Come to Wenmei in Zhunan this Chinese New Year for a "Charming Purple Golden City" tour

Driving south along the West Coast Expressway, you will sigh at the beautiful west coast of Taiwan, cut to pieces by one power plant, fishing port and industrial zone after another, and feel helpless at the sight of the blue coastline occupied by gray concrete monsters. But when you reach the coast of Zhunan Township in Miaoli County, here, besides the rare stretches of intact natural sandy beach and coastal windbreak forest like a black forest, during the breeding season of the purple butterfly you will also see golden and silver butterfly pupae, like stars in the night sky, dotting the rich natural ecology of the coastal forest.

This national protective forest, stretching about five km from Longfeng Fishing Port in the north to the mouth of the Zhonggang River in the south, protects the coastal ecology, the estuary mangroves and the rural character, and has been assessed by the Construction and Planning Agency of the Ministry of the Interior as the most completely preserved ecosystem on the west coast of Taiwan. Under the adoption and protection of the residents of Wenn ei Community in Gangqian Village, Zhunan Township, it has become the "Charming Purple Gold City" of Taiwan's western coast.

Purple Butterfly + Cultural Gold Mine = Wenn ei Purple Gold

Wenn ei Community

The community is named Wenn ei because in the past the residents made their living from aquaculture, with fish ponds spread all around, and so Wenn ei is a typical community that makes its living from fishing and farming. Seventy percent of the residents are of the Ye clan, making it the community with the strongest sense of unity in Zhunan Township. Because the vast majority of the community members are relatives of one another, the bonds of kinship between neighbors are strong, giving it considerable cohesive power.

A World-Class Treasure: the Purple Butterfly

In the British Museum's book "Butterfly," Taiwan's Purple Butterfly Valley and Mexico's Monarch Butterfly Valley are listed together as the world's two largest overwintering butterfly valleys, but the mystery of the purple butterfly's migration remained unsolved for a long time. Five years ago, the Forestry Bureau commissioned the Taiwan Butterfly Conservation Society to promote a research and conservation plan for Purple Butterfly Valley, mobilizing nearly one hundred volunteers from all over Taiwan to tag and release nearly twenty thousand purple butterflies, and only then was its migration route understood. The Zhunan coast is the largest breeding area for the purple butterfly in the country, highlighting the importance that the Zhunan coast holds in ecological conservation issues, which cannot be ignored.