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.

For the plains communities, no burden was heavier than the endless corvée. They were conscripted at the officials' whim to haul documents and military supplies, to build walls and roads, and to furnish whatever the runners demanded, often missing their own planting season and left without food or clothing. The interpreter-brokers wedged between the government and the Han settlers frequently worked both ends, exploiting the people layer upon layer and wringing them dry. Resentment accumulated, drop by drop, in this daily round of conscription and abuse.

In the winter of 1731 the burden finally broke them. Provoked by an especially cruel demand for labour, the Taokas of Dajiaxi, near present-day Dajia in Taichung, could bear no more, and under a leader remembered as Lin Wu-li they rose in revolt. They burned government offices and attacked garrison posts, hurling a cry of rage at the colonial order that oppressed them.

What began as one community's defiance spread swiftly across the central plain. Neighbouring communities suffering the same oppression answered the call one after another, until more than a dozen Indigenous communities were drawn in, forming the largest plains-aborigine uprising the Qing ever faced. For a time this prairie fire paralysed the officials of the centre and shook Qing rule in central Taiwan.

The alarmed court swiftly mustered heavy forces in reply. The provincial military commander of Fujian led a great army across the strait, and joining the local garrisons, unleashed overwhelming and merciless force to encircle and crush the communities in revolt. After months of bloody suppression, this desperately unequal resistance was at last put down.

The reprisals that followed were devastating. Villages were burned to the ground, and the people were slaughtered, captured and scattered; the Shalu community suffered most grievously, all but annihilated, its population dwindling to a mere handful of households. And Dajiaxi, the heart of the uprising, was pointedly renamed by the Qing as "Transformed by Virtue" — in the sense of "having submitted and been civilised" — a permanent brand upon its subjugation and humiliation.

The failure of the Dajiaxi Uprising became a turning point in the fate of the central plains peoples. With the road of armed resistance now closed, they could only, beneath the flood of Han settlement and the government's policies of assimilation, gradually lose the autonomy of their land, language and culture. Over the century and more that followed, many of the plains communities either migrated elsewhere or dissolved into Han society, their once-distinct identity fading year by year.

After the uprising was put down, the Qing added garrison posts and tightened its guard in the centre, yet never truly addressed the roots of the oppression — the heavy corvée and the layered exploitation of the interpreter-brokers went on as before. With the road of armed resistance now utterly closed, the plains peoples could only bear in silence a fate of land lost inch by inch and livelihoods growing ever harder.

Into the nineteenth century, as the pressure of Han settlement mounted, the Pazeh, Taokas and other central groups even undertook large-scale collective migrations, crossing mountains to the distant Puli basin, and on to Yilan and Hualien in the east, in search of new ground on which to make a life. The plains settlements that had once spread across the central plain withered in these successive dispersals, and the languages and customs of many groups drifted, with them, toward the edge of extinction.

This uprising was the desperate last stand of the central plains peoples against a state that both extracted their labour and eroded their land and dignity. Its terrible outcome not only hastened the long decline of the very societies it crushed, but also wrote an unforgettable chapter in this island's heavy history of how Indigenous peoples lost their homelands under foreign powers.