Pingtung County: The Nation's Turning Points Happened Here, and Taipei Has Never Really Remembered

30-second overview: On May 22, 1874, Japanese army lieutenant colonel Sakuma Samata led 150 men into the Shimen gorge, where Paiwan Mudan community chief Aruqu and his son were killed in battle that same day. This fight made the Qing court reverse its Taiwan policy: Shen Baozhen came to establish Hengchun County, abolished the ban on crossing to Taiwan, and built Eluanbi Lighthouse in 1883. Some 780,000 people live across Pingtung County's 33 townships, towns, and cities: five Indigenous peoples (49,643 Paiwan, 2,100 Rukai, plus Makatao, Puyuma, and Amis) live alongside the six Hakka Liudui townships, Hoklo, and postwar mainlander communities. Then, at 4:30 a.m. on August 8, 2009, the Linbian floodgate could no longer hold, and Linbian and Jiadong townships sat in seawater for nearly a month. The history that changed Taiwan began from this peninsula twice, but in the capital's mainstream narrative only Kenting Spring Scream and Pacific bluefin tuna remain.

Donggang at 5:30, Every April to June

If you ask someone from Pingtung when Pingtung is at its most captivating, they probably will not say Kenting Spring Scream (Spring Scream belongs to the tourists). They may tell you: every April to June, at the Donggang auction market.

Pacific bluefin tuna migrate through the Bashi Channel during these months each year to spawn, when they are "at their fattiest"¹. At the peak in 1999 and 2000, Donggang's catch exceeded 10,000 fish, and "the annual bluefin tuna catch accounted for 60 to 70 percent of Taiwan's total"¹. Then it collapsed in 2010: the catch fell below 1,000, to just 998 fish¹.

But on April 21, 2026, the "first tuna" was auctioned off. The 2.14-meter, 190-kilogram bluefin sold for a record-high unit price of NT$10,600 per kilogram, for a total of NT$2.014 million². The captain of the boat that caught it, Fu Yu Qing No. 2, was 67-year-old Hong Fu-jia. It took sixteen years to climb back from the 2010 trough.

This is the most contemporary evidence of Pingtung as a fishing county. Kenting Spring Scream's May glory belongs to tourism; but at Donggang's 5:30 a.m. auction market, every fish that moves from the Bashi Channel to the tables of Taipei Japanese restaurants passes through a transaction that happens at this time every year. Before the capital eats this tuna, Pingtung people have already called its price at auction.

Eluanbi Lighthouse, 2011-06-06. Photo: Bernard Gagnon, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia.

The Ambush in the Shimen Gorge

Sleeveless short upper garment from the Paiwan Mudan community, National Taiwan University collection, 1956. Photo: 氏子, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia.

The moment when the Pingtung peninsula changed Taiwan's fate happened at another time besides 4:30 in the morning: May 22, 1874, in the Shimen gorge.

The prelude goes back three years. On October 18, 1871, a tribute vessel from Miyakojima was returning from Naha when it was driven off course by a typhoon and reached Bayao Bay in southeastern Taiwan, around today's Jiupeng Bay in Manzhou Township, Pingtung County. Of the 69 Miyakojima passengers on board, 3 drowned and 66 landed. After landing, they mistakenly entered the territory of the Paiwan Kuskus community; 54 were killed in a headhunting incident, while another 12 were escorted to Taiwan Prefecture with help from Han Chinese residents Yang You-wang and Yang A-cai³. Multiple sources point out that the killings resulted from "a misunderstanding caused by language barriers, not one side's simple bloodthirstiness"³. The Paiwan had a headhunting tradition and misunderstood the intentions of those who had landed.

Japan used this as its pretext. Combined with the Qing court's diplomatic blunder in replying that "raw savages are not under Great Qing rule," Japan formed an expeditionary force under Saigo Tsugumichi as governor-general of the Bureau of Aboriginal Affairs. On May 8, 1874, Japanese forces landed at Sheliao, today's Sheliao Village in Checheng Township, Pingtung County³.

