NTU Giant Sequoia

On the first floor of NTU’s Life Science Building, a giant sequoia disk nearly three meters across greets you right inside the lobby. It looks like something that belongs in California’s Sierra Nevada, not humid Taipei. How on earth did it get here?

This slab started out as part of a sequoia that sprouted about 1,600 years ago in what is now Sequoia National Park. The tree fell naturally in 1917, and a decade later park rangers cut eight enormous slices to send around the world. One ended up in Paris’s Jardin des Plantes, another in Pennsylvania’s Longwood Gardens. The NTU slice, though, had the wildest ride. 

In 1927, it crossed the Pacific to Xiamen University in China, a gift arranged through the park superintendent and Harvard botanist. For years, it resided in Xiamen’s biology building. Then came WWII. In 1938, when Japanese forces occupied Xiamen, Taiwan’s colonial authorities dispatched scholars to salvage cultural treasures. Along with crates of books and artifacts, the sequoia disk was also packed and shipped across the Taiwan Strait to Taihoku Imperial University (today’s NTU). It even sat through the Allied air raids of 1945 without a scratch. 

While its “siblings” in Paris and Pennsylvania enjoyed calm museum lives, this slab crossed oceans and witnessed human chaos—yet for a being that’s lived sixteen centuries, all that is barely a heartbeat.