Mona Rudao: The Anti-Japanese Hero on the Twenty-Dollar Coin, and the World Without China or Japan

30-second overview: You may have had a twenty-dollar coin in your wallet. The face on the front is Mona Rudao, a Seediq chieftain. On October 27, 1930, he led warriors from six villages in an uprising at the Musha Public School athletic meet, killing over a hundred Japanese before taking his own life in a mountain cave. His remains were not found until three years later. Those remains then spent nearly forty years as an anthropological specimen, and were rewritten in turn by three regimes — as "evidence of savagery," as a "Chinese anti-Japanese hero," and as a symbol of "Taiwanese indigenous spirit." But what he wanted to be, in the Seediq language, was a Seediq Bale — a "true person." And the world he died defending had no China, and no Japan.

In July 2001, the Central Bank of the Republic of China (Taiwan) issued a new twenty-dollar coin. Bimetallic, gold outer ring and silver inner, with a Tao outrigger canoe on the reverse and a profile on the front: Mona Rudao, leader of the Musha Incident. It was the first circulating coin in Taiwan to feature an Indigenous theme.¹

But the coin had an awkward origin. When the designers went to engrave Mona's face onto the die, they discovered that after searching every domestic archive and historical record, there was not a single photograph of him to be found. In the end, they turned up an image in a Japanese-language magazine, and the engravers traced it by hand, stroke by stroke, onto the die.²

In other words, Taiwan's most famous anti-Japanese hero — the face an entire nation recognizes — was pulled from a Japanese publication.

The awkwardness did not stop there. The coin saw extremely limited circulation; many people have never held one in their lives. Some who tried to spend it at a night market stall or a drink shop had it refused as counterfeit.³ A hero the state minted onto currency, meant to "promote ethnic harmony," was itself rejected as fake money.

This article is about what lies beneath these three layers of awkwardness: an anti-Japanese hero on a twenty-dollar coin, whose real act of defiance was directed at a world in which neither China nor Japan had any place.

📝 Curator's note
We are accustomed to fitting Mona Rudao into a ready-made frame: "He led Indigenous people in a heroic resistance against Japan." This is not wrong, but it presupposes a stage on which "Japan" and "China" (or "the Chinese nation") stand, and Mona chose to resist Japan. The problem is that this stage was built by later generations. When Mona raised his rifle in 1930, the world he was trying to defend had nothing to do with that stage. Understanding what he was defending is the key to understanding why this coin is so deeply ironic.

The Bridge He Had to Cross Was Made of Rainbow

To understand Mona Rudao, one must step outside the "anti-Japanese" frame and enter the Seediq cosmos.

Mona Rudao was chieftain of Mehebu village, of the Tgdaya dialect group of the Seediq people, born around 1880 (per Chinese and English Wikipedia), though some sources give 1882 (per the National Academy for Educational Research, Ministry of Education). He left no household registration record; even his birth year has two competing accounts.⁴ He succeeded as chieftain young, renowned for his bravery, the wealthiest man in the village, skilled in headhunting. As for his appearance, Wikipedia describes him as "tall and powerfully built, said to be nearly 190 cm" — note those two words: "said to be." No one ever measured his bones; this height is legend, not fact.⁵

In Mona's world, there was a body of law called Gaya. It is the totality of ancestral commandments, laws, social norms, and taboos, said to be ordained by the ancestral spirits (Utux) and unalterable. Communal ritual, communal hunting, communal eating, shared observance of taboos, shared bearing of the consequences of transgression — these are the collective obligations Gaya prescribes.⁶

One element of Gaya later became the most misunderstood key to the Musha Incident: headhunting (mgaya in Seediq). To Han Chinese and Japanese, headhunting was savage decapitation. But in the Seediq context, its meaning was far more complex than violence — it involved revenge, divine adjudication (using the success or failure of a headhunt to settle disputes), prayers for bountiful harvests, rites to honor the dead, and it was also a qualification for male adulthood.⁷

And all of this connected to a bridge. The Seediq believe that after death, a person must cross a rainbow bridge (Hakaw Utux), on the far side of which the ancestral spirits dwell. A crab-shaped spirit (Utux Kalan) guards the bridge and inspects your hands — or more precisely, inspects your facial tattoo (Ptasan). A man must have taken a head and a woman must have mastered weaving to earn the right to a facial tattoo; without it, one cannot cross the rainbow bridge and reach the ancestral spirits.⁸

Mona Rudao's beaded ankle ornament, held in the National Taiwan Museum. Photo: Shizi, 2019. CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

So when the Japanese banned headhunting and facial tattooing, they were severing far more than two customs. For the Seediq, it was the severing of the right to join the ancestral spirits after death — the collapse of an entire system of identity and meaning. Taiwan-born scholar Leo Ching described the condition of colonized Indigenous peoples as a "colonial double-bind": tamed into "half-civilized" people yet forever treated as savages by the colonizer, accepted by neither side.⁹

There is a Seediq phrase, Seediq Bale, meaning "true person."¹⁰ What Mona Rudao wanted to become was this: a person with facial tattoos on his face, who could cross the rainbow bridge after death, who could uphold Gaya in life. We later called him a hero, but the position of "hero" was arranged for him by others; the position he spent his lifetime defending was that of a "true person."

There was later a film, Seediq Bale, that rendered Mona's world in sweeping cinematic grandeur. But lines like "blood sacrifice to the ancestral spirits" were invented by the director — there is no corresponding phrase in the Seediq language, a fact later publicly pointed out by the film's own Seediq cultural consultant.¹¹ This is a reminder: even the version we think is "closest to the Seediq" may be someone else speaking on their behalf. Mona's world was, from the start, difficult for outsiders to articulate accurately.

