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.

Zhi Muliu was a Saisiyat chief whose career fell in the early eighteenth century, when the frontier between Han settlement and indigenous territory was still being established and both sides were still testing what was possible. Zhi Muliu pursued a strategy of selective engagement — trading with Han merchants for goods the Saisiyat wanted, resisting by force when settlement pushed too close to vital resources, and maintaining enough ambiguity in his commitments to avoid being bound by any agreement that would have foreclosed future options. His flexibility gave the Saisiyat a degree of autonomy that lasted longer than it might have under more rigidly confrontational leadership.

Watan Yui faced a fundamentally different situation. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the Qing's 'open the mountains' policy had sent military columns into the Central Range with explicit orders to clear the way for roads and settlement. Watan Yui led the resistance in his area with the tactical tools available to him — knowledge of terrain, ability to ambush, willingness to sustain losses in exchange for inflicting them. The historical record, largely written from the Qing military perspective, is notably silent on the outcomes in his specific area. The absence of a recorded surrender is itself a kind of historical record.

Arokus was a leader in the Mudan community, the Paiwan village at the center of the 1874 incident that changed the trajectory of Taiwanese history. When Ryukyuan sailors shipwrecked on the southern coast in 1871 were killed following indigenous customary law, the incident became the pretext for Japan's first military expedition to Taiwan. Arokus fought in the Japanese engagement and was killed. His resistance made the incident internationally significant, forced the Qing court to confront its claims about eastern Taiwan, and triggered the 'opening the mountains' program that would reshape the island's geography and demographics.

Pan Shengqing chose the path of integration. A man of mixed Kavalan and Pingpu descent who obtained official appointments within the Qing administrative system, he became one of the very few indigenous people in the Qing era to hold formal bureaucratic authority. The price of this strategy was visible: integration required adopting the cultural markers of Han Chinese respectability and accepting the premises of a system that classified his own people as backward. Whether his career achieved net benefit for the communities he represented is a question that cannot be answered simply — it illustrates, at minimum, the impossible trade-offs that indigenous survival in Qing Taiwan required.