Chen Chien-nien: The Golden Melody King from the Police Station, the Grandson Who Turned His Grandfather's Songs into Ocean

30-second overview: Chen Chien-nien (Puyuma name Pau-dull) was born on August 1, 1967, in the Nanwang community of Beinan Township, Taitung County.¹ He is the maternal grandson of Lu Senbao (Baliwakes, 1910-1988), the Puyuma song master and author of "Beautiful Rice Ears."¹² After graduating from the 114th class of the police officer program in 1986, he was assigned to Guanshan, Taitung, beginning a police career that lasted 30 years and 10 months.³ In 1999, at age 33, he released his first original album, Ocean. At the 11th Golden Melody Awards in 2000, he defeated Jacky Cheung, Harlem Yu, David Tao, and Wang Leehom to win Best Mandarin Male Singer; in the same year, he also won Best Composition for "Myth," written for Samingad.⁴⁵ At the moment he won, his day job was still police officer.³ In September of the same year, he chose to request a transfer to Lanyu, where he stayed until retiring in 2017.¹⁶

On March 25, 2018, Chen Chien-nien performed at FENG live house in Hsinchu. Photo: Taiwania Justo. License via Wikimedia Commons.

Puyuma Pau-dull, the Songs His Grandfather Left Behind

On August 1, 1967, Chen Chien-nien was born in the Nanwang community of Beinan Township, Taitung County (Sakuban, one of the eight traditional Puyuma communities and among those that have most fully preserved Puyuma culture).¹ His Puyuma name is Pau-dull. His father is Chen Kuang-jung, and his mother is the daughter of Puyuma song master Lu Senbao (Baliwakes). Lu Senbao was therefore Chen Chien-nien's maternal grandfather, not his father.¹² This generational relationship determines how the next thirty years of his music should be read. What the grandfather left behind were melodies remembered by an entire people; what the grandson had to do was receive them, hold them, and then write songs of his own.

Lu Senbao was born in 1910 and graduated from Tainan Normal School, making him a rare Puyuma intellectual during the Japanese colonial period.² After the war, he wrote a series of Puyuma songs in his mother tongue: "Puyuma Mountain," "Song in Praise of the Ancestors," "Beautiful Rice Ears," "Longing for Home," and "Love of Lanyu." Among them, "Beautiful Rice Ears," later widely sung by Kimbo Hu, became one of the first Indigenous songs heard by the outside world during Taiwan's folk-song movement of the 1970s.² Lu Senbao died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1988. That year, his maternal grandson Chen Chien-nien was 21, two years out of Taiwan Police College, and serving as a police officer in Guanshan, Taitung.³

📝 Curator's Note
Common online introductions often describe Lu Senbao as Chen Chien-nien's "father" or "grandfather." Behind this error lies the seepage of Han Chinese patrilineal assumptions. For Mandarin readers, "father passes to son" is the default route of inheritance. But traditional Puyuma society is matrilineal, and the maternal grandfather is the real elder anchor in family narrative. Chen Chien-nien's own wording is clear: he is Lu Senbao's "maternal grandson," and Samingad and Jiajia are his "sororal nieces." Only when the family line is marked precisely does this line of inheritance become visible.¹⁷

The Seventh-Grade Bangdi, the Eighth-Grade Guitar, the 1984 Kaohsiung Newcomer Award

Chen Chien-nien's musical beginning was not family tradition, but the school Chinese orchestra. In seventh grade, when his homeroom teacher founded a Chinese orchestra, he learned the bangdi flute and the nanhu.⁷ In eighth grade, as the campus folk-song movement was flourishing, he picked up the guitar and tried singing Lo Ta-yu's "Childhood." In high school in 1982, he and older schoolmates formed the Four-String Choir, performing at China Youth Corps self-improvement activities; his own song "Once Felt It Too" later became one of the songs the China Youth Corps required participants to learn.⁷

In 1984, he entered a Kaohsiung newcomer songwriting competition and won the Newcomer Award, recording a compilation album with other winners.⁷ He was 17 that year. But this path did not turn into a record contract. In 1986, he entered the 114th class of the police officer program at Taiwan Police College, and after graduation was assigned to Guanshan Township, Taitung.¹³ He became a police officer.

"I only wanted an album as a keepsake!"⁸

That is what Chen Chien-nien later told a reporter from Taiwan Panorama when recalling the recording of Ocean. He had no ambition to become a singer; being a police officer was the life he meant to live. But he kept writing songs, and they kept being sung in Taitung's communities. After thirteen years of daily police work, in 1999, at age 33, he encountered Trees Music.

