“Herbal Urbanism: Beitou·Pingpu Tribe” Lecture Series First Session: Ketagalan Tribe
Moving forward in the torrent of history, we can get a glimpse of a group of people in Beitou who live in symbiosis with nature. They have lived in Qixing Mountain, Datun Mountain System, and today’s Xinbeitou for hundreds of years, but they are almost forgotten by everyone today. They are The Ketagalan ethnic group living in Beitou – Beitou Society. In order to arouse more attention, we explore the history of the Pingpu ethnic group, the intersection of hot spring geology and humanities, ethnic culture and gods. This discussion invited teacher Zhan Sujuan, who studies the Pingpu ethnic group in the north, to first sort out the historical context of the Pingpu ethnic group in the north, and then teacher Li Qilin responded, opening up Beitou’s perspective on aboriginal history.
The “Chen Clan Ancestral Hall” in Beitou is located on Datong Street, a 5-minute walk from Beitou MRT Station. Since the late Kangxi period of the Qing Dynasty, Han people began to immigrate to Beitou, purchasing land from the Pingpu people and buying and selling it. The Chen Ancestral Hall is the mark of the Chen family’s reclamation in Beitou. To this day, the Chen family is also the common surname in Beitou. In the school building behind the ancestral hall, officials were stationed here during the Qing Dynasty to handle lawsuits involving illegal sulfur mining. In 1903, the Beitou branch of Bazhilan Public School was located here, which was also the predecessor of Beitou Elementary School. This lecture explores the historical evidence of the Pingpu people and the Beitou community in the north. It will bring the audience to the historical scene and experience an atypical listening to history from the historical field of the interaction experience between the Han people and the Pingpu people.
Lecture text summary
Host/Planner | Introduction by Xu Wenrui (excerpt)
How can we pay attention to local life experience and life history in this era where people come and go and are on the move at all times?
I moved to Beitou a few years ago and am considered a “new resident” of Beitou. In the past few years, we have paid more and more attention to issues of identity, from the history of immigration and colonization to interactions with indigenous peoples. But in this series of caring movements, where are the Pingpu people? This question reminds me of a statement put forward by the writer Sun Dachuan. When the Han people differentiate between the aboriginal people, they use raw and cooked people to classify them. In recent years, the concepts of raw and cooked Han have also begun to appear in the identity issues. The transformation from raw Han to mature Han comes from the Han people’s concern for aboriginal issues and culture. During this process, everyone began to review their identity and lineage, and started to pay attention to “root-seeking.”
I am a Pingtung native, and my family has immigrated here since the mid-19th century, so the possibility of “mixed blood” is very high. After doing some research, I also found out that my father’s mother is familiar with her. This discovery actually surprised me, because my family never talked about this matter since I was a child. This discovery made me realize that many of my thoughts and living habits, such as my love of eating betel nuts, were actually influenced by my grandma. The process of going from a raw Han to a familiar Han made me start to think about how I can change from a “born Beitou person” to a “familiar Beitou person”? What do I need to do? How does this concept connect to my life experience? I think this project (series of lectures) is a process for me from being a Beitou native to being a Beitou native.
In the past few years, I have gradually met many friends who are concerned about Beitou-related issues, from the ecological environment to the Pingpu people, from (visible) ruins to invisible things. Among all the visible and invisible, how can we find the Pingpu people? How can we see from this that the Pingpu people’s life experience is still active and full of vitality? In the upcoming series of discussions on Pingpu ethnic issues, we need a historical foundation, so in the first lecture, two historical scholars were invited to lay the foundation for future related activities and discussions.
Speaker｜Zhan Sujuan (Academia Sinica, associate researcher) (excerpt)
History often needs to be explored and understood through local people before it can truly be restored.
Just now, Teacher Xu mentioned that your grandma is familiar with you in the household registration information during the Japanese colonial period. Congratulations, you are very lucky. Because there are not as many people with Pingpu blood in Taiwanese society as we think. In addition, if the new revised version of the Aboriginal Status Law is passed by the Legislative Yuan, then as long as you have a familiar annotation in your genealogy, you will have the opportunity and hope to be registered as a Pingpu Aboriginal person. In today’s speech, I do not intend to give an overly academic explanation of the history of the Pingpu people. In the Internet age, everyone can get a lot of information from databases. The local stories, history, and memories that local people can know and express are often more delicate and emotional than those from other places. Therefore, I just want to provide a historical context for everyone to understand.
At the beginning, I would like to introduce to you the indigenous people of the greater Taipei area, the so-called Ketagalan people. Going back to history, the earliest image data of the aboriginal people in the greater Taipei area comes from the Manila manuscripts of the 16th century. There are two images among them, which are related to the aboriginal people of northern Taiwan. One is a chicken coop and the other is fresh water. In the image, we see that the aboriginal people of northern Taiwan actually came into contact with outsiders very early and left a deep impression on them. The Spanish priest J. Esquivel also left written records of the aborigines in northern Taiwan in 1632, allowing us to have a deeper understanding of the aborigines in the greater Taipei area. After the Spanish, there was an ancient map drawn by the Dutch in 1654. Different locations and tribes were numbered on the map, and their names were listed next to them for comparison.
