Indigenous People of Taiwan - Austronesian Origins DOCUMENTARY

If one was to be asked what the regions of Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Hawaii, New Zealand and Madagascar have in common, they might be left puzzled. After all, these lands are spread out over three continents and over 11,000 kilometers of endless ocean. The answer is that various ethnic groups on all of these distant lands are all culturally and linguistically related and share a common ancient ancestral homeland, Ilha Formosa, the island of Taiwan. Today, Taiwan is known as an integral part of the Chinese-speaking world. However, the original inhabitants of Taiwan are not a Chinese-speaking people but an Austronesian one who had little to do with China for most of their history. In this video, we will explore the culture and history of an ancient indigenous people whose ancestors shaped the entire ocean and whose descendants exist all the way from the east coast of Africa to the edge of Polynesia. A fierce warrior culture that endured waves of colonization at Dutch, Chinese and Japanese hands, yet maintains their languages, identity and society to this day. Welcome to our video on the indigenous Formosan tribes of Taiwan. The modern country of Taiwan is a definitive part of the Chinese-speaking world, with the overwhelming majority of its total population of 23 million people speaking the Chinese languages of Mandarin Hokkien or Hakka as their mother tongue. However, for most of history, Taiwan existed outside the periphery of the Sinosphere. It was only in the 17th and 18th centuries that migrants from Fujian province began crossing the strait en masse, marginalizing the island's native population in a history not dissimilar to the expansion of European empires across the Americas, which was happening at around the same time. Indeed, the story of Taiwan's recorded history is synonymous with colonization. Over the last 400 years, the island has been dominated by a carousel of foreign regimes, including the Dutch East India Company, the Kingdom of Tungning, the Qing Dynasty, the Empire of Japan, and Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Army. This makes it all the more remarkable that in spite of all that, Taiwan's ancient aboriginal populations maintain a living society to this day, growing to 589,000 and accounting for 2.5% of the total population. Once the dominant population across the entire island, today they are largely concentrated within the sparsely populated mountainous east. There, in the inaccessible highlands, amongst towering peaks and steep verdant valleys, Taiwan's remaining aboriginal societies exist in a world away from the urban sprawl of the flat western plains, where the overwhelming majority of the country's Han Chinese population lives. The modern government of Taiwan recognizes 16 distinct indigenous tribes, each of which has its own unique language. Historically, the Taiwanese aborigines were divided into two subgroups, the Plains Tribes and the High Mountain Tribes. Today, the Plains Tribes have largely been assimilated into Chinese-speaking society. However, the High Mountain Tribes have maintained their ethnic and linguistic identities due to a hostile hilly homeland that long provided a barrier against colonization. The indigenous peoples of Taiwan are of entirely different linguistic and ethnic stock to the Han Chinese. Their languages belong to the Austronesian language family, making them ancestrally related to a vast array of languages across the islands of Southeast Asia, such as Malaysian, Indonesian, and Filipino, and even beyond. Taiwan is widely regarded by both historians and linguists alike to be the original homeland of the Austronesian peoples. Today, Austronesian languages stretch across nearly half of Earth's saltwater expanse, with Austronesian-speaking territories dominating the densely populated islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific islands of Micronesia and Polynesia. In the present day, there are roughly 1,257 Austronesian languages. This amounts to 20% of the world's total languages, which are spoken by over 386 million people across 14,000 kilometers of territory. All of this staggering linguistic and cultural diversity traces its roots back to Taiwan, and the proof lies in linguistic taxonomy. The Austronesian language family is divided into nine subdivisions. Eight of these are found exclusively in Taiwan, while the ninth, Malayo-Polynesian, encompasses every Austronesian language spoken outside Taiwan. The fact that the indigenous Taiwanese are magnitudes more linguistically diverse than the entire rest of the massive Austronesian-speaking world combined is considered one of the strongest pieces of supporting evidence for Taiwan being the original homeland of the Austronesian peoples. Archaeological evidence suggests that humans have inhabited Taiwan for over 30,000 years, but the ancestors of today's indigenous Taiwanese descended from Neolithic cultures in what is now southern China, who arrived on the isle around 6,000 years ago. These prehistoric peoples likely spoke Proto-Austronesian, the hypothetical common ancestor of all modern Austronesian languages. Around 2000 BCE, some of these Proto-Austronesians left Taiwan and settled in what is now the northern Philippines. Hundreds if not thousands of years before European explorers like Columbus, Magellan, and Vasco de Gama made their mark on history, the Austronesians were traversing thousands of miles of ocean in sturdy catamarans and outrigger canoes. Their journeys marked the furthest any human beings had ever travelled by sea before the early modern era. By 1500 BCE, they had arrived in Indonesia and the Mariana Islands. From there, the Austronesian Odyssey spread further along the Indian Ocean to the west and Oceania to the east. Around 800 BCE, they had surfed upon the shores of Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa. A millennium passed without any further movement before in 500 AD, a new surge of seaborne migrations saw the Austronesians arriving in Madagascar. 