30-second overview: On July 19, 1996, the Atlanta Olympics opening ceremony broadcast the ancient chant of Kuo Ying-nan, an Amis elder from Maolan village in Taitung — to 65 million viewers worldwide. But Kuo Ying-nan himself only learned his voice had circled the globe two years later, through an international copyright lawsuit. This "stolen, then heard by the world" absurdity is the perfect metaphor for one hundred years of Taiwan's folk music: repeatedly silenced under colonial policies, yet always surfacing in unexpected places, ultimately letting the world hear Taiwan's oldest and most resilient voices.
On the evening of July 19, 1996, as the Enigma track "Return to Innocence" played over the Atlanta Olympics opening ceremony, 65 million viewers worldwide heard the ancient chant of Amis elder Kuo Ying-nan from Maolan village in Taitung. But Kuo Ying-nan himself only learned, two years later via an international copyright lawsuit, that his voice had already reached everyone.
This "stolen, then heard by the world" absurdity is the perfect metaphor for one hundred years of Taiwan's folk music: silenced time and again under the pressure of colonial policies, yet always resurfacing in unexpected places — ultimately letting the world hear Taiwan's oldest and most resilient voices.
The Kuo Ying-nan Case: An International Victory for Taiwan's Indigenous Music
In 1988, Taiwan dispatched the "Republic of China Mountain Traditional Music and Dance Visit to Europe Group" to the Maison des Cultures du Monde in Paris. There, sixty-seven-year-old Amis elder Kuo Ying-nan performed the traditional "Drinking Song of the Elderly" (老人飲酒歌). The French music publishing house recorded the performance and released it; the German electronic music group Enigma extracted Kuo Ying-nan's voice and remixed it into "Return to Innocence."
The song was released in 1993, selected as the promotional theme for the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, and broadcast around the world. Kuo Ying-nan had no idea — until a tribal member in Taiwan heard the song on a radio station and realized: "Wait, that's the sound of our village elder!"
📝 Curator's note
The most absurd part of this case: the first time Taiwan's indigenous music "conquered the world," the subject himself had no idea. Kuo Ying-nan only learned his voice had been heard by 65 million people when he heard the song on the radio.
In March 1998, with the help of Magic Stone Music general manager Chang Pei-jen, Kuo Ying-nan and his wife filed an infringement lawsuit against Enigma and related record companies. After three years of litigation, an out-of-court settlement was reached: Enigma paid compensation and royalties; EMI acknowledged Kuo Ying-nan and his wife as performers and added their names on worldwide releases of the song.
This was the first time Taiwan's indigenous music achieved recognition of its subject status in an international court. The real significance lies not in the victory, but in the world hearing for the first time that Taiwan's indigenous voice was not an object of "world music" exoticism — it genuinely carries universal musical value: a voice that penetrates cultural barriers and reaches straight to the human heart.
The Bunun Acoustic Miracle: Rewriting the Origins of Music
Noticed by the international musicology community even before Kuo Ying-nan was the Bunun people's "Prayer for Millet Harvest" (Pasibutbut). On March 25, 1943, Japanese scholar Kurosawa Takatomo recorded this song in Kantou village, Haiduan Township, Taitung County, and was deeply moved. In 1952 he sent the recording to UNESCO; the authoritative Western musicologists who heard it were astonished — how could an ancient tribe have harmony this complex?
The song is commonly called "eight-part harmony," though in practice it is four-part singing that produces natural overtones that sound like eight parts. In the 1990s, musicologist Wu Jung-shun analyzed 25 recordings of pasibutbut using a spectrograph in France, proving that its polyphonic voices dynamically change according to overtone phenomena — genuine "natural overtone harmony."
⚠️ Contested viewpoint
The name "eight-part harmony" was actually coined in the 1990s to help Westerners understand the piece. The Bunun themselves call it pasibutbut, meaning "pulling each other" — emphasizing the interaction between voices, not the number of parts.
More importantly, this overturned a basic assumption of Western musicology: that music develops from single tones to dyads and then to chords. Bunun pasibutbut proves that complex multi-part harmony may be one of humanity's most primitive musical forms.
In 2019, when Japanese music master Ryuichi Sakamoto visited Zhuoshi Township in Hualien, he said the Bunun "Prayer for Millet Harvest" was his favorite sound he had heard in Taiwan. For a musician dedicated to exploring the boundaries of sound, those words carry significant weight.
The Golden Explosion of 1930s Taiwanese-Language Songs
Back to August 1933: under the colonnade of the Columbia Records building in Taipei, crowds of Taiwanese people always gathered — they couldn't afford a gramophone, but couldn't resist coming to hear the new song "Looking Forward to Spring Breeze" (望春風) that the store was playing. This song, lyrics by Li Lin-chiu, music by Deng Yu-xian, sung by Chunchu (純純), created a stunning sales record in 1934.
To understand how stunning: Chunchu's 1932 recording of "Peach Blossom Weeping Blood" (桃花泣血記) had already sold "seventy or eighty thousand copies"; other popular songs including "Looking Forward to Spring Breeze" sold "forty or fifty thousand copies." With Taiwan's population below five million at the time, this is equivalent to one out of every sixty to eighty people buying a record.
