The Subgroup Feuds

For much of the Qing era, Taiwan was a young society of migrants from every quarter packed in together. They had crossed the treacherous Black Ditch to get there, and on unfamiliar ground they contended fiercely over fields, water and livelihood. Such a society was restless and unsettled, and it earned a grim reputation: "a small revolt every three years, a great upheaval every five."

Beneath the periodic rebellions against the state ran a violence more constant, and closer to daily life — the subgroup feuds. "Subgroup" meant that people formed sharply divided camps along the lines of their ancestral origins: Zhangzhou against Quanzhou, Hokkien against Hakka, and even, among fellow Quanzhou folk of different counties, the Tongan people against the people of the Three Districts, who could turn their weapons on one another.

The sparks that set off a feud were often trivial: a disputed field boundary, a fight over water for the paddies, control of a market or a harbour, a clash at a temple festival, even an unpaid debt. But in a land where the imperial magistrate was far away and his soldiers few, such ordinary quarrels could, once clans and fellow-villagers were mobilised, escalate swiftly into pitched battles.

Once a feud broke out, hundreds or even thousands would gather, armed with blades, spears and staves, to burn homes, destroy fields and plunder villages, leaving dozens or hundreds dead or wounded. The losers, at best, lost their property and were scattered; at worst, whole villages were burned to ash and entire lineages forced to migrate. The Qing-era local gazetteers of Taiwan are full of records of such bloody clashes, mirroring a frontier of weak order where everyone lived in peril.

The most famous erupted in 1853 in Bangka — the Dingxiajiao feud. The Three Districts people of the "upper guild" and the Tongan people of the "lower guild," both from Quanzhou, turned on one another over wharves and commercial interests. The defeated Tongan were forced to abandon Bangka and move north to make a fresh start at Dadaocheng — a move that, unexpectedly, made Dadaocheng's later prosperity and forever redrew the commercial map of the Taipei basin.

In Yilan there was the curious spectacle of the "Xipi" and "Fulu" factions, whose young men feuded for years over rival schools of music and turf. On the surface these conflicts were struggles of pride and profit, but deeper down they reflected a society without any public authority to arbitrate, in which people could seek security and belonging only through blood, native place and the worship of their gods.

The frequency of the feuds was branded deep into Taiwan's landscape and folk custom. Many settlements raised high walls and set up defensive gates because of them; and the local deities each group revered — the Sage King of Zhang for the Zhangzhou people, the Great Emperor Baosheng for the Quanzhou, the Three Mountain Kings for the Hakka — became spiritual banners that bound one's own kind together and marked off outsiders, still scattered through the temples of Taiwan to this day.

Fuel was added, too, by the peculiar demography of the early crossings. The Qing long enforced bans on migration to Taiwan and restrictions on bringing families, so that the early migrants teemed with able-bodied young men who had come alone, unencumbered by household ties — the so-called "rootless wanderers." Drifting from place to place with no fixed home, they became, whenever trouble flared in a village, the fiercest and most reckless fighters in a feud, making conflicts all the easier to spin out of control.

Faced with feud after feud, the Qing officials were often unequal to the task, and at times were secretly content to see the different groups hold one another in check, standing aside in a spirit of "divide and rule" and intervening only reluctantly, with troops, once matters had grown large enough to threaten order. This passive and calculating manner of governing only drove the cycle of private violence and inter-group enmity deeper, and made it harder to undo.

Only in the later Qing, as local administration gradually strengthened, as the opening of the ports brought a new order, and as the different groups, living intermingled over generations, slowly let the lines of ancestral origin fade and grew a shared consciousness of being "all Taiwanese," did this century-long fire of feuding at last die down. The subgroup feuds were a painful scar in the maturing of a frontier society — and a testament to how the people of Taiwan moved, step by step, from enmity toward a shared fate.