"Not Following the Usual Model of Pulling the Singer into a Taipei Recording Studio"

Trees Music was founded in 1998. Its founder Chung Shih-san and producer Cheng Chieh-jen heard Chen Chien-nien in Taitung.⁹ Their first decision was: do not pull the singer into a Taipei recording studio.

"Rather than following the usual model of pulling the singer into a Taipei recording studio, they moved the recording equipment to Taitung. Beyond recording the vocals, they also traveled through Taitung's valleys, streams, communities, and coastlines to gather sounds, pairing the most distinctly Taitung soundscapes with the songs."¹⁰

The liner notes of Ocean include one record that turns recording technique into a kind of local gazetteer:

"Source of the sound of waves / Shanyuan coast, Dulan Bay, Taitung, 3:43 p.m., 25 degrees Yang, southeast wind, clear skies, Green Island very clear in the distance."¹⁰

This passage reads like a recording log, but also like a local gazetteer: minute, temperature, wind direction, and visibility all present. A stretch of ocean waves is annotated like a citeable historical source. The Taipei industrial model of "singer plus arrangement plus musicians" was pushed aside and replaced by "person plus place plus time plus one guitar."

In June 1999, Ocean was released under Trees Music catalog number TCM003.¹¹ All 13 songs used the guitar as the main instrument. Chen Chien-nien wrote the lyrics, music, and arrangements himself, with a few tracks co-written with Lin Chih-hsing. Lin Chih-hsing is a Puyuma poet from Taitung who became known in the 1990s for his Indigenous-language poetry collection Tribal Rhythms and Homeland Sentiments: Betel Nut Poems. "We Are Compatriots," from his self-published collection, was the poem Chen set to music and included on Ocean.¹² Lin later described their collaboration in an interview this way: "Half of these songs are my life experiences, and half are Chien-nien's feelings about life."⁸

What Chen Chien-nien wanted was not the R&B, sentimental packaging, and layered synthesizers then fashionable in the Mandarin pop world. He wanted the call of the flying squirrel to be used like a synthesizer:

"Like the music of the Betel Nut Brothers: just a few simple instruments, mixed with the sounds of children and flying squirrels. That is the feeling I want."⁸

After its release, Ocean was selected by the Association of Music Workers in Taiwan as one of the "Top Ten Albums of 1999."¹⁰ Years later, it was ranked number one in the 1993-2005 section of Taiwan Popular Music: The 200 Best Albums.¹⁰

Official MV from Trees Music: the 1999 title track of Ocean. One guitar and the wave sounds from Shanyuan coast in Taitung belong to the same album as that recording note: "3:43 p.m., 25 degrees Yang."

Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall: The Police Officer Among Four Heavenly Kings

April 29, 2000. Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall. The 11th Golden Melody Awards ceremony.⁴⁵ The nominees for Best Mandarin Male Singer were: Jacky Cheung, Harlem Yu, David Tao, Wang Leehom, and a Puyuma police officer from Taitung, Chen Chien-nien.¹⁰ When the result was announced, David Tao, Wang Leehom, and Jacky Cheung all turned to shake his hand and congratulate him.¹³ That same year, Chen also won Best Composition for "Myth," the song he wrote for Samingad, with lyrics by Lin Chih-hsing.⁴¹⁴ Samingad herself won Best New Artist that year.⁴

Samingad is Chen Chien-nien's sororal niece. Jiajia (Chi Chia-ying) is Samingad's younger sister and also Chen Chien-nien's sororal niece.¹⁴¹⁵ In other words, the 2000 Golden Melody Awards placed three generations of Puyuma music from the entire Nanwang community onto the highest stage of Mandarin pop at the same time: Lu Senbao (not present, having died in 1988), Chen Chien-nien (Best Male Singer and Best Composition), and Samingad (Best New Artist).

Official MV for "Myth," sung by Samingad, composed by Chen Chien-nien, and written by Lin Chih-hsing, included on Samingad's 1999 debut album Samingad: The Sound of Sun, Wind, and Grassland. At the 11th Golden Melody Awards in 2000, Chen won Best Composition for this song, and Samingad won Best New Artist.

How did international music critics view that year? An April 27, 2000, pre-awards article in the Taipei Times quoted critics describing Chen Chien-nien's music as "sincere, pure and naturally touching," and argued that the Golden Melody recognition of Chen and Samingad was "an affirmation of Aboriginal musical achievement."¹⁶ The outside world read the same signal: Indigenous music was no longer material to be "sampled" by pop lyricists, but a subject that could take the stage and win mainstream awards in its own name.

But the Chen Chien-nien on that awards stage was still, as his main job, a police officer.