200 years later, their far-flung eastern kinsmen planted their oars on the beaches of Tahiti and Hawaii for the first time. Finally, around 1200 AD, the islands of Rapa Nui and Aotearoa were settled. In the countless generations since those first brave seafarers set out from Taiwanese shores, the Austronesian peoples have become one of humanity's biggest families, consisting of thousands of cousins spread across thousands of islands over thousands of miles of endless sapphire horizon. Since then, each of those cousins has developed a unique history, social memory, and cultural identity of its own. Yet, if one follows the thread of time back thousands of years, one will find that each wayward child of the Austronesian family can trace their origins back to where it all began. In the modern day, the language connection between the indigenous Taiwanese and their distant kinsmen remains prominent across vast stretches of ocean. For example, in the language of the Saisiyet tribe, who are native to what is now Hsinchu country, Taiwan, the word for hello is ma'alo. 8500 kilometers away, on the island of Hawaii, the word for hello is mahalo. Additionally, mata, the word for eye in many indigenous Taiwanese languages, remains remarkably uniform across the Austronesian world, and is pronounced the same way across Malaysia, Indonesia, and Polynesia. Moreover, the tribes of Taiwan were fiercely warlike people, who practiced a highly ritualized form of headhunting. Similar headhunting traditions once existed throughout the Austronesian world, such as among the various highland tribes of the pre-colonial Philippines. Inextricably linked to the practice of headhunting were body tattoos, which reflected a tribal member's social status, and recorded the victories they had achieved in combat. Worn by both men and women of several indigenous Taiwanese tribes like the Atayal and Paiwan, ritual ink can be observed across the Austronesian world, such as in the traditional batok tattoos of the Philippines and the tamoko markings of the Maori people, where they fulfilled the same social purpose of glorifying a warrior's deeds, or affirming a person's status and privileges. On a more peaceful note, the weaving of ornate barkcloth textiles is a common practice among many Polynesian peoples. Genetic studies have confirmed that the plant from which it is processed, paper mulberry, is indigenous to Taiwan, and was originally carried across the ocean by the Having explored Taiwan's place in the greater Austronesian world, let us now refocus on the island itself, and what its indigenous societies looked like before the era of colonization. Before doing this, we should reiterate that the Taiwanese aborigines were a diverse people divided among linguistic and tribal lines, and that this will be, at best, a broad generalization of the cultural traits prevalent in most or all of the tribes. The tribes of Formosa were predominantly matrilineal. A village's properties, lands, and farms were often owned by the women, and lineage was traced down the mother's line, with men marrying into women's families. Men and women lived separate lives, existing in separate worlds which only rarely intersected. The village square was the domain of the women, who cultivated the fields, gathered the crops, and did all the cooking, weaving, and child-rearing. From the age of four onwards, boys left their mother's homes and spent much of their life living apart from women in communal men's houses, where they spent most of their days training to be a hunter and a warrior. To be a man among the natives of Formosa was to be deadly with the bow, arrow, and spear, their primary quarries being the Formosan sika deer, sambar deer, and mudjack. Women were strangers to the world of hunting, and their intrusion within it was strictly taboo. Several days before departing on a hunt, all members of the expedition had to purge themselves of feminine residue. Sexual contact was strictly forbidden, and even touching women's clothing was said to portend misfortune. Wildlife was not the only target of the Formosan hunter. Headhunting was practiced among every indigenous Taiwanese tribe, with young males required to kill an enemy and claim their head as a trophy in order to advance to full manhood. In many ways, the main day job of the indigenous Formosan man was headhunting, and protecting his village's women from rival headhunters. The role of the warrior was taken so seriously that among the Siria and various other peoples, men were discouraged from marrying or having children until they were in their mid-thirties, so they could spend the entirety of their athletic prime singularly focused on acquiring heads for the tribe. Headhunting