A new outrigger canoe, a traditional mode of transportation for Austronesian people across the Pacific Ocean, has been built in Palau and is now on display in Taiwan at the National Museum of Prehistory in Taitung.
A ceremony was held at the museum yesterday to mark the completion of the seven-seat outrigger canoe.
In the ceremony, museum officials practiced a traditional Puyuma worship ritual while four shipbuilders from Palau practiced their traditional craft. Betel nuts, azure stones and hemp knitting were offered in the rituals as sacrifices.
According to the museum's deputy director, Tsuei Jui-ming (崔瑞明), the museum ordered a traditional outrigger canoe from Palau early this year to enrich its collections.
The shipbuilders were appointed in person by Palau President Tommy Remengesau, he said.
Widely used
Tsuei said that outrigger canoes have been used for thousands of years by the Austronesian people across the Pacific Ocean.
Taiwan's indigenous people are believed to belong to the Austronesian-language group, which probab-ly underwent the widest physical dispersion of a single language family -- prior to the European colonial expansion following Christopher Columbus -- from the island of Madagascar off the east coast of Africa all the way to Easter Island and extending to Taiwan, Vietnam, Northern Australia, New Zealand and most of the Melanesian and Polynesian islands.
Taiwan's indigenous people could have originated either from the southern part of China or from a vast Austronesian-language region.
Taiwan's Aborigines were considered the northernmost Austronesian people. The government divides them into 12 major mountain tribes and 10 Pingpu groups. While elements of the languages and culture of the 10 mountainous races have been maintained, most of the native languages of the Pingpu people have died out and no traces remain.
Among the mountainous Aborigines, the Saisiat and the Atayal are believed to have migrated to Taiwan some 3,000 years ago.
Anthropologists have no idea what exactly happened, or when, to cause some of Taiwan's earliest natives to die out or disappear, but efforts to seek traces of the original natives' existence via anthropological, linguistic and historical studies are continuing.
Theories
In a relatively newer theory developed in Australia and New Zealand in recent years, anthropologists believe that Taiwan is the place where the Austronesian-language people originated from.
Geoffrey Chambers of Victoria University in Wellington believes that Maori people and other Polynesian peoples of the Pacific "island-hopped" from Taiwan through the Philippines and Indonesia to West Polynesia. From there, he says, they traveled to the islands of East Polynesia and then south-west, eventually settling in New Zealand.
A fugitive in a suspected cosmetic surgery fraud case today returned to Taiwan from Canada, after being wanted for six years. Internet celebrity Su Chen-tuan (蘇陳端), known as Lady Nai Nai (貴婦奈奈), and her former boyfriend, plastic surgeon Paul Huang (黃博健), allegedly defrauded clients and friends of about NT$1 billion (US$30.66 million). Su was put on a wanted list in 2019 when she lived in Toronto, Canada, after failing to respond to subpoenas and arrest warrants from the Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office. Su arrived at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport at 5am today on an EVA Air flight accompanied by a
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
Restarting the No. 2 reactor at the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant would take up to 18 months, Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) said today. Kuo was answering questions during a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Economics Committee, where legislators are considering amendments to the Renewable Energy Development Act (再生能源發展條) amid concerns about the consequences of the Pingtung County reactor’s decommissioning scheduled for May 17. Its decommissioning is to mark the end of Taiwan’s nuclear power production. However, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers have proposed an amendment to the Nuclear Reactor Facilities Regulation Act (核子反應器設施管制法) that would extend the life of existing