Live camera
Alishan, Ogasawara viewing platform live camera
A circular platform open on every side. It was built to watch the sun rise above a sea of cloud, and people gather here before dawn.
Sample October 2026What you are looking at
In the sample frame a cloudless deep blue sky fills the upper two thirds, with blue-grey ridges layered one behind another below it. Pale haze sits in the valleys, small white clouds rest on the skyline, and the crown of a conifer enters at the bottom right. There is no sea of cloud in this one frame.
Alishan is mountain country in Chiayi county at around 2,000 metres, and this platform stands on one of its ridges. The floor is open the whole way round, so as the sunrise point shifts through the year you need only move where you stand. A cloud sea forms on mornings when damp air rising out of the valleys reaches ridge height, cools, and comes to a stop there.
Taiwan is only one hour behind Japan and has no summer time. Sunrise at Alishan falls at roughly the same clock hour as in Japan, so getting up at a normal hour in Japan is enough to catch first light here. There is no need to sit up through the night as there is for cameras in the Americas or Africa.
The platform is reached by train from Alishan station on the Zhushan line. The line was built for forestry, and now runs for the sunrise, so its departure time shifts day by day with the season. This platform is a few minutes' walk from the Zhushan terminus, and on the same ridge there is a second viewpoint at Zhushan that opens only to the east.
Beyond the layered ridges, in the direction of the east, stands Mount Jade. At 3,952 metres it is the highest mountain in Taiwan, about 180 metres higher than Mount Fuji. There are seasons when the sun comes up from that quarter, though whether the mountain shows at all depends on how thick the haze is. Alishan itself is not the name of a single peak but a name for the whole run of mountains.
It is a live video stream, so the colour of the sky changes in front of you with no refresh to wait for. Whether the cloud sea appears is a day-by-day thing, and there are mornings when the ridges sink into cloud and nothing is visible.
About this camera
| Place | Alishan, Chiayi |
| Format | Live video |
| Time zone | Asia/Taipei (UTC+8) |
| Category | Nature |
| Operator | Taiwan Forestry and Nature Conservation Agency |
| Terms of use | Taiwan open government data |
The operator's own page
The footage belongs to each agency. This site is an unofficial guide, and each sample frame was copied once per camera under that agency's terms of use.
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