Story Thread

Indigenous Histories

Four centuries of indigenous Taiwan — from Siraya manuscripts to recognition movements

The People

14 figures · 4 eras · 1690–1979

Age of Discovery

Dika?–?

Qing Frontier

Zhang Dajing1690–1773

Zhimuliu?–?

Pan Xianwen?–?

Tauketok?–1874

Arokus?–1874

Pan Shengqing1827–1886

Japanese Colonial Period

Mona Rudao1882–1930

Tado Mona1901–1930

Hanaoka Ichiro1908–1930

Hanaoka Jiro1908–1930

Suniuo1919–1979

Post-War & Authoritarian Era

Kao I-sheng1908–1954

Tang Shou-jen1924–1954

Indigenous Encounters

Before the colossus of the Age of Sail crashed through Formosa's pristine coastlines, this emerald island had already thrived for millennia as a sprawling, vibrant, and entirely self-contained ancient cosmos. From the majestic heights of the Central Mountain Range to the expansive western plains and the jagged, sun-drenched reefs of the Pacific coast, countless Austronesian tribes called this island home. These original masters of the land, categorized by later historians as the Plain Tribes and Mountain Tribes, were by no means the isolated, primitive savages depicted in the early logs of Western colonizers. Instead, they had engineered highly complex, sophisticated social structures and spiritual worldviews perfectly calibrated to harmonious coexistence with the natural world. In their cosmic understanding, every mountain, river, and ancient forest was shielded by omnipresent animistic deities and ancestral spirits (Utux or Anito). Moving to the rhythmic cadences of seasonal monsoons and oceanic tides, they wove an extraordinary, unwritten tapestry of human civilization through song, tattoo, and sacred ritual.

The Madou She War

In the early seventeenth century, the southwestern plains of Taiwan were not a unified land ruled by any single state.

The Cave on Lamey

In October 1622 a Dutch East India Company ship, the Gouden Leeuw, put in at a coral island off the south-west coast of Taiwan for water. The men who went ashore did not come back. On Dutch charts the place became Golden Lion Island. The people living there called it Lamey.

The Staff With the Silver Head

On 20 February 1636 the Dutch called the first assembly of villages at Sinkan. Each headman who attended received three things: the tricolour of the Netherlands, a black velvet gown, and a rattan staff with a silver head. The staff was not ornament but warrant. From that day the man holding it was the village head the Company recognised, and the man the Company would come looking for when something went wrong.

The Sinckan Script

In the early seventeenth century, the plains of Taiwan had no written language.

1662–1683Tungning Dynasty

Vanishing Plain Warriors

In the 1660s, the landscape of central Taiwan offered a stark contrast to the highly sinicized, scholarly atmosphere taking root in Tainan. This was a wild, untamed frontier nourished by the currents of the Dadu and Zhuoshui rivers.

1683–1895Imperial Frontier

The Dajiaxi Uprising

Before the tide of Han migration swept across central Taiwan, this fertile plain was already the homeland of the plains peoples — the Taokas, the Papora, the Pazeh and their neighbours — who for generations had fished, hunted, farmed and multiplied here. But as the Qing brought Taiwan into its realm, these "acculturated aborigines" were enrolled into the system of rule, becoming subjects burdened with corvée labour and tribute.

The Aboriginal Frontier

Throughout the Qing period, the relationship between Han settlers and Taiwan's indigenous peoples was defined by an official boundary — the 'savage boundary' (番界) — a line of earthen mounds, ditches, and guard posts stretching across the island's western foothills. East of this line lay the territories of indigenous communities whom the Qing classified as 'raw savages' (生番), largely beyond imperial control; to the west spread the Han-settled plains, where 'cooked savages' (熟番) — indigenous groups that had adopted Han customs and paid taxes — occupied an increasingly precarious middle ground.

Sovereignty of the Mountains

The encounter between Taiwan's indigenous peoples and Qing Chinese expansion did not have a single form or a single outcome. It was not simply a story of conquest followed by resistance followed by defeat, though all three were certainly present. It was a more complicated set of negotiations, adaptations, and confrontations spread across more than two centuries, involving dozens of distinct peoples facing a colonial pressure that arrived with different intensities in different places and at different times.

Opening the Mountains

The Mudan Incident of 1874 — in which Japanese forces landed in southern Taiwan on the pretext of punishing an indigenous village for the killing of Ryukyuan sailors — delivered a shock to the Qing court that transcended its immediate military dimension. The real blow was conceptual: when Qing officials attempted to protest the Japanese landing, they found their position undermined by their own previous statements classifying eastern Taiwan as territory beyond effective imperial administration. They had, in effect, conceded their own sovereignty over the areas they now sought to defend. The resulting settlement required the Qing to pay an indemnity to Japan, making clear that the island's internal geography had become an external vulnerability.