📝 Curator's Note
At the opening ceremony of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, the German group Enigma sampled the Amis couple Difang and Igay Duana's drinking song in "Return To Innocence," broadcasting it worldwide; the subsequent royalty lawsuit was not settled until 1999. That was the largest instance of Taiwanese Indigenous music being treated as "material" in the international commercial world. Four years later, Chen Chien-nien and Samingad stood onstage to receive Golden Melody Awards. The meaning lies precisely in this contrast. Indigenous music had entered the mainstream in both cases, but this time the creators themselves stood under the brightest spotlight, not a sample cut up by someone else.

September of the Same Year: Requesting Transfer to Lanyu

After winning, the most natural script would have been: sign with a major label, appear on variety shows, launch a concert tour, become a star. Chen Chien-nien chose the opposite direction. In September 2000, less than five months after the Golden Melody Awards, he voluntarily applied to transfer from Taiwan's main island in Taitung to Lanyu.¹⁶

Lanyu is an outlying island southeast of Taiwan proper. Its main residents are the Tao people (also known as Yami), and its population is a little over 4,000.¹⁷ For a singer who had just won a Golden Melody Award, this was a form of self-exile to a place where the media could not call every day. Before his 2022 solo concert, Chen himself explained the atmosphere of this move to an ETtoday reporter: it was to "avoid the commotion."¹¹³

From September 2000 until his retirement in September 2017, he served on Lanyu for more than ten years in intermittent postings, rotating through all of the island's police stations: Lanyu, Yongle, Dongqing, and Langdao. Before retirement, he was deputy chief of the Lanyu Police Station.³⁶¹⁸ Outside police work, he hiked, dived, took photographs, learned the Tao language, and participated in the Tao flying fish festival and Indigenous rituals.⁶¹⁸ The police dormitory became his recording studio, and Lanyu's coastline became the material archive for his next album.

In 2002, he released his second original album, Earth, through Trees Music, reflecting three years of creation in Lanyu, Taitung, and Taipei.¹⁹ On August 5, 2021, he released his third major original album, pongso no Tao (Tao for "Island of the People," Lanyu's self-name), with 17 songs, all rooted in Lanyu's natural environment.²⁰ At the 33rd Golden Melody Awards in 2022, pongso no Tao won Best Indigenous Language Album.²⁰²¹

In other words, between the 2000 award for Mandarin Male Singer and the 2022 award for Indigenous Language Album, there were 22 years. During those 22 years, he did not run off to become a major celebrity. He stayed in police stations, on Lanyu's shores, slowly writing the island into one long record.

Official MV from Trees Music: "Beautiful Heart of Orchid Island," included on the 2021 third original album pongso no Tao (Tao for "Island of the People"). The firsthand recordings of Lanyu slowly written over 17 years later won Best Indigenous Language Album at the 2022 Golden Melody Awards.

_On March 25, 2018, a close-up of Chen Chien-nien singing in Hsinchu. Photo: Taiwania Justo. License via Wikimedia Commons._

"We Are Compatriots": Lyrics Written in 1999 That Became a Disaster-Relief Song in 2024

There is one song on Ocean whose meaning, heard from the vantage point of 2026, has become heavier than it was at release in 1999.

"We Are Compatriots," lyrics by Lin Chih-hsing, music by Chen Chien-nien. The core of the lyric is this line: "Whether mountain people or plains people, we are all the people of this place; whether first inhabitants or later inhabitants, we are all residents of this place."¹²²²

The year the song was written, 1999, was the end of Lee Teng-hui's presidency, a moment after the Indigenous "name rectification movement" had changed "mountain compatriots" to "Indigenous peoples," and while the Legislative Yuan was still discussing the draft Indigenous Peoples Basic Law.¹⁷ Lin Chih-hsing distilled the everyday greeting "we are compatriots," used in gatherings of Puyuma elders, into a poem that accepts all later arrivals. Chen Chien-nien set it with a light guitar and rhythm, avoiding a tragic narrative and giving it the tone of an invitation.

More than twenty years later, the song's afterlife became larger than when it was written. After the magnitude 7.2 Hualien earthquake on April 3, 2024, its lyrics were repeatedly quoted in disaster-volunteer messaging groups, and the line "we are all the people of this place" became part of the moral ground of cross-ethnic rescue work.²³ The same song has also been repeatedly cited by young political workers of Audrey Tang's generation as one of the most commonly quoted Taiwanese vocabularies for discussing "the coexistence of plural identities."

✦ "Whether mountain people or plains people, we are all the people of this place."

Official MV from Trees Music: lyrics by Lin Chih-hsing, music by Chen Chien-nien. Lyrics written in 1999, repeatedly quoted in disaster-volunteer messaging groups after the 2024 Hualien earthquake, and resurfaced again during the 2025 Matai'an flooding.

