I spent the last two days tromping through the back country of northern Taiwan in search of more of the wall.  A lot of it has been destroyed by factories and housing estates.  The depressing thing is that most of the destruction has happened in the last 20 years.  Something that has survived for over 200 years is being destroyed in our life time. 

I've been searching for the wall by first searching on maps for placenames that refer to the wall like "earthen ox" or "ox hill" or "earthen village" or "division spot (referring to the division of Han vs aboriginals the wall create)."  But these names are few (total of only 25 so far found) and far between (literally).  There is so much ground to cover in between these few place names so the only way is to get out there and search.

The next source of information is reading history records.  But not many records were kept of the wild frontier of 250 years ago.  And what records exist are spotty and/or vague (they refer to an area the wall went through, no specific location).  Another problem is the place names for most of the route have changed so even if I could identify a place, the locals don't necessarily know which modern name has replaced the old name

I have yet to find a detailed map that shows locations for the wall.  The closest resolution I can get is MILES, not yards or feet! 

One good thing is that because the wall was constructed by the government, the land on which it stood was public property.  When the Japanese took control of Taiwan in the late 1800's they maintained the public property registry for the land the wall was on.  This category has been maintained until now.  This means that the land the wall is on should technically off limits to private individuals.  In many places this exclusion has been maintained.  What has happened is that in places the public land has been used for public purposes.  The wall has been pulled down and replaced with a road.  The ditch has been widened into a canal.  In other places the land has been abandoned and has become overgrown.  But due to the unique nature of the wall (meters wide, miles long), the abandoned land is in long strips that can be seen from a satellite as a line that is different in color and usage than the surrounding plots of land.  Parts that have been converted into canals or roads can be linked together with the abandoned strips of land to form long sections if one knows what to look for on a satellite map.

Thus the best way to find where the wall used to go is to use satellite imagining to locate lines that are suspiciously straight or follow the contours of the land in man-made ways.  Then I take the map and the coordinates and drive out to the location and ask local farmers what the site I located on the map is.  About 10% of the time I find someone that can lead me to a portion of the wall.  Mostly the locals just stare at me as though I'm crazy.
 

The Earthen Ox

While Taiwan was known to the Chinese for hundreds of years it was not initially settled by them. When the Portuguese "discovered" it in the late 1500's was occupied by at least 25 tribes of aborigines, who's origins are still being debated. The Dutch were the first serious colonizers, setting up a fort and trading center in southern Taiwan in the early 1600's. The local aborigines were willing to trade with them but were not interested in settling into an agrarian lifestyle or in growing the cash crops the Dutch needed to generate a profit from their colony. The Dutch then encouraged immigrants from China who settled around the Dutch fort. Forty years later the Chinese defeated the Dutch and drove them out of Taiwan.

Starting in the early 1700's Chinese immigrants started pouring into Taiwan, attracted by the rich farmland available on the western plains. They ran into conflict with the existing aboriginal population over land rights. The result was usually the aboriginals being bought off, cheated or driven off prime farming land. The aborigines would try to retaliate, resulting in the murder of Chinese settlers. This would bring about a military response from the Chinese, ect., etc. (sound familiar, those of you who know American settler-Indian conflict)?

The Chinese government grew tired of having to post military forces to separate the two sides so starting in 1715's it built a trench backed by an earthen wall two meters high that ran from Taipei in the north to Wufeng  in the central part of Taiwan, at total of almost 200 kilometers. The Chinese were forbidden from settling on the eastern side of the wall and the aboriginals could only enter Chinese lands through special military-controlled gates in the wall. The Chinese named the wall the Earthen Ox because the back of the wall reminded them of the back of a water buffalo.

The wall did not work and soon the Chinese were colonizing lands to the east of the wall. There were several attempts to relocate the wall to accommodate the realities on the ground, but eventually the Chinese authorities abandoned trying to separate the Chinese settlers from the original population of non-Chinese. In the mid 1800's the few thousand surviving aboriginals left the plains and moved up into the central mountain range to escape from the Chinese. They then disappeared from history.

With the disappearance of the aboriginals the history linked to that period of Taiwan's past also disappeared. Aside from place names that carry aboriginal names or describe aboriginal villages (the name Aboriginal Field or Aboriginal Hamlet is a common place name in Taiwan) there is no physical evidence the aboriginals were ever here. The Earthen Ox was also forgotten.

When the Japanese colonized Taiwan in the late 1800's they recorded the existence of the wall and photographed sections that were still standing. These sections have since succumbed to farms, towns and roads of modern Taiwan. But pieces of the wall still exist. They are not labeled and even people living next to them do not know what they are.

I am attempting to retrace the route of the actual wall and see if all remaining segments of the wall can be preserved for posterity. This blog is the record of my search for the Earthen Ox of Taiwan.

My Top Current Mysteries

Taiwan is an historical goldmine. There are more important historical locations and places that are more interesting to the general world population, but few have

My current mysteries I am trying to unravel are as follows (organized chronologically)

1. Did all Polynesians originate from Taiwan?
2. What happened to the negroid aborigines?
3. What are those "buildings" undersea off the coasts of Taiwan? Are they a lost civilation?
4. Is the "pyramid" on Yang Ming Shan mountain really an UFO landing site (as the aboriginals claim)? And how do you explain the rock carvings of "UFOs" the early Japanese colonizers write about?
5. What happened to the original aboriginal inhabitants of Taiwan? Were they massacred or assimulated?
6. Were the British the first Europeans to attempt to colonize Taiwan?
7. Where is the exact location of the first Spanish fort and mission on Taiwan?
8. The Dutch claim to have built seven forts on Taiwan. Only three are currently identified. Where are the others?
9. There are dozens of placenames in Taiwan that start with "red hair" (the name Chinese gave to the Dutch). Are these places actually founded by the Dutch?
10. Between the 15-17th centuries Spanish galleons traveling between Mexico and the Philippines passed by the east coast of Taiwan. One such ship spotted gold glittering on a sandbar and the sailors came ashore to investigate. They were slaughtered by the aborigines and their bodies dumped in a mass grave. Where is that grave?
11. Between 1730-1790 the Chinese built a 300 kilometer long earthen wall to separate the Chinese settlers for the head-hunting aborigines. The wall was up to 2 meters high and faced with a ditch. It has disappeared from Taiwanese knowledge but pieces of it survive. Can it be retraced across modern Taiwan?

These are the mysteries I am following. I try researching and traveling to possible sites. I try interviewing locals and piecing together myths and rumors. Hopefully over time I can make some headway on at least some of these fascinating stories from our past.