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.