Three Months at Kaliawan

The Kavalan once lived on the Lanyang Plain. After Wu Sha led settlers in to farm it in 1796, Han fields pushed steadily deeper into the plain, and in the 1830s and 1840s a group of Kavalan, led by the people of Kaliawan village, moved south along the coast and rebuilt their villages around the Meilun River on the Qilai Plain. Their neighbours were the Sakizaya, whose main village was Takubuwan, written in Qing documents as Jinlaoye. Sakizaya territory ran roughly from south of the Liwu River to north of the Mugua River.

1895–1945Under the Rising Sun

The Taroko War

The high mountains of Taiwan were the homeland of Indigenous peoples who for centuries had bowed to no lowland power. To a colonial state hungry for the resources of the forests and determined to complete its rule over the whole island, these cloud-wreathed ranges were the last and hardest frontier to conquer. In 1910 Governor-General Sakuma Samata launched a Five-Year Plan to Subjugate the Aborigines of unprecedented scale, resolved to bring the highlands into the fold by force.

Seediq Bale

After the fires of the Yiwei War died out in 1895, the Rising Sun flag was planted across the plains and harbors of Taiwan. Yet deep in the Central Mountain Range — those forests forever wreathed in mist, revered by the Seediq as the sacred domain of their ancestral spirits — the empire's rule could never truly conquer the human heart. Thirty-five years later, a rage of blood and tears, long suppressed, would erupt upon the hunting grounds of Wushe.

The Takasago Volunteers

Japanese forces took Manila in January 1942, and the front kept moving south, closer to the equator, until it reached the rainforests of the Philippines and New Guinea. The Imperial Army had been trained for temperate ground. What broke there first was not the line but the supply: trucks could not get in, horses died, ammunition and tinned rations ended up on men's backs, and malaria and dysentery put soldiers down faster than bullets did. The army turned to the mountains of Taiwan — to people who had spent their lives moving where there were no roads.

1949–1987Silent Island

Purge of Indigenous Elites

Beneath the shadow of Cold War confrontation and martial law in the mid-twentieth century, Taiwan’s authoritarian government launched sweeping campaigns to consolidate control over the island’s mountainous regions, natural resources, and indigenous communities. Determined to eliminate all potential local autonomy movements and prevent any perceived communist infiltration, the regime carried out systematic political purges across every level of society.

1987–2000Breaking the Silence

A Hundred Thousand Drums on Orchid Island

In 1974 the atomic energy council placed the storage site for low-level radioactive waste at Longmen, on the south-eastern corner of Orchid Island. The island then had a population of about three thousand, all of them Tao, lay some forty-odd nautical miles off Taitung, had no electricity supply, and had no document that would have let anyone living there read the decision.

Give Us Back Our Land

On 29 December 1984 a group of young indigenous intellectuals met in the fifth lecture hall of Mackay Memorial Hospital in Taipei and founded the Alliance of Taiwan Aborigines. Its president was the Puyuma singer Kimbo Hu, and its founders included Icyang Parod, Chang-Fa Tung and Tuobasi Tamapima. At the time, the government's legal term for them was "mountain compatriots". The following February the alliance launched its journal, Aborigines.

2000–presentNew Formosa

Taiwanese Identity — Who Am I?

"Are you Taiwanese, Chinese, or both?" This deceptively plain survey question, first posed systematically by National Chengchi University's Election Study Center in 1992, has become one of the most telling barometers of a society in quiet revolution. At the outset, fewer than twenty percent of respondents answered "Taiwanese only." Three decades later, that figure exceeds sixty percent, while exclusively Chinese identification has collapsed to near single digits. No amount of policy, propaganda, or protest could have produced the shift alone; it is the cumulative work of democratic elections, a free press, generational turnover, cross-strait estrangement, and an expanding civic imagination.

Morakot and the Village of Xiaolin

Typhoon Morakot made landfall in Hualien on August 7, 2009. Its winds were not exceptional; it moved very slowly, and it emptied itself onto the mountains of southern Taiwan. The Alishan station recorded more than three thousand millimeters over three days, close to a full year's rainfall there. On August 8 the rainfall maps for Pingtung, Kaohsiung and Chiayi went past their upper bounds.

The First Woman President, and an Apology

On January 16, 2016, Tsai Ing-wen was elected president with 6,894,744 votes, 56.12 percent. On the same day the Democratic Progressive Party took sixty-eight seats in the legislature, its first outright majority. Executive and legislative power changed hands together in a single election, something that had not happened since the first direct presidential vote in 1996.