On May 22, Japanese army lieutenant colonel Sakuma Samata led 150 men to Shimen, today's Shimen Village in Mudan Township, Pingtung County; in Paiwan, macacukes, meaning "mutual support." Paiwan fighters had prepared an ambush and mounted fierce resistance, but were outmatched in equipment. Japanese marines climbed the cliffs and occupied the high ground. Mudan community chief Aruqu and his son died in this battle³.

What followed was village burning. "After victory in the Battle of Shimen, Japanese forces advanced on the Mudan and Kuskus communities, set fire to houses, and the people fled in panic in all directions"⁴. On July 1, Mudan and other communities surrendered. On October 31, the Qing court and Japan signed the Sino-Japanese Beijing Treaty. Its first article stated plainly: "What Japan has done on this occasion was originally a righteous act to protect its people, and Qing China does not indicate that it was wrong"³. The Qing court also paid Japan 500,000 taels of silver in the name of "purchasing the houses and roads built by the Japanese army." On December 20, Japanese forces fully withdrew from Taiwan.

In this campaign, 12 Japanese soldiers were killed in battle and 561 died of disease³. Tropical disease was far deadlier than Paiwan spears. But battlefield victory and defeat were not the side of this war that truly changed Taiwan.

How That Battle Changed Taiwan

After the Mudan Incident, the Qing court's attitude toward governing Taiwan completely flipped. It appointed Shen Baozhen as imperial commissioner to push "opening the mountains and pacifying the aborigines." The southern route ran from Sheliao in Pingtung all the way to Beinan in Taitung, 214 li in total⁵. At the same time, the court abolished the ban on crossing to Taiwan, ending the two-century policy that required migrants from Fujian and Guangdong to hold permits to come to Taiwan; established the walled Hengchun county seat; renamed Jilong as Keelung in 1875; formally created Taiwan Province in 1885; and made Liu Mingchuan its first governor.

In other words: the Mudan Incident was Japan's first military probe of Taiwan, and it was also the point at which the Qing court truly began investing in the governance of Taiwan. The prelude to Japan taking Taiwan in 1895 was written during those few months on the Pingtung peninsula in 1874.

📝 Curator's note: The conventional narrative of Taiwanese history places the "beginning of Japanese rule" at the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki. But that narrative cuts the chain of causality. The answer to whether Japan should take Taiwan had already been tested on the Pingtung peninsula in 1874. They sent 3,600 people, circled for half a year, and learned three things: the Qing court would withdraw, would pay money, and would tacitly acknowledge the result. Taking Taiwan after the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895 was a lesson learned in Mudan Township 21 years earlier, not an offhand decision. The Pingtung peninsula was the entrance to Japan's 50 years of rule over Taiwan, not a periphery merely caught up in events. Open most Taiwanese history textbooks and 1874 takes up half a page, while 1895 takes up an entire chapter. The half-page and the chapter are in fact the two causal ends of the same event.

That Church from 1861, 21 Years Before Oxford College

Wanchin Catholic Church, Wanchin Basilica of the Immaculate Conception. Photo: WEI WAN-CHEN, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia.

Go 50 kilometers north and you encounter another moment omitted by central narratives.

At the end of 1861, the Spanish Dominican Father Fernando Sainz and catechist Yang Du "trekked more than 60 li and arrived at Wanjin Village in Wanluan, Pingtung"⁶. In May 1863, they purchased land in Wanjin and built an adobe church. In November of the same year, Father Sainz was robbed on the road after sedan-chair bearers colluded with bandits; before long the church was also burned down. They "snuck into the church in the middle of the night and set it on fire, reducing the entire church to ashes"⁶. The cause was a conflict over nearby Hakka settlements' demand that Catholics share the expenses of local deity processions and festivals.

A second attempt came in 1869, when Father Francisco Giner purchased land at the current site and rebuilt. The church opened on December 8, 1870, the Catholic feast of the Immaculate Conception⁶. In 1874, the same year Japanese troops landed, the Tongzhi Emperor granted stones inscribed "By Imperial Decree" and "Catholic Church," which Shen Baozhen personally delivered to Wanchin Church. In 1984, Pope John Paul II designated the church a basilica; today, "approximately 80 percent of Wanjin Village's population believes in Catholicism"⁶.