was of crucial spiritual importance, and was seen as vital to placate and receive blessings from the gods. The Sidiq people believed that only men who had hacked off the heads of their enemies would be able to cross the rainbow bridge into the spirit world upon death. However, the overall prevalence of headhunting does not mean that indigenous society was an endless chaotic bloodbath. Warfare, while a constant threat to village life, was ordered and highly ritualized, and avenues for diplomacy existed between rival villages. Having provided a snapshot of indigenous Formosan society, let us now slip into the flow of time and tell an abridged account of their history. Despite being only 100 miles off what is now the southern Chinese coastline, Taiwan existed outside Chinese civilization's sphere of influence for most of the latter's dynastic history. As of the late 15th century, when the great treasure ships of the Ming dynasty were establishing trade links with distant India and Africa, the emperors in Meijing made no effort to absorb Taiwan, so tiny and close by, into their sphere of influence. An unfamiliar climate, a hostile, warlike native population, and inward-facing state policies made Taiwan an unpopular and unviable prospect for Chinese settlement. Thus, for most of history, the indigenous Austronesians were left to their own devices. Ironically, the first true colonizers of Taiwan were not the Chinese, who were right next door, but the red-bearded, blue-eyed barbarians from the ends of the earth. By the 1540s, explorers from Europe had arrived in Asia, seeking the wealth of the Orient. The first Europeans to explore Taiwan were the Portuguese, who named it Ila Formosa, or Beautiful Island, a name it retains to this day. In 1624, the Dutch East India Company, or VOC, established a toehold in the south of Taiwan, where they built two strongholds, Fort Zeelandia and Fort Proventia. In the following decades, the VOC had expanded further into indigenous Formosan territory. Predictably, the warrior peoples of the plains fought fiercely against foreign overlordship, but were slowly ground down by superior European firepower. Indigenous Formosan society underwent several seismic shifts under the influence of Dutch missionaries, who set out to convert the locals to Christianity, abolish their headhunting traditions, and convert their men from hunters to farmers. However, the largest change the Dutch brought to indigenous Formosan society was their importation of Chinese workers across the strait. The Dutch provided economic incentives for thousands of Chinese, mostly Hoklo and Hakkas from Fujian province, to migrate to their colony and serve as farmers, laborers, and administrators. The Dutch played the Chinese and the Austronesians against each other, using the Chinese to collect taxes from the natives and native warriors to put down the Chinese when they rebelled against Dutch authorities. This marked the first time that permanent Chinese communities of significant size were established in Taiwan, and it opened the door for the future Sinicization of the island. On April 30th, 1661, a huge fleet of Chinese warjunks, led by the fearless swashbuckler Koxinga, appeared off Fort Zealandia. Koxinga was a symptom of changing times in China, whose ruling Ming dynasty had been deposed by the ethnically Manchu Qing dynasty back in 1644. Part pirate, part Ming loyalist, Koxinga's goal was simple, to seize Taiwan from the red-haired foreign devils and turn it into a stronghold, from which he could hold out against the northern Manchu barbarians who had laid China low. During the battle that followed, swathes of indigenous Austronesian warriors, formerly loyal to the Dutch, defected en masse. They burned their Christian schoolbooks and struck out in their tribal war parties, hunting and beheading their former colonial masters. Suffice it to say, Koxinga was successful in kicking out the Dutch, and for the first time in history, the island of Taiwan had a Chinese ruler. However, Koxinga's island rebel state, the Kingdom of Tungning, would barely survive two decades before being conquered by the Qing dynasty in the year 1683. This marked the first and only time in history that a government based in mainland China controlled the island of Taiwan. Emperor Kangxi of Qing didn't actually want Taiwan. Like all Chinese emperors before him, he saw little value in the island, famously remarking that it was a small ball of mud beyond the pale of civilization. Still, he was stuck administering the place, lest some other pirate king form a rogue state on its shores, or worse, the Dutch came back. For a time, Qing policies favoured the island's indigenous peoples. Fearful that an ungoverned Han Chinese population on the island would create a breeding ground for rebellions, Qing authorities heavily limited cross-strait migration, and restricted Han Chinese settlement to a small southern enclave, forbidding them from settling in lands owned by indigenous villages. Despite their attempts to stymie migration, the Qing were ultimately powerless to stop tens of thousands of Fujianese from crossing the strait every year and illegally settling into indigenous lands. By the 19th century, the plains tribes had been fully sinicized through generations of intermarriage and marginalization, their lands overcrowded with the descendants of millions of Fujianese settlers. However, mountain