💡 Did you know
Chunchu (Liu Ching-hsiang) entered a gezai opera troupe at age thirteen and used different stage names for different types of music. For Taiwanese-language pop songs she used "Chunchu" (純純); for gezai opera she used her real name "Ching-hsiang"; and she had still more names: Mei-ying, Chin-ling, Ai-ching, Pai-hua-hsiang, Man-tai-hung — so many that nobody else of the era came close.
This "golden era of Taiwanese-language songs" had an interesting background: the driving force was a Japanese businessman, Kashino Shojiro. In 1932 he decided to bet on the Taiwanese-language pop song market; on the third floor of the Columbia Records building he established a literary and arts division, recruiting lyricists and composers including Li Lin-chiu, Deng Yu-xian, and Zhou Tian-wang, as well as dedicated singers including Chunchu and Ai-ai.
Kashino's most distinctive strategy: rather than seeking literary elites, he broadly solicited lyricists from the general public — "regardless of whether you're a street entertainer, a company employee, or even a factory hand, if you're interested, everyone is encouraged to write popular lyrics." This "folk route" created the original vitality of Taiwanese-language songs.
Two Cultural Silencings: From Kominka to National Language Policy
Taiwanese-language songs suffered two cultural extinctions in just 100 years, each under different pretexts:
| Kominka Movement (1937–1945) | National Language Policy (1945–1987) |
|---|---|
| "Looking Forward to Spring Breeze" → "The Land Is Calling" | Taiwanese-language singers forced to switch to Mandarin |
| "Rainy Night Flower" → "The Honored Soldier's Husband" | Establishment of "Taiwanese-language song review system" |
| "Moonlit Night Sorrow" → "A Soldier's Wife" | Radio stations banned from broadcasting Taiwanese-language songs |
After the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, Taiwanese-language songs faced their first existential crisis. The Japanese government launched the Kominka Movement; the most popular Taiwanese-language songs were forcibly adapted into Japanese military anthems, with lyrics transformed from romantic love to war propaganda. In 1944, the "father of Taiwanese-language songs" Deng Yu-xian died in illness in Qionglin, Hsinchu, at only 37 — having taken the Japanese name "Higashida Gyouu."
The postwar national language policy was the second silencing. After the martial law decree of 1949, Deng Yu-xian's "Four Months, Hope, Rain" (四月望雨) cycle was perversely listed as forbidden songs — "Four Season Red" (四季紅) was renamed "Four Season Rhyme" (四季謠) for fear it evoked the Communist Party; the other three were "sensitive" because they had been adapted as military songs.
📝 Curator's note
In 1996, when the music hall at Changhua Senior High School was to be named "Yuexian Hall" after Deng Yu-xian, a music teacher who had graduated from National Taiwan Normal University asked: "Who is Deng Yu-xian?" This episode speaks to the severity of the cultural rupture.
Under nearly forty years of dual suppression, the creative tradition of Taiwanese-language songs nearly broke off entirely. Chunchu died in 1943 of tuberculosis at 29; many musicians scattered — some married abroad to Japan, some fled to Hong Kong, some put away their instruments and went home to farm.
The Sound Revival of the 1990s: Redefining the Taiwanese Voice
After martial law ended in 1987, suppressed native culture began to revive. In the early 1990s, a succession of landmark Taiwanese-language music works appeared: the Blacklist Studio's Songs of Madness, Lim Giong's Marching Forward, Chen Ming-chang's Afternoon at a Play. These musicians began creating new songs in Taiwanese, no longer content to merely cover classic old songs.
Lim Giong's "Marching Forward" (向前走) was released in December 1990, selling 400,000 copies and making him "the first person of the new Taiwanese song movement." But more importantly, these creators began expressing in Taiwanese the experience of modern urban life — not nostalgic longing, but a living present.
📊 Data source
According to records of the Taiwan Pop Music Wiki, three Rock Records Taiwanese-language albums released in 1990 successfully influenced the stylistic and market direction of Taiwanese-language songs in pop music.
Also worth noting: in 1997, R&B singer Tao Zhe reinterpreted "Looking Forward to Spring Breeze," layering Mandarin lyrics over the original Taiwanese, sparking cross-generational discussion. This kind of cross-language, cross-generational reinterpretation symbolizes Taiwan's music beginning to recover its own multiple and complex voice.
Repairing Memory: From Silencing to Being Heard by the World
Back to Kuo Ying-nan's story. This Amis elder, born in 1921 in Taitung, never imagined his song would travel the world. But when he reclaimed his rights in court in 1998, the symbolism went beyond an intellectual property victory — it was the first time Taiwan's indigenous music achieved recognition of its subject status on an international stage.
Kuo Ying-nan passed away in 2002, but his case opened a new template: Taiwan's voice would no longer be an object discovered or curiosity-hunted — it would actively walk onto the world stage as a musical force.
✦ "The songs of a people are the soul speaking."
Today, when we listen to Chen Chien-nian's Ocean, Chi Hsiao-chun's celestial voice, or any old Taiwanese tune, we are hearing a story about how sound survived under oppression and ultimately redefined itself.
Taiwan's folk music and songs have never been just music — they are this island's sonic memory, witness to cultural resilience, and an important index for understanding "what Taiwan is." When Kuo Ying-nan sang the "Drinking Song" on a night in Maolan village, he did not know this voice would one day resound across the world. But today we know: these ancient and resilient voices are Taiwan's most precious cultural heritage — telling the world who the people of this island are, where they came from, and where they are going.