The weight of this date becomes clear only by placing it side by side with another: Wanchin Church began missionary work in 1861, a full 21 years before George Leslie Mackay built Oxford College in Tamsui in 1882. The mainstream narrative of Christianity in Taiwan is a Presbyterian story of "Mackay in the north, Barclay in the south." But in reality, a small Spanish Dominican village church had already written the first passage in Wanluan, Pingtung, while Mackay was still studying in Canada.

Wanchin Basilica still stands today, and its annual Marian procession every December is Pingtung's largest Catholic event. Wanjin, a Hakka village where 80 percent of the population is Catholic, sits deep inside Taiwan's largest Hakka settlement region. This is not the kind of thing central narratives remember.

49,000 Paiwan, 2,100 Rukai

Pingtung County has the most complex ethnic structure of any county in Taiwan. Five Indigenous peoples, the Hakka Liudui, Hoklo, and postwar mainlander communities share a population of 780,000⁷. But the phrase "five peoples living together" is too thin; one has to look at the actual distribution.

The Paiwan are mainly distributed across the northern Paiwan areas of Wutai, Majia, and Taiwu townships, and the southern Paiwan areas of Chunri, Shizi, and Mudan townships, plus Laiyi and Sandimen townships. Around 49,643 Paiwan were registered in Pingtung County at the end of 2023⁸. Their representative material culture is the slate house, built with slate and shale, with roofs laid to imitate the scales of the hundred-pacer snake; these houses are mainly found in Sandimen, Majia, Taiwu, Laiyi, and Chunri. Their representative spiritual culture is the Five-Year Ceremony, maljeveq, in Paiwan, the "covenant ceremony between humans and spirits." It is held once every five years and lasts around 15 days, including a ball-spearing ritual in which participants use long spears to pierce ceremonial balls and welcome the ancestral spirits⁸. The Paiwan believe the ancestral spirits, qumaljeveq, live on Mount Beidawu and descend every five years to visit their descendants.

The Rukai are mainly in Wutai Township, including the Dawu, Wutai, Jiamu, Shenshan, and Jilu communities. Pingtung County's Rukai population is around 2,100, out of about 13,000 Rukai across Taiwan⁹. Their slate-house construction resembles that of the Paiwan but differs in detail: there are two doors rather than the Paiwan's one, the forecourt is richer, and the arrangements of slate tables, chairs, and screens are different. Their cultural symbol is the clouded leopard, Tagarawsu in Rukai. The old Kucapungane, or Kochapogan, community is a national monument and Taiwan's only Indigenous settlement included in the World Monuments Fund's World Monuments Watch, selected in 2016⁹.

Mount Beidawu, elevation 3,092 meters, Kavulungan in Paiwan and Tagarawsu in Rukai, is a sacred mountain shared by the two peoples. It is also the southernmost mountain in the Central Mountain Range above 3,000 meters¹⁰. The Dawushan Nature Reserve contains protected animals including the Formosan black bear, Swinhoe's pheasant, Mikado pheasant, mountain hawk-eagle, maroon oriole, hundred-pacer snake, and golden birdwing butterfly, as well as rare plants such as the Taiwan cow-tail fir and Keteleeria davidiana var. formosana¹¹.

The Makatao are the Plains Indigenous people of the Pingtung Plain. They were once divided into the Eight Communities of Fengshan: east of the Donggang River were the Jiateng, Lili, and Fangsuo communities, while west of the river were Talou, Wuluo, Xiadanshui, and others¹². Large-scale Sinicization took place in the mid-to-late Qing period, and today most have been absorbed into Hoklo communities. But the Plains Indigenous name-rectification movement continues, and community members stress: "I am called Makatao, not Pingpu"¹². A distinctive feature of Makatao belief is the "jar deity": small wine bottles wrapped entirely in red cloth, similar to the Siraya pot-veneration tradition.

The Puyuma and Amis are minorities in Pingtung County, mostly distributed around Manzhou Township⁷.