tribes like the Bunen, Paiwan, and Atiyal continued to defy Han Chinese encroachment into their lands. The ferocity of the mountain warriors was a constant headache for the Qing that caused not one but two international incidents. In 1867, the American ship Rover was shipwrecked off the southern tip of Taiwan, its crew washing up in the territory of the Paiwan, who had oral traditions of when blue-eyed white men had subjugated their tribe 200 years earlier. Believing that the Americans were the Dutch returned to oppress them once more, the Paiwan ambushed the shipwrecked survivors, killing the captain, his wife, and several others. An American punitive expedition was launched against the Paiwan, but the Formosan warriors, using the jungle highlands to their advantage, forced the US Marines to retreat. A similar incident occurred in 1872, when the Paiwan massacred 54 Ryukyuan sailors who had shipwrecked on their shores. Since the kingdom of Ryukyu was a Japanese client state, this slaughter was used as a pretext by the Empire of Japan to invade Taiwan in 1874. Ultimately, the Qing paid the occupiers an indemnity, after which they sailed off. However, this would not be the last that the Qing would hear from the Japanese. In 1895, the newly industrialized Empire of the Rising Sun thrashed the antiquated Manchurian dynasty in the First Sino-Japanese War. In the subsequent Treaty of Shimonoseki, signed in April of 1895, China ceded a gift bag of goodies to Japan, not the least of which included the island of Taiwan. The relationship between the Japanese and the native Austronesians was complex. Many mountain tribes submitted to Japanese authority, but several, like the Bundun and Sidiq, remained belligerent throughout Japanese occupation, using guerrilla tactics to stymie Japanese advances into their mountain territory for decades. Ultimately, these tribesmen were eventually brought to heel by the artillery of a fully modernized Japanese military, and even the most rebellious of indigenous Formosans were made to submit to imperial rule. It was at this time that the last holdouts of headhunting were finally abolished and the last vestiges of indigenous Formosan independence snuffed out. In the end, Japanese rule in Taiwan was short-lived. To fast forward through events at max speed, a thing called World War II happened, Taiwan was returned to China, then a thing called the Chinese Civil War happened, which the nationalist Kuomintang Party lost, leading to Chiang Kai-shek fleeing the mainland and setting up a Kuomintang-led ROC government in Taiwan. Between 1949 and 1987, the Kuomintang ruled over Taiwan as a one-party authoritarian system, pursuing a policy of forced national homogenization. Mandarin was introduced as the national language of the island, while all other languages were suppressed. This impacted the Hoklo and Hakla-speaking Chinese of the urbanized western plains, but the Austronesian mountain tribes suffered far worse. Throughout the later 20th century, the Kuomintang deliberately suppressed indigenous cultures and identities, implementing policies designed to make them speak Mandarin and become Han, with the tagline of making the mountains like the plains. Indigenous peoples were forbidden from using their indigenous names on official government IDs, and forced to adopt Chinese names. As a result of all this, the Austronesian languages of the Formosan mountains began declining, going down the same path towards extinction as their plains cousins did a century earlier. However, this authoritarian system was, like every regime that had ruled Taiwan before it, fleeting. By 1987, the country was well on its way to democratization, and in March of 2000, history was made when the Democratic Progressive Party of Taiwan ousted the Kuomintang in a free and fair election. In a newly democratic Taiwan, the languages, cultures, and identities of the indigenous Formosans were brought back from the brink, the restrictions on their practice lifted. Today, the societies of the native Austronesians of Taiwan are well on the way to recovery, although the scars of colonization run deep, and their relationship with the modern Taiwanese government remains not without friction. Throughout history, the indigenous peoples of Taiwan have endured many foreign masters, be they European colonists, Hoklo pirate princes, Manchu emperors, Japanese emperors, or the Kuomintang-led government in exile. And yet, throughout this carousel of occupiers, the original inhabitants of this ancient island have survived and maintained their culture and identity, and their connection to the massive oceanic Austronesian world it helped seed. This video is sponsored by the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Canada. More videos on the histories and societies of lesser-known cultures are on the way. To ensure you don't miss that, make sure you are subscribed and have pressed the bell button. Please, consider liking, subscribing, commenting, and sharing – it helps immensely. Recently, we have started releasing weekly patron and youtube member exclusive content. Consider joining their ranks via the link in the description or button under the video to watch these weekly videos, learn about our schedule, get early access to our videos, access our private discord, and much more. This is the Kings and Generals channel, and we will catch you on the next one.