Light House Cyclopedia

Question 5：Color of lighthouses

A:
Lighthouses guide vessels and protect their safety at dark night with light beams. In the morning, lighthouses are also important indication for vessels to identify their positions when there is nothing on the sea or no obstructer to show the direction there, and thus the color of lighthouses is very important. The color of the lighthouse is decided by different locations, climate or terrain.

1. White
White is the most common color used for the lighthouse in the early years. Stone-made or brick-made lighthouses are whitewashed with lime from the very beginning. To increase thickness of lime, the plaster ingredients would be a mixture of 100 kilograms of lime usually, 4 kilograms of salt and thick sticky rice liquid. After 1945, paint is getting to be the whitewashing material.

2. Black and white
In foggy sea areas, vessels cannot recognize the light beams from the lighthouse. Therefore, the white tower cannot work there. To solve this problem, some lighthouses are painted in black and white. Those lighthouses consist of Fuguei Cape, Fangyuan, Mudou (Isle) and Donjiyu Lighthouses.

3. Other colors
So far, there are nine color selections of lighthouses in Taiwan comprise white, black, red, blue, black and white vertical bands, black and white horizontal bands, red and white vertical bands, red and white horizontal bands, red and black vertical bands. In general, red, blue, red and black vertical bands, and red and white horizontal bands are used on the surface of small-size lighted beacon, and those four selections are not typical colors on the lighthouses. The only one lighthouse in red and white horizontal bands in Taiwan is Gaomei Lighthouse, which stopped service since 1982.

Back To Light House Cyclopedia