Pingtung County has eight mountain Indigenous townships: Sandimen, Wutai, Majia, Taiwu, Laiyi, Chunri, Shizi, and Mudan, the most in the country. But the combined population of the eight mountain townships "accounts for only 5.5 percent of the county's total." By contrast, Pingtung City alone has nearly 200,000 people, four times the combined population of those eight mountain townships¹³. The urban-rural gap is severe. This is the physical structure on the underside of the "most diverse" framing. Pingtung County's aging index was 163.8 in 2019, the fourth oldest in the country, and farm households accounted for 32.67 percent of the county's population¹⁴.

Liudui Was Organized During the 1721 Armed Conflict

Head south from Pingtung City, and six Hakka townships are scattered along the Gaoping and Donggang river basins. Together with Meinong, Liugui, and Shanlin, now incorporated into Kaohsiung City, these townships are called the Liudui, or "Six Units." Of Taiwan's two major centers of Hakka yimin, or righteous militia, faith, the northern one is Baozhong Yimin Temple in Hsinchu, and the southern one is here.

In 1721, the sixtieth year of the Kangxi reign, Zhu Yigui rose in rebellion against the Qing in Tainan. Hakka settlers in the Xiadanshui River basin developed a "sense of crisis": after Zhu Yigui and Du Junying became caught in a "Fujianese-Guangdongese conflict" in the prefectural capital, Hakka villages feared being dragged in. In May, they joined more than 10,000 people from thirteen large villages and sixty-four small villages to organize a self-defense righteous army. They "jointly elected Li Zhisan as general manager and divided into six groups, or Liudui, to defend their hometowns"¹⁵.

The Liudui units correspond to today's administrative areas as follows[^13]: the Right Unit is Meinong, Liugui, and Shanlin districts in Kaohsiung, which belonged to Pingtung during the Qing period and were incorporated into Kaohsiung after 1945; the Left Unit is Xinpi and Jiadong townships in Pingtung County; the Front Unit is Changzhi and Linluo townships; the Rear Unit is the western half of Neipu Township; the Central Unit is Zhutian and Yanpu townships; and the Vanguard Unit is Wanluan Township. The Hakka people still living in these six townships today are direct descendants of that 1721 righteous army.

After the Zhu Yigui Incident, the Kangxi Emperor bestowed a plaque reading "Cherishing Loyalty," which is enshrined today at Zhutian Zhongyi Shrine¹⁵. The imperial inscription bestowed on the Yimin Temple in Hsinchu in the north was "Commending Loyalty," originating from the Lin Shuangwen Incident of 1786, 65 years later than Liudui. Taiwan's two major Hakka yimin faiths share a root, but their event backgrounds and historical narratives each have their own emphasis.

✦ "In May of the sixtieth year of Kangxi, amid the struggle between Zhu Yigui and Du Junying, the 'Fujianese-Guangdongese conflict' that occurred in the prefectural capital triggered a sense of crisis among Hakka settlers in the Xiadanshui River basin who were unwilling to join the uprising. The Hakka settlers of the Liudui area therefore joined in May with more than 10,000 people from the local thirteen large villages and sixty-four small villages." (Wikipedia entry "Liudui"¹⁵)

Wanluan, the Vanguard Unit, is best known today for Wanluan pork knuckles; Zhutian and Neipu are dotted with preserved Hakka huofang, or three-sided courtyard houses. Wanchin Basilica sits in Wanluan Township, the Vanguard Unit. A small Spanish Dominican village church was built on the land of the oldest unit of the Hakka Liudui, and that overlap has its own historical logic. Wanluan in the 1860s was one of the most complex multilingual ethnic frontiers in all of southern Taiwan at the time.

Eluanbi 1883, Hengchun Old City 1879

Battlements of the East Gate of Hengchun Old City, 2013-09-07. Photo: Orbital, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia.

The second thing the Qing court did after the Mudan Incident was build a walled city.

In 1875, the first year of the Guangxu reign, Shen Baozhen submitted a memorial proposing the establishment of Hengchun County, and construction of the city wall began on October 18 that same year. "Langjiao," the old name of Hengchun, comes from the Chinese phonetic transcription of either a Paiwan word for an orchid plant or the name of an old community¹⁶. In July 1879, the fifth year of Guangxu, construction was completed: the city wall measured 880 zhang in circumference, with four gates: East, West, South, also called Mingdu Gate, and North. Hengchun Old City is "Taiwan's most complete surviving old city, and Taiwan's only Qing county seat with all four gates preserved to this day"¹⁶.