When Chen Chien-nien wrote this melody, he was still wearing a police uniform by day at the Guanshan police station in Taitung. As an agent of public authority, the people he dealt with every day were the mixed eastern Taiwan society of plains people, mountain people, Han people, and Indigenous people. When the line "we are all the people of this place" became a song in his hands, its meaning was concrete: it was the eastern Taiwan society he saw every day at the police station window.

Flag Platform, Police Motorcycle, Convention Center: Moving the Police Station onto the Stage

Five years after retiring, Chen Chien-nien held his first large ticketed concert. On February 12, 2022, 2,500 fans came to the Taipei International Convention Center.¹³

The stage was strange. A flag platform, a police motorcycle, a Lanyu police-station scene moved onto the stage. The concert opened with a flag-raising ceremony. Chen Chien-nien walked onstage in a police uniform and gave this opening statement:

"Because every police station has to raise the flag. The work of police is to be loyal to the country and faithful to the leader. I want to share with everyone this heart of loyalty to the country."¹³

Then he began to play and sing. He made a mistake in the first song, stopped, and told the 2,500 people in the hall:

"I'm so nervous! I'm sorry. I'm so excited, because I haven't performed in a while."¹³

A few songs later, he made another mistake and laughed at himself in mixed Japanese and Tao: "Sumimasen! I always mess up the first song!"¹³

What made this concert distinctive was not its scale: 2,500 people is a relatively modest number for someone who had been a Golden Melody king 22 years earlier. Its distinctiveness lay in the design choice: Chen Chien-nien did not turn the stage into a medal show for the "return of a Golden Melody king"; he turned the stage into a police station. He put the two identities of the past 30 years, police officer and singer, onstage at the same time, and let the police half raise the national flag first. The audience had to accept this contradiction before listening to him sing.

📝 Curator's Note
For a rock narrative accustomed to an anti-establishment stance, the sentence "the work of police is to be loyal to the country and faithful to the leader" would normally be something to deconstruct in reverse. But when Chen Chien-nien says it, he is entirely earnest. This is why he cannot be absorbed into either side's narrative: he is not a "rebellious Indigenous musician disguised as a police officer," nor is he a "system-obedient police officer secretly making music." He is someone who believes two things at once: loyalty to the land, loyalty to the country, and loyalty to the songs his grandfather left behind, all arrayed within the same body. This kind of coexistence is very ordinary in Taiwan's civil-service system. So ordinary that when he wrote something like "Ocean," the outside world was surprised that such a person wrote songs.

On March 25, 2018, Chen Chien-nien at a small live-house performance in Hsinchu. Photo: Taiwania Justo. License via Wikimedia Commons.

After Retirement: The Second Half of Life

On September 1, 2017, Chen Chien-nien officially retired from his position as deputy chief of the Lanyu Police Station, ending a police career of 30 years and 10 months.³⁶ In an interview with the Central News Agency before retirement, he said: "After retirement, I will return to a leisurely, natural life, but I will continue along the path of music and create more, better music."³

A few months later, he explained the deeper meaning of this decision to a Liberty Times reporter:

"I worked hard in the first half of life. In the second half, I should spend more time with family and take care of my health."⁶

His retirement list was also concrete: tend the family's land as a farmer; often travel to and from Lanyu to record ecology; train himself physically to complete a cycling circuit of Taiwan, triathlons, marathons, and ultramarathons.⁶ When he talks about Lanyu, he does not beautify it: "Lanyu is full of conflicts of culture and values, and many things are very difficult to change."⁶ Even his first experience wearing the Tao people's traditional thong was described directly: "It was really uncomfortable the first time; the material was rough and rubbed the skin."⁶

Read together, these passages show that he never packages himself as a "spokesperson for Indigenous music" or "ambassador of Puyuma culture." He acknowledges cultural conflict, acknowledges that Lanyu has problems that are difficult to change, acknowledges that traditional dress can chafe the skin. Such details are often smoothed away in familiar media narratives about "diva-level Taiwanese Indigenous singers," but Chen Chien-nien keeps them.

Why This Person Matters to Taiwan

Place Chen Chien-nien back into the music history of late-1990s Taiwan, and his position is irreplaceable.

