CHAPTER IV THE PRESENT POPULATION OF FORMOSA

Hakkas and other Chinese-Formosans, Japanese, Aborigines.

As regards this particular odd corner of the world, naturally, in my peregrinations about the island, I picked up a certain amount of information. Among other things, I learned that those who make up the vast majority of the population of the island at the present time, and who are known as “Formosans”—this not only among themselves, but who also are so called (i.e. Taiwan-jin, “men of Formosa”) by their Japanese conquerors, and by Europeans resident in the island—are Chinese; that is, descendants of the immigrants from the mainland of China. Of these, between 80,000 and 90,000 are Hakkas, originally from the Kwantung Province of China—a people rather despised by the other Chinese.[42] The remaining nearly 3,000,000 “Formosans[87]” are descendants of Chinese from the Fukien Province of the mainland, and most of them speak the Amoy dialect of Chinese, though a few speak the dialect of Foochow.

The Japanese, who since the treaty of Shimonoseki (1895) have been masters of the island, number between 120,000 and 125,000, and are constantly increasing in population. All official positions, and those of authority of any sort, are in the hands of the Japanese as is now all the wealth of the island.

The aboriginal population it is naturally more difficult to estimate. But the number of the aborigines at the present time cannot, in reality, exceed 105,000. Personally I doubt if a carefully taken census would reveal that number.[43] Certainly the aboriginal population is steadily diminishing, and all tribes are being driven constantly farther up into the mountains; or, in the case of certain tribes—such as the Ami and Paiwan—are being more rigidly confined to the precipitous, barren east coast. The whole of the island—including the marvellously fertile great plains on the west side of the central mountain range—was naturally once in the hands of the aborigines. But during the Chinese dominion of[88] the island, from the conquest of Koksinga (1662) to the close of the Sino-Japanese War (1895), the aboriginal population was—if all reports and all records, including those of the Chinese themselves, speak truly—treated with systematic cruelty and with ruthless greed and rapacity. Sometimes by wholesale slaughter, sometimes by fraud and cunning, the Chinese gradually pushed the aborigines back into the central mountain range, or, as the Japanese to-day are doing, confined them to the sterile, ill-watered east coast, and thus gained for themselves possession of the whole of the broad, level, western sea-board; and even of those valleys between the mountains where rice and tea could be made to grow. Chicanery was often cheaper than gunpowder. An aborigine would fancy a gun or a red blanket. A Chinaman would supply him with the commodity desired and would take in exchange, or more frequently “as security,” fertile fields. Naturally—to one who knows the habits of the aborigines—the “security” was seldom redeemed, and the Chinaman became the owner of the land.

If an effort were really made by an exceptionally industrious or far-seeing aborigine to redeem his land, some method was usually found by the Chinaman to thwart this effort. The land remained in Chinese hands.

Since 1895 all the land of agricultural value in the island has passed from the hands of the Chinese-Formosans into those of their Japanese[89] conquerors; this usually by force and extortion, the Chinese having suffered at the hands of the Japanese, much as they had forced the aborigines to suffer at their hands during the preceding two hundred years.[44]

The well-being, or the reverse, of the aborigines has been little affected by the change of masters. On this point I should be contradicted by the Japanese, who would point out that they have introduced the eating, and—as far as this is possible in the mountains—the cultivation, of rice, instead of millet, among the aborigines. Also they would lay stress upon the fact that they have established among the aborigines schools for the “teaching of Japanese language, Japanese customs, and Japanese manners.” Apart, however, from wondering just how the displacement of millet by rice, as a staple of diet, and compulsory training in Japanese language and customs and Japanese “good manners” will be of benefit to the aborigine (the eating of white rice will probably give him berri-berri—as it has given this disease to so many of the Japanese—from which up to this time he has been spared by the eating of millet), one notes that the Japanese in their[90] reports—official and otherwise—of the efforts of their Government in the direction of the “civilization of the aboriginal tribes” fail to remark upon the fact that, because of their establishment of camphor “factories”[45] (see illustration) throughout the mountains, they are encroaching further upon the territory of the aborigines than ever the Chinese did. Also they fail to remark upon the fact that bombs are dropped from aeroplanes upon villages of the aborigines, in order to impress the latter with the omnipotence of the Japanese Government, and with that of its Divine Emperor.[46]

“FACTORY” FOR EXTRACTING CAMPHOR IN THE MOUNTAINS OF FORMOSA.

The work is done by Chinese-Formosan coolies under the supervision of Japanese officials. The manufacture of camphor, like that of opium, is a Japanese Government monopoly.

As a matter of fact, the only people ever dominant in Formosa who seem to have treated the aborigines with either kindness or equity were the Dutch during their thirty-seven years’ over-lordship in the seventeenth century. The story of this period of just and kindly rule in their island has been handed down among the aborigines from parent to child and still remains a tradition among them—one of a Golden Age long past; just how long of course they have no idea, but in the time of “many grandfathers back.” There is [91]a tradition that the Dutch even taught the aborigines to read, and also to write their own dialect—this in the “sign-marks of the gods” (Roman script). Old documents written by their ancestors are said to have existed among them even a generation ago. These are reported to have been confiscated by the Japanese, as part of a systematic and far-reaching attempt to eradicate the memory of any culture other than Japanese. Whether or not this story of the confiscation of old documents be true I do not know, but certainly during my two years’ residence in Formosa I was not able to find a single document of this sort among the aborigines.

Only the memory of past culture given by “fair gods who came over the sea in white-winged boats”—or, as some of the tribes have it, “came up out of the sea”—remains.

It seems that there exists among some of the tribes a belief that a reincarnation of a former “Great White Chief”—presumably Father Candidius, a Dutch priest, who devoted his life to the care, spiritual and temporal, of the aboriginal people—will return and help them throw off the yoke of their Chinese and Japanese conquerors.[47] Hence the welcome which a fair-haired, blue-eyed person receives from them, and the reverence with which he—or she—is treated: their appreciation[92] of such a one being in rather marked contrast with the point of view of both Chinese and Japanese, who speak of a fair-haired—or even brown-haired—blue-eyed man or woman as a “red-haired, green-eyed barbarian.”