Formosan

The Formosans are the Austronesian-speaking indigenous peoples of Taiwan, an island most linguists treat as the original homeland of the entire Austronesian family: every primary branch of it except Malayo-Polynesian survives only in the Formosan languages. They lived in independent villages without any overarching polity, trading, warring and intermarrying among themselves. The lowland groups of the west and south, the Siraya, Makatao, Lloa, Taokas and Arikun, combined millet farming with deer hunting in walled villages, often under matrilineal customs and age-grade systems, while the Amis held the east coast. The Dutch East India Company, arriving in 1624, built its colony near present Tainan, subjugated the Siraya villages after 1635, opened schools and churches using a romanised Siraya script, and drew the plains people into the deerskin trade; a short-lived Spanish foothold at Keelung lasted only from 1626 to 1642.

In 1662 Zheng Chenggong, known as Koxinga, expelled the Dutch and set up the Tungning kingdom, whose Chinese schools and farming reforms reached into indigenous villages; the Qing seized the island in 1683, after which Han settlers from Zhangzhou and Quanzhou flooded the western plain. The Qing taxed the acculturated plains villages as cooked aliens and set up boundary stelae from 1722 to seal off the mountain peoples, yet Han encroachment continued. The Taokas led the Dajiaxi revolt of 1731 to 1732, while many plains families adopted Han surnames, intermarried with settlers or migrated inland, some moving to the Yilan plain in 1804 and into the Puli basin in 1823.