Mon, Aug 25, 2025 page12

• Notes from Central Taiwan: Taiwan’s indigenous communities: more than just song and dance

  The indigenous ‘culture’ we are offered is truncated, impoverished, unrepresentative and even worse: predictable

  • By Michael Turton / Contrbuting Reporter
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  During the Metal Ages, prior to the arrival of the Dutch and Chinese, a great shift took place in indigenous material culture. Glass and agate beads, introduced after 400BC, completely replaced Taiwanese nephrite (jade) as the ornamental materials of choice, anthropologist Liu Jiun-Yu (劉俊昱) of the University of Washington wrote in a 2023 article. He added of the island’s modern indigenous peoples: “They are the descendants of prehistoric Formosans but have no nephrite-using cultures.”

  Moderns squint at that dynamic era of trade and cultural change through the mutually supporting lenses of later settler-colonialism and imperial power, which treated the indigenous as savages, and the census systems of the Japanese and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), which erased them. The result is that where the indigenous exist they are positioned in isolation and opposition to the “civilized” states that occupied Taiwan, instead of as outward-facing participants in the exchange networks that dominated the Austronesian world until the advent of the Europeans in Asia.

  Liu Yi-Chang (劉益昌) of the Institute of Archaeology at National Cheng Kung University has developed a three stage “trade diaspora” model under which itinerant craftsmen who knew high-firing pyrotechnology for metal and glass work traveled to Taiwan regularly for trade beginning around 400BC. These craftsmen had links to technologies developed in what is now India. By 100BC they began to settle in diasporic communities that still maintained links to the homeland outside Taiwan. Sometime between 200 and 400AD, in the final stage of diasporic integration, they made use of iron ore deposits on Taiwan and the links with the homeland were dispensed with. Liu Yi-chang argues that one of these groups eventually became known as the Basay.

  

  Archeologists excavate an archeological site in Yilan County’s Dongshan Township in this undated file photo.

  Photo courtesy of the Yilan Culture Bureau

  THE BASAY ‘GYPSIES’

  The Basay were a northern Taiwan group, well known to the Dutch and Spanish as traders and manufacturers, “gypsies” as one Spanish account put it. The term “Basay” appears to cover a loose grouping of peoples and there is some debate over just who and what places could be considered Basay. Modern Tamshui apparently occupies the site of one of their villages, Senar. They persisted long enough into the modern era for the Japanese to have collected their language, but they no longer exist today as a distinct people. Unique among the pre-colonial peoples of Taiwan, they lived by trade, working as blacksmiths and carpenters. They operated extensive trade networks with other groups around Taiwan, and later, brokered between the incoming Chinese, Dutch and Spanish and the groups in their networks.

  According to historian Chien Hung-yi (簡宏逸), the Basay were considered to be excellent navigators using outrigger canoes, and may have established “their own territories along with trade routes connecting Tamsui, Keelung, Cavalangh (Yilan Plain) and Turoboan (generally believed to be near the estuary of Hualien’s Liwu River).”

  

  Human remains from the Hanben Archeological site.

  Photo courtesy of Hsiao Wen-chieh

  The Basay were considered especially good at languages by everyone they interacted with. Peter Kang (康培德) has observed that they mined coal and cut wood for the Dutch, and traded food for Chinese goods. In 1697 Yu Yonghe (陏永河), whose travel diary of his Taiwan trip is a trove of information, apparently encountered one of the Basay groups, noting that a small community in Tamsui produced sulfur. They also acted as mediators of Dutch attempts to rule over other peoples of the north after the Dutch drove out the Spanish.

  As scholar Christopher Joby observed in an article on food culture in pre-colonial Taiwan, the Basay knew how to make salt by salt-panning, technology they probably obtained from the Chinese. They grew peaches (northern Taiwan was colder in those days) and oranges, both of which come from outside Taiwan. Based on their differing linguistic and cultural practices, Joby tentatively suggests that the Basay (and the Siraya) came to Taiwan at a different time than other groups on the island.

  NEW TECHNOLOGIES

  The influx of materials and technologies such as glass and glass bead, agates and metals and metallurgy was part of a flow of technologies in and out of Taiwan. After 400BC the first glass beads, based on South Asia technology, reached Taiwan. In the 10th century Chinese traders brought the first leaded glass beads, while the Dutch introduced beads made of European glass. With the mining of jade and the development of the famous ling-ling-o ornaments for trade with maritime southeast Asia after 500BC, craftsmen must have traveled to and from areas to the south and southeast of Taiwan, bringing raw jade, processed jade and jade shaping technologies with them. Even as demand for jade fell off locally, mining and processing for export continued, observes Liu Jiun-yu.

  Ancient iron production in Taiwan is now familiar to the public as the centerpiece of the museum in Bali outside Taipei. Less well known is that the local peoples also occasionally worked bronze. A small bronze bell and knife shanks with sandstone moulds dating somewhere between 200 to 800AD are known from the Jiuxianglan (舊香蘭) and Blihun Hanben (漢本) sites in south-eastern and eastern Taiwan. Liu Jiun-yu argues that because the amounts of bronze are small, the technology likely came in as a package with the glass and agate bead artifacts and technologies.

  Iron production among indigenous peoples in Taiwan remained critical well into the historical era. In 1657 a Dutch clerk named Jacob Balbiaen traveled in a Basay canoe (that carried 27 people, 24 of whom were rowers) down the east coast of Taiwan to visit the Turoboan people in what is now Hualien, where he watched as the Basay traded old iron and pots of salted fish for gold. The Dutch offered fabric and roughly 120 kilos of raw iron, and received ten-and-a-half eight-real pieces in gold in return. Chien Hung-yi observed that the Turoboan people alone consumed three metric tons of iron a year to make tools for mining and farming. Further, he notes, the demand for raw iron only shows that they could manufacture their own iron objects.

  The ubiquity of iron-working technology among the pre-colonial peoples of Taiwan, along with their extensive local and overseas trade networks, has become lost to moderns. When we visit indigenous villages in the hills that part of history is nowhere represented. We view performances, not of iron smithing and potmaking, or jade and gold mining, but dancing and singing. The indigenous “culture” we are offered is truncated, impoverished, unrepresentative and worse: expected. It would be enormously helpful to the image of indigenous people if some of these old metalworking and glass bead technologies were demonstrated, instead of songs.

  Overwhelmed by Han settlers, the Basay eventually lost control of northern Taiwan sometime in the 18th century. They could no longer live by trade and brokering relations between different groups, and gradually receded into history. Chien relates that a group of Basay people migrated to Kevalan at the beginning of the 19th century and established themselves as the Masai, also known as the “Roaming Tamsui Savages.”

  “The current Masai village,” he says, “also narrates the story that their ancestors migrated from Jinbaoli to help the Qing soldiers to fight against the Qauqaut Tribe, but, in the end, they were assigned to poor lands and had to work hard to survive and tell the tale.”

  Almost a metaphor for the indigenous experience of colonization.

  Notes from Central Taiwan is a column written by long-term resident Michael Turton, who provides incisive commentary informed by three decades of living in and writing about his adoptive country. The views expressed here are his own.
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