Four years later, Eluanbi Lighthouse, begun in 1881, was completed in 1883¹⁷. It is the southernmost lighthouse on Taiwan's main island. But more than its "southernmost" status, what deserves to be remembered is its form: it was designed as a fortification, with gun ports in the surrounding walls, a trench, and a roof entirely built as a water-storage platform, earning the description "the world's only armed lighthouse"¹⁷. Why would a lighthouse need to be armed? After the Mudan Incident, the Qing court completely lost trust in this "extraterritorial periphery." It needed to guide passing ships, but also feared renewed Indigenous headhunting, so it built a lighthouse at the level of a defensive work. On March 15, 2024, Eluanbi Lighthouse was elevated to national monument status.

Every year from October to the following March, the Hengchun Peninsula has a special weather phenomenon: luoshanfeng, literally "downslope wind." The northeast monsoon moves south along the Central Mountain Range and suddenly intensifies as it passes through the Shimen gorge, the Dawu mountain valleys, and the valley terrain of Manzhou Township, becoming dry and forceful like a hair dryer no one has turned off¹⁸. Among the "Three Strange Things of Hengchun" (luoshanfeng, betel nut, and folk songs; another version lists "Si Xiang Qi," the moon lute, and luoshanfeng), the central figure in the folk-song tradition is Chen Da (1906-1981). Chen Da was from Hengchun, a yueqin, or moon lute, singer-performer who spent his life singing Hengchun folk songs to yueqin accompaniment. In 1967, the Institute of Ethnology at Academia Sinica went to Hengchun to record him, and only then "was he discovered by modern society"¹⁸. His signature song was "Si Xiang Qi."

📝 Curator's note: The Kenting in tourist brochures is a post-1990s story. Kenting National Park was established only in 1984, and the first Spring Wave Music Festival was held in 1995. But the Hengchun Peninsula's geographic identity as "Taiwan's southernmost point" was only incorporated into Taiwan's administrative system in 1875, when Shen Baozhen established the county. Before that, this was "Langjiao," a place Qing power could not reach, where Ryukyuan castaways encountered the Paiwan and which later became the Japanese army's stepping stone. From the 1875 establishment of the county, to the 1883 armed lighthouse, to Wei Te-sheng's Cape No. 7 earning NT$530 million after being filmed in Hengchun in 2008, the same peninsula is rediscovered by the whole country every few decades, but each time from a different angle: administrative, military, touristic.

On December 12, 2008, director Wei Te-sheng's Cape No. 7 was released. In 113 days it grossed NT$530 million nationwide and won six prizes at the 45th Golden Horse Awards¹⁹. The story is set in Hengchun Township: Aga returns home to work as a postman and becomes involved with a Japanese colonial-era love letter addressed to "Cape No. 7." In an interview, Wei described Hengchun this way: "Hengchun is full of music. It has contemporary Spring Scream and also traditional old melodies; it has historic city walls and also modern tourist hotels"¹⁹. What he noticed was precisely these historical layers covered one over another.

The Day the Linbian Floodgate Could Not Hold

Pingtung Station, completed in 1939, Showa 14. Photo: Wikimedia Commons contributor, CC BY-SA via Wikimedia.

From August 7 to 9, 2009, Typhoon Morakot's rainfall in Pingtung's mountains broke the records of all Taiwanese weather stations at the time. The Xinmajia station recorded 1,897 millimeters in a single day on August 8; the Taiwu station recorded 1,145 millimeters in a single day on August 7; and Pingtung's Weiliaoshan station recorded 1,403 millimeters in a single day on August 8, at the time setting Taiwan's all-time record for one-day rainfall²⁰.

