Taiwan Aborigines

A dialog from the H-Asia list, November 1995

I am forwarding this message on behalf of a graduate student.

David C. Wright

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I am a graduate student doing research on Taiwan aborigines (their history and their role in the history of Taiwan). I have been able to locate a few articles by Chinese scholars (Hsieh Shih-chung, Hsu Wen-hsiung, and Liang Chiu-yen) on recent political movements and attempts to redefine ethnic identity among the modern-day aborigines, but I have been less successful in locating older historical records on the aborigines. (I have looked over Ronald Knapp’s China’s Island Frontier and John Robert Shepperd’s Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier, 1600-1800, as well as a score of other general histories of Taiwan, which include excerpts on the aborigines).

I want to find more information on why the aborigines were considered savage (was it the head-hunting? clothing? ritual? or just because they were different?). I am particularly interested in their head-hunting. I know that other cultures practiced head hunting for practical purposes (i.e., to keep the demon outsiders from intruding into their lives) and that the ceremonies of beheading sometimes had an almost religious aspect. Are there any books, articles, or other sources on head hunting in general and/or Taiwan aborigine head-hunting (or any other useful background information on these aborigines) that anyone out there knows about?

Bill Myers

Japanese anthropologists did a lot of work on these peoples during the colonial period. I’d start my search in G. William Skinner and Sigeaki Tomita, eds, Modern Chinese Society: An Analytical Bibliography, Vol III Publications in Japanese (Stanford: Stanford U Press, 1973) ISBN 0-8047-0753-7. It is not clear, however, that the Skinner and Tomita volume indexed all the Japanese research on aboriginal peoples.

David D. Buck

I just returned from taiwan. you may already know but there is a very good taiwan folkarts/aborigine museum in beitou. it has books in both english and chinese on the aborigines. in the museum displays it mentions headhunting and tatoos but not very much. it is purely anthropological and not historical. that is it is taxonomic and not causal. but you might write to it and inquire if there are any archivists who could respond to your requests.

Richard C. Kagan
Professor of History
Hamline University
St. Paul, Mn. 55104-1284

I would suggest that you contact Emma Teng, at Harvard’s Department of East Asian languages and Civilizations, or c/o the MIT History faculty, where she will be teaching this spring term. Her email address is: jteng@husc8.harvard.edu. She has been researching sources about Taiwan from the Qing period to the present, including travel literature and ethnographic albums about aboriginal customs. She also showed me some Japanese photographs depicting apparently, headhunting [piles of skulls].

Dutch sources on Taiwan have been underused, also, and they are valuable for the 17th century period. John Wills at USC may know more about them.

It might be productive to look into the evolution of the legend of Wu2 Feng4, who supposedly ended the head-hunting practice of the aborigines by sacrificing his own life. According to one version of the legend, when Wu could not dissuade the aborigines from head hunting, he promised them that a man will walk along a certain path so that they could ambush the said man for his head. One the appointed day, they did find a man walking along the appointed path and killed him with arrows. But when they moved close to cut off the head, they found that the victim was actually Wu Feng, whom they respected and loved greatly. Greatly moved by Wu’s altruism, they resolved to abandon their headhunting for good. Around 1987 (?), Guo1 hua2 magazine (published in Taiwan) ran a long article on the evolution of this legend--and the various political uses different groups put it to. The legend of Wu Feng is quite well known. I remember seeing a musical production based on this legend on Chinese television around the late 70’s (definitely before 1981).

Xiao-bin Ji
xiaoji@princeton.edu

Peter J. Herz writes:

Forgive me for sending this to H-Asia, but the host returned it when I tried to send it directly to Drs. Wright and Myers.

Dear David C. Wright and Bill Myers:

Re your search for info on the Taiwanese Aboriginals:

I lived among Taiwanese Hakka-speaking Han people in Chungli and Chutung in 1977-78 and 1980-86. I noticed that shan ti jen (mountaineers) had currency only when the speaker was using Kuoyu. When speaking Hakka or Hokkien, Han people always used the term fan tzu (Fon A in Hakka, Huan A in Hokkien).

