The Opening of Kavalan

The Kavalan plain — known in the Qing records as Jiazinanlai, today as Yilan — lay on the other side of the Snow Mountains from the rest of Qing Taiwan's administrative world. The Kavalan people had farmed, fished, and traded there for centuries. The Qing court had long classified the plain as 'savage territory' and issued formal prohibitions against Han Chinese settlement, a policy designed more to avoid the administrative complications of a new frontier zone than to protect the Kavalan from encroachment.

The prohibitions were not enforced. From the late eighteenth century onward, illegal migrants crossed the mountain passes in increasing numbers, establishing farming hamlets in the plain's river deltas and occupying land in the informal but persistent way that characterized frontier expansion throughout Qing Taiwan. The court knew this was happening and chose not to intervene.

Yu Wenyi, serving as circuit intendant of Taiwan in the 1760s, was among the first officials to argue in writing that this ambiguity was unsustainable. His memorial laid out the case for bringing the Kavalan plain into the formal administrative system: the alternative was a growing population of unregistered settlers outside imperial jurisdiction, a situation that would eventually produce the unrest and violence the court most wanted to avoid. The argument was sound, but the court filed and ignored it for three decades.

What finally forced the issue was Wu Sha's large-scale migration campaign beginning in 1796. Within a decade, the plain held a substantial Han Chinese population with no formal legal status, no court system, and no mechanism for resolving disputes. Yang Tingli was the official sent to assess the situation — three times over more than a decade he crossed the mountain paths, conducted surveys, recorded population figures, interviewed settlers and indigenous leaders, and submitted detailed reports to the court. His persistence was the decisive factor in the eventual decision to act. In 1812 the Kavalan Sub-Prefecture was formally inaugurated. The plain that had been off the map for a century was now part of the empire. For the Kavalan people, it was the beginning of the end of their autonomy over the land their ancestors had cultivated for generations.