臺灣文學虛擬博物館

Fantastic Fables of Fictional Formosa｜Passage to Taiwan: Paranormal Dangers｜"So We Packed up and Moved to Taiwan": Austronesian Origin Stories

Austronesian Taiwanese are Taiwan's earliest inhabitants. They have cultivated and nurtured over their 8,000 years of known history a magnificent and rich cultural heritage, and provided Taiwan's earliest stories of the paranormal. Yet, due to the lack of a written language, the earliest records of these strange stories were, in fact, not authored by the indigenous peoples of this island, but rather by "outsiders".

In the 16th and 17th centuries, Taiwan was still a largely unknown island on the periphery of East Asia. It was thus imagined by pioneers and adventurers as a mysterious and magical island full of exploration potential. Most early records of strange occurrences here came from notes made by Chinese officials and foreign travelers. Of course, their experiences and secondhand tales of strange beasts inhabiting the island and of monsters roaming its waters may have been exaggerated due to the island's distinctly "foreign" air and to misunderstandings of it and its indigenous peoples.

During that period, Taiwan's landscape of ghosts and monsters was often an external construct woven by outsiders using threads drawn from Chinese and Western fantasies about this "barbarian land". Such cultural exchange brought about through foreign migration may have conversely affected how Taiwan's indigenous peoples narrated their own ghostly legends. But over time, people from different ethnic groups settled and died here, and, today, the stories of Taiwan's ghosts and monsters are solidly connected with the living environment, folk customs, and religious beliefs here.

    Fantastic Fables of Fictional Formosa

When international travel was still a time-consuming, infrequent, and often risky endeavor, stories from abroad won eager audiences at home. Narrators not infrequently padded the original stories with their own fanciful imaginings to further wow their audiences. For their part, audiences, lacking knowledge of these storied lands, had little reason to doubt the veracity of what they were told. In 1704, George Psalmanazar published the book "An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, an Island Subject to the Emperor of Japan" in which he described the history, customs, and language of his purported home. Until this Frenchman finally admitted several years later to the whole thing being an elaborate hoax, his book and his purported expertise on all things 'Formosan' (Taiwanese) earned for Psalmanazar (who had never actually set foot on Taiwan) widespread respect and admiration among Europe's intelligentsia. Psalmanazar was believed because the island of Formosa lay far from Europe. His claims were difficult to challenge. At that time in history, traveler's claims were rarely doubted and generally accepted. After all … they were stories from the frontiers of the known world.

The 'frontier' was romanticized and painted in exotic, fanciful colors. Even when a narrator had not personally experienced a foreign land, stories and tales overheard about its savage ways and mysterious customs were enough fodder for a creative traveler to spin a sufficiently plausible yarn for the people back home. From the European Age of Exploration through the early years of Qing rule in Taiwan, 'Formosa' remained an enigmatic entity in the Western imagination – a distant realm ripe for whimsical speculation and home to a colorful array of monsters, ghouls, and goblins.

    Passage to Taiwan: Paranormal Dangers

The flow of people and trade between mainland East Asia and Taiwan traveled by necessity over the waters of the Taiwan Strait. Extreme weather, strange natural phenomena, and unusual marine life were sometimes imagined as being caused by or as being malevolent beasts. In relating stories of strange sea creatures, sailors revealed their sense of awe at the great unknown while reminding those that followed in their footsteps not to underestimate the dangers that lay in wait in the open sea.

As trade and commerce spread across the western Pacific from Northeast Asia to the East Indies, so too did stories of unusual maritime phenomena spread beyond coastal China and Taiwan. Japanese fishermen feared the Umibōzu, bald giants who lived beneath the sea and emerged from otherwise calm seas to overturn ships. This legend closely mirrors stories that were once shared up and down the southeast China coast about malevolent "sea monks". Prevalent in coastal Vietnam and Malaysia were stories of Qu Niao Po (Funayurei Shunyuba), a creature that would inundate and sink boats at sea with water. The 1791 publication Records and Anecdotes of the Islands notes that legends of Qu Niao Po were known at that time in Annan (Vietnam) and Liko and Johore on the Malay Peninsula.

    "So We Packed up and Moved to Taiwan": Austronesian Origin Stories

Prior to the first wave of Chinese settlement in the mid-1600s, Taiwan was dominated by a patchwork of Austronesian groups that were culturally and ethnically part of Polynesia / Oceania. Chinese settlement put the two ethnic streams into regular contact and set the stage for Chinese and Austronesians to share and absorb cultural traditions, including those related to the paranormal. Thus, it is thought that this was when these two groups began coopting and embellishing upon each other's ghost and ghoul traditions.

The basin that is today occupied by Taipei City was once home to the Basay (Kawanuwan) tribe. In his 1897 Survey of Formosan Pepo (Lowland Aborigine s) Tribes, Japanese ethnologist Inō Kanori records a story told to him by the people of Ki-pataw (in today's Beitou District) of how the Basay originally came to be in Taiwan. According to their account, the Basay once lived in a land called Sanasai (some legends locate Sanasai in today's Shanxi Province in northern China). However, the tribe was vexed by meddlesome demons called Sansiao that would steal their blankets and keep them from sleeping. This led to the decision to leave Sanasai. They eventually ended up coming to Taiwan by boat, making landfall in Shen'ao, near today's Keelung City. It is interesting to note that the Basay's Sansiao shares so much in common with the legendary Chinese demon 'Shanxiao' that this story's origin may actually be stories told to tribesmen by early Chinese settlers.