The Native Peoples of Taiwan

JupiterKid

I was surfing the web yesterday evening and ended up reading up on the geography and history of the Asian island of Taiwan and I was very surprised to learn that the Chinese people, who claim soveirgnty over Taiwan, are in no way the original inhabitants of the island.

In fact the "Han" Chinese only started to arrive in Taiwan in significant numbers in the 17th century, under the era of Dutch rule over Taiwan. This was roughly the same time that Northern Ireland was "planted" with Scottish and English settlers.

I was pretty stunned to learn this. Today, the ethnic Chinese make up about 90% of the population of Taiwan and the political disputes over the island between mainland China and the separatist government in Taiwan are well known.

But what is much less well known, certainly in the West, is that the original Taiwanese peoples were a much darker skinned ethnic group more closely related to the Indonesians and Polynesians than to the Chinese or Japanese peoples. Today, they account for less than 10 per cent of the population of Taiwan and after centuries of mistreatment and colonial oppression, under the Dutch, the Chinese, the Japanese and again the Chinese, they are now largely confined the mountainous interior and East of Taiwan.

Seems like a sad history for the native people of Taiwan.:(

Kampung Boy

Despite several centuries of Chinese colonization, Austronesian tribes still dominated the central and northern regions of Taiwan until the end of the 19th century AD.

The origins of the Austronesian people reflects the most phenomenal record of maritime colonization and dispersal in the history of humanity

"All the East Indies, including parts of the Malay Peninsula, and all of the island world of the Pacific-Polynesia, Micronesia and Melanesia, always excepting interior New Guinea - are the habitat of the closely knit Malayo-Polynesian or Austronesian family, whose unity was early recognized by philologists. From Madagascar to Easter Island their speech stretches half-way around the planet."

Regards, KB

Duffy the Vampire Slayer

This reminds me of something I came across recently when studying the colonization of New Zealand. The Chatham Islands about 500 miles east of New Zealand were inhabited by a Polynesian people called the Moriori but were then colonized by Maori's with the help of the British in 1835. The native people were enslaved by the invaders until the 1860's. I thought it was very interesting to read of a colonized people colonizing another group of people.

charlemont

Whats amazing is the Han Chinese on Taiwan speak the native language, I remember hearing it on a documentary before.

Seems im wrong, I just had a wee look on Wikipedia.

Kampung Boy

The Tao people of Orchid Island {Lan Yu - Chinese; Ponso no Tano - Tao}
have the best preserved traditions among the Taiwanese aborigines. This is largely due to the fact that access to the island was restricted between 1895 - 1945 when Taiwan was a dependency of the Empire of Japan. The Japanese designated Orchid Island as an ethnological research area. The restrictions imposed on the island were retained when the Republic of China took over power in Taiwan in 1945. The ban on tourism to Orchid Island was only lifted in 1967.
KB.