Linbian and Jiadong townships were waiting on the coastal lowlands. The timeline of the Linbian River embankment breach left this record:

"At 4:30 a.m. on August 8, 2009, the four Taiwan Railways staff members responsible for watching the floodgate called the township office to say, 'The gate can't hold anymore.' At 5:00 a.m., a second call came: 'The floodgate has breached.'" (Morakot 88news.org interview record²¹)

There were only 30 minutes between the first call and the breach. Within days, the whole of Linbian and Jiadong townships were submerged in seawater. "Jiadong Township was one of the worst-hit areas, with floodwaters reaching as high as two stories"²². Linbian has a well-known aftereffect: "When Linbian people hear rain, they cuo le deng," a Taiwanese phrase meaning they become nervously braced for trouble²¹. "Linbian used to be famous as the home of black pearl wax apples and seafood; now people call it the home of flooding"²¹. That is how local people described it in interviews with Morakot 88news.org.

The mountain disaster was equally concrete. In Wutai Township, among the Rukai, the Yila Bridge on Provincial Highway 24 was washed away and the entire township's transportation was cut off; in Dawu, "all three bridges to the outside were destroyed. Dawu became an island, and the community was trapped in the mountains for a week before being evacuated by helicopter"²³. New Haocha Village in Wutai Township was entirely buried: "Typhoon Morakot caused New Haocha Village to be completely buried under the debris flow of the South Ailiao River." In December 2010, three communities, Haocha, Majia, and Dashe, collectively moved into the Rinari permanent housing settlement in Majia Township²³. The people gave this new home a Paiwan name meaning "the place where we walk together, where everyone goes together"²³.

Across Taiwan, the typhoon caused 681 deaths and 18 disappearances²⁰, with agricultural losses approaching NT$200 billion, equivalent to 1.6 percent of that year's GDP²⁰. Pingtung County's specific losses "amounted to NT$3 billion calculated by cost, and nearly NT$10 billion calculated by market value"²¹. But what truly changed Pingtung in this disaster was not how many people died that year. It was the shape of reconstruction sixteen years later.

Black Pearls Grow in Salty Soil

The coastal areas of Linbian and Jiadong suffered land subsidence because of excessive groundwater pumping and improper aquaculture use. Soil salinization was severe. This problem had been accumulating since the 1980s, and by 2009 it was already a structural disaster²⁴. The August 8 disaster merely exposed this structural problem: the real cause of seawater backflow was two decades of excessive groundwater extraction and land subsidence. The typhoon week only developed the image all at once.

But on this salinized soil, Pingtung farmers discovered something unexpected.

"In the past, Pingtung's Linbian and Jiadong townships grew rice. Later, aquaculture rose, and improper use of groundwater caused land subsidence. Seawater backflow made the soil salty, which turned out to be very suitable for growing wax apples. The fruit that grew had a distinctive salty-sweet, juicy flavor"²⁴. Farmers even "drew in seawater to flood wax apple orchards after the trees bore fruit," deliberately using saltwater to intensify the flavor²⁴. "Black pearl wax apples are produced in Pingtung's coastal Linbian, Jiadong, Fangliao, and Nanzhou areas. The main cultivar is the Nanyang variety, with sugar content above 12 Brix."

This is counterintuitive enough to make one pause: land subsidence plus salinization equals an agricultural crisis, but the same soil conditions turned wax apples into Pingtung's most representative agricultural product. Disaster and gift are physically the same thing.

✦ "Groundwater pumped too aggressively, seawater flowing back, soil becoming salinized: that is a crisis. The same salty-sweet soil growing Taiwan's sweetest wax apples: that is the black pearl." (Synthesized from Morakot 88news.org interviews and Pingtung County Government wax apple promotion materials)

After the August 8 disaster, the Pingtung County Government proposed the Water Cultivation and Solar Farming plan: fish ponds and farmland would be leased to solar companies, landowners would collect rent, electricity would be sold to Taipower, and groundwater replenishment would be taken into account, preventing continued extraction from causing further subsidence²⁴. In 2018, the four townships of Donggang, Linbian, Jiadong, and Fangliao were designated as a solar energy special zone²⁴. On the same flooded land, salty-sweet wax apples now grow on one side while solar panels stand on the other. The Pingtung County Government recorded this transformation: "Water Cultivation and Solar Farming is a post-disaster reconstruction model unique to Pingtung County after the August 8 disaster"²⁵.

May 22, 2024: Renaming macacukes

Return to the battle that opened this story.

