Taiwan: Shung Ye Museum of Formosan Aborigines, Taipei

I have to admit, when we went to Taiwan, I didn't know much about Taiwanese history. I had this vague notion that, sometime in the 20th century, the Chinese Communists kicked the Chinese Nationalists out, at which point they fled the mainland, established a government in Taiwan, hung on to a seat at the UN for a while, then languished in an uneasy truce with the mainland for a good sixty or seventy years.

As it turns out, Taiwan has a much longer history of political turmoil and foreign invasion. First there were the aborigines, then several waves of Chinese (Post-1945 mainlanders, Hakka, and Hoklo, three very different mainland cultures), before the Japanese and the Chinese Nationalists swept in. These days, partly as the result of a new movement to differentiate Taiwan from the mainland (link), a lot more has been done to highlight those parts of Taiwanese history and culture that are neither (modern) Chinese nor Japanese.

The Shung Ye Museum of Formosan Aborigines (note: "Formosa" is the old name for Taiwan), established in 1994, was a very early step in this direction. The museum, coupled with the park across the road, tells the story of the people who lived in Taiwan for about 8,000 years before the Chinese arrived. These Taiwanese aborigines aren't culturally, linguistically, or genetically related to other East Asians--instead, they're related to the Austronesian peoples of Madagascar, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Oceania. In fact, there's some evidence that all those cultures actually originated in Taiwan. Some old Maori myths from New Zealand, for instance, that suggest Taiwan as the ultimate origin of the Maori people.

There are still some active tribes of Taiwanese aborigines today. In total, they number about 500,000, or around 2% of Taiwan's population. They're a much bigger presence in the Taiwanese imagination, though. For one, people of aboriginal descent who are no longer part of an active tribal culture tend to under-report their aboriginal ancestry. In addition, Taiwan has built a small but thriving industry on tourism and cultural production related to aboriginal culture.

This is a pretty major development: as recently as 10 or 20 years ago, legal, social, and economic discrimination against Taiwanese aborigines was pretty severe. There are still problems, to be sure, but things are also much better than they once were.

Anyway--the museum. We went first thing in the morning (yes, we were actually waiting outside when they unlocked the place . . . how dorky are we!), but even so, it was strange that we were the only people there. It was a great little museum, with plenty of English signage and a variety of exhibits on the daily lives of aborigines past and present. The museum was also surprisingly even-handed: it didn't whitewash the shocking violence inherent in some of the old tribal ways, and didn't romanticize the often brutal lives under the old tribal system, but at the same time made it clear why some of the old traditions were worth preserving. I thought the music was especially varied and beautiful.

Overall, this place is well worth a morning if you're in Taiwan, and especially if you plan on hitting the nearby National Palace Museum in the afternoon.