The Dutch conducted a very detailed survey of the greater Taipei area and used space to divide the tribes into several blocks and calculate the number of people and households in each village. Therefore, we can see that in the seventeenth century, the entire Greater Taipei Basin actually had only 842 households and 3,171 people. Documents from the Qing Dynasty continued to use the pinyin of the Dutch period, and records of place names in Chinese for Pingpu Village began to appear, allowing for mutual comparison and understanding, and establishing historical continuity. There are so many tribes and ethnic groups, which can be roughly divided into three groups, namely the Maasai/Basay people on the north coast, the Luilang/Ketagalan people living in the Taipei Basin, and the The Kulon people in the Linkou Platform and Nankan River Basin. In the end, we used Ketagalan as the collective name for these three groups of people.
In Spanish and Dutch archives, the indigenous tribes of Beitou are often referred to as “Kipatauw”. “ki” is an Austronesian adverb, which is sometimes meaningless, so patauw is the correct name. But what does patauw mean? It can be seen from the literature of Japanese scholar Inō Yoshiaki that patauw means witch, but the accuracy of the literature is questionable. Therefore, the research on the name of Beitou still needs more and more in-depth research on the ethnic language. Fortunately, the word “Kipatauw” has always existed in our understanding of the region. As a place name, Beitou not only has a place in history, but has been used since the 17th century to this day. So where is the Beitou Society? In historical research, there are different opinions on the research area of Beitou community. The consensus among scholars today is that the Pingpu village communities in Beitou area are mainly composed of three areas: Dingshe, Zhongshe and Xiashe. The Dingshe refers to the area around Sanchengqi (the location of the park’s renaming movement), the Zhongshe is at Fuxinggang, and the Lowershe is the original site of Baode Palace, commonly known as “Fanzai Cuo”, near Daye Road (the area around Fengnianli, Beitou District).
Descriptions of each region can also be seen in household registrations, leases, and genealogy information in the Beitou area. When discussing the connection between the Beitou settlement and the local area, the “Fanzai Cuo” Baode Palace, which is dedicated to the “Prince Fan” Chitose Chifu, played a very important role. The story about Baode Palace is very exciting. The following lectures will There is a more in-depth introduction. Another core of Beitou faith is the Beitou Presbyterian Church. Founded by Pastor Ma Kai in 1876, it was originally founded in Galabie (today’s Central North Road area). It was not until 1912 that church member Chen Jin donated land in the Fanzicuo area and became the predecessor of the current Presbyterian Church. As the first event in the entire series of events, my focus today is to explain why this event is meaningful in the context of history. In addition, I also want to emphasize that history often needs to be explored and understood through local people. Really restored.
Although I do research on the Pingpu people, the reason why the Pingpu ethnic group has been able to amend the Aboriginal Status Law and be accepted as an indigenous people today is the result of decades of hard work by the Pingpu people, not scholars. Everyone here is very welcome to join in.
Respondent｜Li Qilin (Assistant Professor, Department of History, Tamkang University)
In the concept of maritime history, the interaction between immigrants and local residents promotes the development of industries and affects the formation of local history.
From a historical point of view, the development of Beitou area is actually very early. The earliest research data is “Daoyi Zhilue” written by Wang Dayuan, a navigator of the Yuan Dynasty, which specifically mentions that sulfur is produced in northern Taiwan, and sulfur can be linked to the industrial history of the Pingpu people. As early as 1626, the Spanish began to exchange cloth with the indigenous people for sulfur stones to be used as gunpowder materials. The Dutch also have similar historical records depicting the smoking mountain (Sulfur Mountain) in the Beitou area of Taiwan. The relevant information from the Qing Dynasty is Yu Yonghe’s “Sulfur Mining Diary” (Pi Hai Jiyou), which records the relevant situation of the sulfur industry in Beitou area. The Lin Shuangwen incident in 1786 made the Qing court realize the importance of the sulfur industry again, prompting the emergence of a ban on sulfur mining, which affected the industrial development of aborigines.
As the area with the highest sulfur production in northern Taiwan, Beitoushe’s historical development is inseparable from sulfur mining. After the opening of Tamsui Port in 1862, the industrial structure of the Aboriginal people changed dramatically due to the rise of sulfur mining. During the Japanese colonial period, the development of the hot spring industry promoted the commercial flow of Beitou area. In 1905, the discovery of Beitou stone further enhanced the value of Beitou area in terms of tourism and leisure. From the perspective of maritime history, whether it is moving people or objects, transactions and commerce are highly related to the history of local residents, therefore the study of local history also requires the cooperation and assistance of many people. A few years ago, when I was doing oral histories of several towns in northern Taiwan, I found that the data were getting less and less, and the elders were leaving one after another. Therefore, I had to establish the entire data as soon as possible while they were still there. The local culture was It requires everyone’s participation and understanding.
QA time
Audience: Is the location of the Hanban boundary monument fixed? Because there is also a Han-Fan boundary monument next to Shipai Police Station?
Answer: As time goes by, the historical areas will also change. Boundary monuments were not set up at the same time, and the movement and exchanges between Aboriginal people and Han people would affect the location of the boundary monuments.
Audience: Is there any new literature or information emerging about the research on Ketagalan? The research on the Pingpu people seems to have reached a bottleneck?
Answer: It’s not that there’s no documentation, it’s that there’s a lack of people doing research. In fact, there are many different materials and documents that need to be interpreted and studied, but not many people are involved in Pingpu related research. The existing researchers also have their own fields, so they are unable to invest in new research topics.
Audience: How was the household registration survey conducted during the Japanese occupation? How to determine the identity of local people? Is it through the language he uses or his own words?
Answer: Both, it is a comprehensive investigation. Sometimes they are classified as having the same ancestral home based on language, and sometimes it is based on personal self-report (identity), so it is indeed possible that although there are no familiar words registered in the household registration information, they still have aboriginal ancestry.