On May 22, 2024, the 150th anniversary of the Mudan Incident, the Pingtung County Government and Mudan Township Office unveiled the county-designated historic-site stele for the macacukes Shimen Old Battlefield⁴. Restoring the place name in Paiwan was an action: the site where Aruqu and his son died in 1874, where the Qing court reversed its policy, and where Japan learned Taiwan could be taken, is no longer called only by the Han-character colonial name "Shimen Old Battlefield." It is called macacukes, Paiwan for "mutual support."

That day, Kuskus community spirit medium Zhang Shun-zhi vuvu performed a blessing ceremony; the Kuskus old-song transmission team sang the traditional song "Remembrance." At the ceremony, Kao Chia-hsin, director at Mudan Elementary School and a community representative, said:

"To recover the historical memory of the Mudan Incident, to commemorate the spirit of our ancestors' heroic resistance, so that future generations may learn the resilient will with which our ancestors defended the homeland, and moreover to hope that different peoples in the future can understand and respect one another." (Kao Chia-hsin, director of Mudan Elementary School, remarks at the 2024 150th anniversary commemoration⁴)

Some younger community members have pushed to change the place name further back to sevalitan, Paiwan for "inherit, transmit, transcend," representing a historical break from Han-character colonial naming⁴. After 150 years, this valley that changed Taiwan's fate is being renamed by its original owners.

Alongside the renaming, another fact is present: Kuskus Shrine. The Japanese burned the Kuskus community in 1874, then in 1936 built the Kuskus Shrine on the same site, renamed Tak士 Shrine in 1939, dedicated principally to Amaterasu. This meant Paiwan descendants were made to worship "the deity of the Japanese who had once massacred their ancestors"²⁶. During World War II, Paiwan people were conscripted into the Takasago Volunteers, and a promise circulated among them: "If I do not come back, then in the future let us meet at the shrine!"²⁶. In 2015, Japanese Shinto priest Sato Kenichi, seeking to repay Taiwanese assistance after the March 11 earthquake disaster, raised 10 million yen to rebuild the wooden shrine. The enshrinement ceremony was held in August 2015, and a white torii gate was erected in May 2016²⁶. Today's Kuskus Shrine uses both Japanese Shinto and Paiwan traditional rituals, enshrines the spirits of those who died in battle from the Kuskus community, and is "Taiwan's only shrine dedicated to Indigenous ancestral spirits"²⁶.

From village burning, to forced worship of the perpetrators' deity, to incorporating ancestral spirits into the shrine, to renaming the site in Paiwan on the 150th anniversary, the memory of this peninsula contains several layers of time at once. It has never been linear.

Donggang at 5:30, Bluefin Waiting

Return to the tuna that opened this story.

Every April to June, at 5:30 in the morning in Donggang, auctioneers call prices, fishers carry boxes, and buyers circle the auction platform making hand signals to bid. The 190-kilogram first tuna in April 2026 sold for NT$2.014 million², more than 1.6 times the NT$1.21 million price of the 2025 first tuna². Sixteen years ago, when the catch fell below 1,000 in 2010, Donggang's fishing industry looked as if it might be ending. Sixteen years later, the first tuna's unit price has set a new record, and the cumulative catch has exceeded 5,000 fish¹.

Two kilometers away, Pingtung Station, built in 1939, is still operating, and the old site of the Pingtung Sugar Factory, which began operation in 1908, has been transformed into a tourist park²⁷. But the real texture of Pingtung County today is not in these old buildings. It is in the 780,000 people spread across 33 townships, towns, and cities: in the communities of 49,000 Paiwan, who hold a ceremony for the ancestral spirits every five years; in the Wutai communities of 2,100 Rukai, the mountain of the clouded leopard; in the Hakka huofang houses of the Liudui, which have not scattered in 235 years; in Wanjin Village's 80 percent Catholic population, unbroken for 160 years; in the wax apple orchards of Linbian, black pearls grown from salty-sweet soil; and in the valley in Mudan Township that is again being called macacukes after 150 years.

