The Yehliu Promontory is part of the Daliao Miocene Formation, a geological layer deposited roughly five to twenty-three million years ago when this stretch of coast lay beneath a shallow sea. Tectonic forces later pushed the Datun Mountains skyward, and the promontory emerged as a narrow ridge of sedimentary rock extending into the ocean. What makes Yehliu extraordinary is what happened next. Millennia of wind, rain, salt spray, and wave action carved the exposed sandstone into an outdoor gallery of hoodoo stones, geological formations where a harder capstone protects softer rock beneath, creating mushroom and pedestal shapes. The process is ongoing. Every typhoon season reshapes the cape, and formations that existed a century ago have since collapsed or transformed beyond recognition.

The Queen's Head is a natural rock formation that took over 4,000 years to achieve its current profile: a narrow neck supporting a head-shaped mass of harder stone, the whole assembly bearing an uncanny resemblance to a woman's silhouette. The neck measures roughly 125 centimeters in circumference — as of 2017 — and shrinks by roughly one centimeter per year from wind erosion and salt weathering. Simple arithmetic delivers a sobering conclusion. The formation has become an iconic image in Taiwan, an unofficial emblem of the town of Wanli, and one of the most visited natural landmarks in the country. Its fragility is part of its appeal and its tragedy. Authorities have installed a protective stone collar, a kind of geological necklace, to slow the erosion. A successor formation called the Princess' Head has been designated nearby, chosen partly to divert tourist attention and reduce the foot traffic that accelerates the original's deterioration.

The Yehliu Geopark, operated by the North Coast and Guanyinshan National Scenic Area administration, preserves and provides access to the cape's formations. Visitors walk among rocks that have been given fanciful names based on their shapes: the Fairy Shoe, the Beehive, the Ginger Rocks, the Sea Candles. Each name reflects a moment of human pattern recognition imposed on millions of years of geological process. The Beehive formations, pocked with small cavities from differential erosion, cluster along the cape's edges. The Sea Candles, narrow pillars of stone, stand near the waterline where wave action continues to sculpt them. Together, they form a landscape that feels curated, as if some vast intelligence had arranged the pieces for maximum strangeness. In reality, the curator is entropy, and the exhibition is temporary.

From above, Yehliu reveals its full geometry: a thin promontory extending from the coastline like a breakwater, surrounded by the dark blue of the East China Sea. The Wanli District stretches inland behind it, backed by the volcanic mass of the Datun Mountains. The geopark occupies the cape's tip, where the rock platforms are most exposed. On clear days, the hoodoo formations cast long shadows across the flat stone surfaces, creating a texture visible even from moderate altitude. The cape's orientation means it catches the full force of northeast monsoon winds during winter, the same winds that have spent millennia carving the stone into shapes that draw more than a million visitors each year.