Occasionally, some neighbors even called me a Fon A (although the more common term was Fung Mo—Redhair).

Like the ancient Greeks, the Han Chinese regarded as barbarians all those whose languages sounded like bar-bar-bar-bar (or, man-man-man-man-man, cf. mantzu, the old name for the Yao, and Nan Man).

Mr. Myers wrote:

I am particularly interested in their head-hunting. Are there any books, articles, or other sources on head hunting in general and/or Taiwan aborigine head-hunting (or any other useful background information on these aborigines) that anyone out there knows about?

Look at Huang Jung-lo’s Tu T’ai Pei Ke (1989, Taipei, T’ai Yuan Ch’u Pan She). This is a collection of popularly-written articles on various aspects of Taiwanese local history, especially that of the T’aoyuan-Hsinchu-Miaoli area. While probably not quite as detailed as you might wish, they are worth reading in that they represent an emerging enlightened view of the Aboriginal. I have translated some chapters into English and can make them available to you. Do you know any publishers who might be interested in the whole translated book?

One of Huang’s articles discusses how Hakka settlers in late 19th-century Taiwan would occasionally cook and eat Aboriginals killed on unsuccessful headhunting raids (This practice was also noted by Dr. George McKay, pioneer Presbyterian missionary in northern Taiwan). Huang’s informants stated that many Hakka believed that eating a dead headhunter would protect them from having their heads lifted the next time they went into (or got close to) the mountains.

Huang is amazingly frank about the less savory aspects of his people’s history (he himself is a Taiwanese Hakka). As late as the early 1980’s, most Hakka I knew, if they thought at all about the dispossession of the Aboriginals, considered it an advance of Han civilization.

By the way, I have run into people in Taiwan’s Hakka region who are of mixed Han and Aboriginal blood, but they will not admit the latter ancestry to any save family and very close friends.

While we’re on the subject, has anyone made any correlations between the various lowland aboriginal peoples encountered by the Dutch and those mentioned in later Chinese, Japanese, and non-Dutch Western records? I know about the Siraya (Sydeyan), but has anyone identified the Dutch-recorded Favorlang with any modern P’ing-p’u group?

You may wish to consult Li, Yi Yuan T’ai-wan T’u-chu Min-tsu te She-hui Yu Wen-hua (1983, Lien Ching Ch’u-pan She, Taipei) and Liu, Max Chiwai, Culture and Art of the Formosan Aborigines (T’ai-wan T’u-chu Wen-hua Yi-shu, 1984, Taipei, Hsiung Shih T’u Shu Ku-fen Yu-hsien Kung-sze).

Peter J. Herz
613 S. Glenview Dr.
Carbondale, IL 62901
pjherz@midwest.net

You might want to read Peggy Reeves Sanday’s Divine Hunger about cannibalism in general. Another source that in part deals with Americans’ obsession with primitive practices is Catherine A. Lutz and Jane Collins Reading National Geographic. In my dissertation (1994, Univ. of Michigan), Han and the Chinese Other: The Language of Identity and Difference in Southwest China, I explored the reasons for Han Chinese to focus on certain practices of ethnic minorities, especially in southwest China (Kunming and environs). Some of this analysis might be relevant, though might also contrast in instructive ways.

Susan D. Blum
Department of Anthropology
325 University Museum
33rd and Spruce Streets
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-6398

> While we’re on the subject, has anyone made any correlations
> between the various lowland aboriginal peoples encountered by the
> Dutch and those mentioned in later Chinese, Japanese, and non-Dutch
> Western records? I know about the Siraya (Sydeyan), but has anyone
> identified the Dutch-recorded Favorlang with any modern
> P’ing-p’u group?

The ethno-linguisc group called the Favorlang by the Dutch was later called the Babuza by the Japanese.

Regarding the Siraya, John R. Shepherd has a new book (1995) Marriage and Mandatory Abortion among the 17th-century Siraya American Ethnological Society monograph series no. 6. It has the information regarding the relationship between the practices of headhunting and other aspect of culture.

Best,
Peter Kang
Department of Geography
University of Minnesota
kang0024@gold.tc.umn.edu