From Taipei, Pingtung is a southernmost tourism county, Kenting, bluefin tuna, and the disaster area of the August 8 flood. From the peninsula itself, Pingtung is the turning point that changed Taiwan's entire fate in 1874, the Catholic home whose history began 21 years earlier than northern Christianity, the diverse county where five Indigenous peoples and the Hakka Liudui live together, and the salinized land that sat underwater for a month in 2009 yet still grew black pearls.

Xie Bingying once wrote a sentence in Rainy Port Keelung that made Keelung people remember their relationship with rain. Pingtung has no equally famous sentence defining its relationship with the sea, but the Linbian people interviewed by 88news.org left a similar line: "When Linbian people hear rain, they cuo le deng"²¹. It sounds like fear. But they stayed to keep growing wax apples, keep installing solar panels, and keep holding Donggang's tuna auctions. Fear and staying do not contradict each other.

Next time you go to Pingtung, you can stop by Wanjin, take a trip to the Shimen Old Battlefield, and sit by the gate of Hengchun Old City listening to the luoshanfeng. Then you will remember one thing: the historical turning points that changed Taiwan happened twice on this peninsula, once in the 1874 Mudan Incident, and once in the 2009 Typhoon Morakot disaster. Neither has really entered the capital's mainstream narrative. This island has always been used to remembering only half of itself; Pingtung has always been in the other half.

Further Reading

• Charles Le Gendre — A background figure in the 1874 Mudan Incident, the U.S. consul in Amoy whose statement that "aboriginal territory was not under Chinese jurisdiction" directly triggered Japan's dispatch of troops to Pingtung
• The Rover Incident and Tokitok — In 1867, the American merchant ship Rover was wrecked at the southern end of the Hengchun Peninsula, four years before the 1871 Ryukyuan castaway incident, in the same waters and the same Paiwan territory
• The Taiwan Island History Perspective — Cao Yonghe's island-history framework; the layered history of the Pingtung peninsula is one of its most concrete unfoldings
• Penghu County — 22 Counties and Cities Series: an offshore island sovereignty choice that twice rejected casinos, sharing with Pingtung a "forgotten southernmost/westernmost" geographic identity
• Keelung City — Another port county in the 22 Counties and Cities Series that the capital fails to see, and like Pingtung, a key node omitted by central narratives
• Lienchiang County — 22 Counties and Cities Series: the distance between battlefield heritage and mainstream narratives, readable alongside the layered memories of Pingtung's Mudan Incident and Kuskus Shrine
• Wei Te-sheng — Cape No. 7, filmed in Hengchun, earned NT$530 million at the box office and wrote the southern Taiwan peninsula into national cinematic memory
• Taiwan's Disaster Volunteer Culture — How the dual mountain and coastal disasters of Typhoon Morakot reshaped Taiwan's rescue networks
• Typhoons — Morakot's one-day rainfall record of 1,897 millimeters marked a turning point in Taiwan's relationship with typhoons

Image Sources

This article uses 5 Wikimedia Commons CC-licensed images.

Hero (frontmatter): Eluanbi Lighthouse 02, Eluanbi Lighthouse, the "world's only armed lighthouse," begun in 1881 and completed in 1883, elevated to national monument status in 2024. Photo: Bernard Gagnon, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Scene §The Ambush in the Shimen Gorge: Sleeveless short upper garment from the Paiwan Mudan community, National Taiwan University collection, 1956, material evidence contemporary with the 1874 Mudan Incident. Photo: 氏子, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Scene §That Church from 1861: Wanchin Catholic Church, Wanchin Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, Taiwan's first Catholic church, established by Spanish Dominicans in 1861 and designated a basilica in 1984. Photo: WEI WAN-CHEN, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Scene §Eluanbi 1883, Hengchun Old City 1879: Battlements of the East Gate of Hengchun Old City, the East Gate of Taiwan's most complete surviving Qing county seat, completed in 1879. Photo: Orbital, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Scene §The Day the Linbian Floodgate Could Not Hold: Pingtung Train Station, completed in 1939, Showa 14, during the Japanese era, the key node connecting the Pingtung sugar railway with the trunk line. Photo: Wikimedia Commons contributor, CC BY-SA.

Licenses: CC BY-SA 4.0 / CC BY-SA 3.0.

References