropical but tempered by elevation, warm enough for year-round agriculture, cool enough for comfort. Rice paddies and orchards fill the flat valley floor. The surrounding hills are forested, the rivers clear. Before the 1999 earthquake, Puli was best known as a pleasant market town with good connections east and west. What happened that September changed everything — and also revealed something about the town's character.

On 21 September 1999, a magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck central Taiwan. The epicenter was near Chi-Chi, south of Puli, but the destruction reached deep into Nantou County. In Puli, buildings collapsed, roads cracked, the hillsides moved. The town was severely damaged.

The recovery drew unexpected help from unexpected places. A church in Kobe, Japan had been destroyed in the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake, and its congregation had been using a remarkable temporary structure: a church built entirely from paper tubes, designed on a pro-bono basis by architect Shigeru Ban. When the congregation no longer needed it, they offered it to a community in Puli's Taomi Village that had suffered the 1999 quake. In 2006, the structure was dismantled, shipped to Taiwan, and reassembled. The Paper Dome now stands in Taomi Village as one of Puli's most visited landmarks — a building made of paper that carries the weight of two earthquakes and two communities' will to continue.

Puli's Shaoxing wine is not from Shaoxing. That city in Zhejiang Province, China, is where the style originated — a rice wine aged in ceramic jars, amber and slightly sweet. But Puli's version, produced here since the mid-20th century using the exceptionally clean local water, has developed its own identity. Taiwan Tobacco and Liquor Corporation produces Puli Shaoxing from the same mountain spring water that brewers and paper mills have always relied on.

Water bamboo — called *jiaobai* — grows in flooded paddies and produces edible shoots prized in Taiwanese cooking for their tender, slightly sweet flavor. Mineral water from the Central Mountain Range aquifer bottles the same underground source that feeds the town's wells. Paper production, quieter now than in its industrial heyday, still draws on the soft water that protects paper fibers from mineral discoloration. Four products, one source.

Puli's mild climate and mountain setting have attracted something less expected than wine and water: a remarkable concentration of Buddhist monasteries, retreat centers, and temples. Large institutions are scattered through the valley floor, while the hillsides above town hold smaller hermitages and meditation centers, tucked among the trees in the kind of quiet that highland Taiwan can still provide.

Zhongtai Chan Monastery, one of the largest Buddhist complexes in Taiwan, was completed near Puli in 2001, its tower visible from across the basin. The town also hosts the Foundation of Chinese Dietary Culture, which has promoted vegetarian cuisine here for decades. Whether or not the mild climate is the cause — as some visitors speculate — Puli has become a place where contemplative life and ordinary town life coexist without friction, the breakfast noodle shops and the meditation bells on the same street corner.

Most visitors who pass through Puli are heading somewhere else. Sun Moon Lake is a short drive south — Taiwan's most celebrated highland lake, the destination that fills the modern buildings and rental shops along Puli's main roads with a tourist economy. Hehuan Mountain lies east, a high-altitude alpine area that gets snow in winter and offers serious hiking in summer. Taroko Gorge, the marble canyon on the Pacific coast, is accessible from here through mountain passes that cross some of the most dramatic terrain on the island.

Puli is the last town of any size before the interior closes in. Stock up, sleep well, and in the morning the mountains begin. For pilots approaching from the west, the Puli Basin is a useful landmark — a flat green clearing in an otherwise densely ridged landscape, approximately 23.967°N, 120.967°E, cradled by the ranges that the island built itself from.