Taiwan before the flood

When Mackay Memorial hospital genetics researcher Lin Ma-li (林媽利) said the results of a series of blood tests proved that Taiwan's population was genetically linked to Polynesians rather that Han Chinese, in August, it reopened a long running debate about an obscure version of Taiwan's history.

Mainstream evolutionary thought has long revolved around two contrasting hypotheses: Taiwan was settled by peoples who came from China roughly 1,700 years ago; or Taiwan had its own indigenous culture long before the Chinese ever set foot on Taiwan.

If Lin's claims are to be taken seriously, however, then the nation's history could be more similar to a third version that is being propagated by members of the fringe historical society, the Taiwan Paleo-Civilization Research Center (灣古文明研究室). This account suggests there is a legendary lost continent, underwater cities, mystifying megaliths and a mega tsunami.

"There is plenty of evidence that links Taiwan to the Pacific islands. Huge stone megaliths in the form of faces for example can be found throughout the region and there are similarities between Taiwanese Aboriginal folklore and that of the Polynesians," said Peter Hsui (眭澔平), a well-known travel writer and recreational historian. "The recent blood tests proved that the Taiwanese and Pacific islanders are far more interrelated than we previously believed them to be."

The blood tests, which involved 640 people from nine of Taiwan's 13 tribes and looked at variations in mitochondrial DNA, found that three specific mutations are shared by Taiwanese, Polynesians and Melanesians -- but are not found amongst other Asians.

For the Taiwan Paleo-Civilization Research Center's Ho Hsien-jung (何顯榮) the findings highlight an evolutionary theory he has long adhered to, that a long-forgotten race of people in Taiwan were responsible for populating the Pacific and a mythical island known as Mu Land, or Mudalu (姆大陸) -- and to Polynesians as Hawaiki. Pacific culture, Ho believes, began in Taiwan.

"It's obvious when you look at the facts. Taiwan is one of the very few places in the Pacific Rim that has such a long, unexplained and diverse history," Ho said. "The parallels between [Taiwanese] and other Pacific races are too much alike to be coincidental. They must have come from somewhere and I believe that that somewhere was Taiwan."

Needless to say, Ho's assertions are not taken very seriously in academic circles. The idea that Taiwan's Aborigines and Pacific Rim races are interconnected is by no means new, however. Linguists have long been aware that the spoken languages of Taiwan's tribes belong to a group known as Austronesian.

Unrelated to Chinese, be it Mandarin or Cantonese, the group includes Polynesian tongues and accounts for nine of the 10 Austronesian linguistic sub-families. Also, many of Taiwan's tribal legends, especially those of the Ami tribe, tell of the tribe "returning" rather than "coming" to Taiwan.

In 2002, Ho's publication Taiwan -- The Cradle of Civilization (台灣人類文明原鄉) put forward the notion that the first seeds of civilization in the Asia-Pacific region came from a landmass called Mudalu. Although the book was only the second comprehensive study of the legendary island to be published in Taiwan, accounts of a Pacific Atlantis called Mu can be traced back to the mid-19th century.