In 1996, Enigma's "Return To Innocence" sampled the voices of Difang and Igay Duana, triggering litigation and making Taiwanese society broadly aware for the first time of intellectual-property issues in Indigenous music.²⁴ In 1996, A-mei's debut album Sisters sold 4 million copies across Asia, marking the first time an Indigenous singer was truly seen by the mainstream market.²⁵ In 1998, Trees Music was founded and opened another route through Chen Chien-nien, Panai, and Samingad: "do not sign with a major company, do not leave the community."⁹ In 1999, Ocean was released; in 2000, it swept the Golden Melody Awards.⁴

Within this entire timeline, Chen Chien-nien was the person who proved, at the highest commercial awards, that the aesthetic of "local recording, writing one's own lyrics and music, playing one's own guitar, and not relying on commercial packaging" could work. Like A-mei, he is Puyuma and from Taitung, but he took the exact opposite route: A-mei went to Asia's largest stages; Chen Chien-nien retreated to Taiwan's most distant outlying island. Both routes are legitimate. But if Chen had not taken his route first, later Indigenous musicians who won Golden Melody Awards after the 2010s, such as Sangpuy, Suming, Panai, and Abao, would have had one fewer precedent showing that one could be non-commercial and still win the highest award.²⁶

The deeper layer is generational relay. Lu Senbao wrote "Beautiful Rice Ears" in Puyuma in the 1950s, and it was not heard by the outside world until Kimbo Hu began singing it in the 1970s;² another thirty years later, in 2000, his maternal grandson Chen Chien-nien finally pushed that line onto the highest stage of Mandarin pop. Three generations, fifty years: this musical line was finally closed once. Chen Chien-nien later included "Beautiful Rice Ears" on Ocean: with his own arrangement, he sang the song his grandfather wrote.²⁷

✦ The grandfather left a people's songs; the grandson put on a police badge and wrote an ocean.

Ending: The Guitar at the Police Station Window

On April 29, 2000, the day of the Golden Melody Awards, many of Chen Chien-nien's colleagues at Guanshan Precinct, the Lanyu station, Yongle station, Dongqing station, and other stations where he had rotated later realized only afterward that the colleague who had stood morning shifts and filled out incident reports with them was the person on television who had won Best Male Singer.³ What Chen himself did after winning was return to the police station for handover, then apply to transfer to the more distant Lanyu.¹

If you go to Lanyu today and ask local Tao elders, they may not tell you about "Golden Melody king Chen Chien-nien." They may say "that police officer who could fix plumbing and electrical problems," or "that deputy chief who could play guitar."⁶ This is the position Chen Chien-nien chose for himself: the Golden Melody Award was a name others gave him; police officer was the post he answered to every day; his grandfather's songs were the responsibility he played into every night. All three identities coexist in one body, without stages of before and after.

And that guitar, first strummed at home in Taitung in eighth grade in 1980, recorded into Ocean at 3:43 p.m. on the Shanyuan coast of Dulan Bay in 1999, slung over his back after he raised the flag at the Taipei International Convention Center in 2022, is still being played today in 2026.

Chen Chien-nien did not begin writing songs in 1999. He had been writing songs in Taitung communities since the 1980s, writing for twenty years without being heard by the mainstream market, and then was suddenly discovered by the outside world in 2000. Nor did he only retire in 2017. He walked into a police station in 1986, made songwriting something he did after work, and did that for 30 years.

The songs his grandfather left behind, he did not strenuously "inherit." He simply, slowly, one song after another, played them again himself.

Further Reading:

• A-mei — Also Puyuma, also from Taitung, but on the completely opposite path: the Puyuma diva who went from the Nanwang community to Asia's biggest stages
• Contemporary Indigenous Singer-songwriters — A generational map of how Taiwanese Indigenous music moved from the margins to the mainstream after the 1990s
• Taiwanese Folk Songs and Song Traditions — Includes the place of 1950s Indigenous creators such as Lu Senbao in Taiwanese folk-song history
• Taiwanese Independent Music — How independent labels such as Trees Music built another path outside the mainstream music industry
• Popular Music and the Golden Melody Awards — How the Golden Melody Awards system incorporated Indigenous music creation

References

Image Sources

This article uses three CC BY-SA 4.0 licensed images, all cached in public/article-images/people/ to avoid hotlinking source servers:

• Pur-dull in Hsinchu 2 — Photo: Taiwania Justo, 2018-03-25, CC BY-SA 4.0, Commons File:Pur-dull_in_Hsinchu_2.jpg (hero)
• Pur-dull in Hsinchu (cropped) — Photo: Taiwania Justo, 2018-03-25, CC BY-SA 4.0, Commons File:Pur-dullin_Hsinchu(cropped).jpg (inline 1)
• Pur-dull in Hsinchu — Photo: Taiwania Justo, 2018-03-25, CC BY-SA 4.0, Commons File:Pur-dull_in_Hsinchu.jpg (inline 2)