The Unclean Hand

In the 1930s, Musha was, in Japanese eyes, a "model aboriginal territory."

Japan's rule over Taiwan's Indigenous peoples followed a path from soft to hard. First came the Pacification Bureau; in 1906, administration shifted to the police; from 1910 to 1915, the "Five-Year Plan for Subjugation of the Aborigines" was carried out under Governor-General Sakuma Samata, with a budget of approximately 16.3 million yen, deploying military and police in campaigns of conquest. From 1915, Indigenous arms were confiscated, and an assimilation phase began: Aboriginal children's education centers and public schools were established, Japanese language was promoted, and headhunting, facial tattooing, and tooth extraction were banned.¹²

By 1930, Musha had been developed into a townscape rivaling those in Japan. Even revisionist historian Paul Barclay acknowledges that around 95% of the Indigenous people there could communicate in basic Japanese with police officers and teachers.¹³ But Barclay also cautions that beneath this model surface lay an enclave dominated by outsiders, and the locals' quiet and loyalty could at best be called suspect.¹⁴ Beneath the model exterior, resentment was building.

The resentment had several sources. One was forced labor. Between 1928 and 1930, Indigenous people in the Musha area were mobilized for work nine times; during the 1928 shrine construction project, their lunch fees were withheld and they were forced to make "donations." Wages were also unequal: Indigenous workers received 20 to 30 sen per day, while Han Chinese workers received 60 sen.¹⁵

Another source was the humiliation left behind by a political marriage. Japanese police officer Kondo Ichiro married Mona's sister Tiwas Rudao. Kondo was then transferred to Hualien and disappeared (one account says reassignment, another says he abandoned his wife). Tiwas was left behind, and under Gaya, a woman abandoned by her husband could not return to her family.¹⁶ Barclay, in Kondo the Barbarian, documents that this "Kondo Ichiro" was the younger brother of Kondo Katsusaburo, another key figure in aboriginal administration.¹⁷ A marriage arranged to use "aborigines to control aborigines" became a thorn in the Mona family's side.

And the spark that actually lit the fuse was a hand.

On October 7, 1930, Mona's eldest son Tado Mona offered a toast to Japanese police officer Yoshimura Katsumi at a wedding feast. Tado had just slaughtered a pig and had animal blood on his hands. Yoshimura found this "unclean," refused the toast, and struck Tado's offering hand with a baton. A scuffle broke out between the two, and Yoshimura was injured.¹⁸ Wikipedia's account reads:

Tado Mona, the eldest son of chieftain Mona Rudao, attempted to offer a toast to Yoshimura, but Yoshimura refused on the grounds of "disliking that unclean feast…" and struck Tado Mona's offering hand with a baton, and the two sides came to blows.¹⁹

Afterward, Mona led his people to Yoshimura's office bearing wine to apologize. Yoshimura refused to accept it and threatened to file a report. Under Japanese law, assaulting a police officer was a serious crime. New grievances piled atop old ones, and fear of retaliation drove Mona to a decision: rather than wait for a crackdown, he would rise up.

📝 Curator's note
There are three Japanese police officers in the Musha Incident, each playing a different role, worth remembering separately: Yoshimura Katsumi is the one who struck Tado at the toast incident; Kondo Ichiro is the one who married and then abandoned Mona's sister; and later there appears Kojima Genji, who instigated the Toda group during the Second Musha Incident. The Musha Incident was never a story of one person against an empire — it was a web woven from many specific people and many specific humiliations. And that "unclean hand" was merely the last straw.

That Morning at the Athletic Meet

On October 27, 1930, the Musha Public School was holding a joint athletic festival. Japanese military police, schoolchildren, and their families would all be gathered on the sports field. Mona chose this day. At dawn, around three hundred warriors from six villages launched coordinated attacks on 13 police substations across the Musha area, seizing firearms and ammunition, then charged toward the sports field.²⁰ The six villages that rose up were Mehebu, Truwan, Boalun, Suku, Hogo, and Drodux; Balan, the largest village, whose chief was Walis Buni, did not participate; the main instigators were Piho Sapo and Piho Walis of Hogo village.²¹

That day, they killed 134 Japanese, including women and children; they also mistakenly killed two Han Chinese wearing kimono — a girl named Li Tsai-yun and a shop owner named Liu Tsai-liang, struck by a stray bullet.²² The warriors seized approximately 180 rifles and over 23,000 rounds of ammunition.²³

News reached Taipei, and the Government-General was shaken. The Japanese dispatched troops and police, with Major General Kamata Yahiko serving as field commander (Governor-General Ishizuka Eizō was a civilian; the front was handed to Major General Kamata). Aircraft dropped bombs and mountain guns shelled the area. The suppression lasted approximately fifty days, into early December.²⁴

Commanders and staff of the Musha punitive force (1930). Photo: Kohei Ebhara, Musha Tōbatsu Shashinchō. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The most difficult and contested chapter of the suppression concerns poison gas. Many Chinese-language sources state that the Japanese military used blister gas (Lewisite or mustard gas), or even white phosphorus shells; survivors gave testimony of "skin rotting," and the Taiwan People's Party cabled the League of Nations in early 1931 to protest the Japanese "massacre using poison gas."²⁵ But there is no academic consensus on this matter. Japanese historian Harayama Akiaki argues that the Japanese military actually used "several hundred tear gas shells, plus at least three rounds of special gas (containing cyanide and tear gas components)," rather than mustard gas; the Japanese Wikipedia even states "it remains unclear to this day."²⁶

So this article will not assert that "the Japanese military massacred with poison gas" — that exceeds what the evidence can support. But there is one document that proves at least one thing: the Japanese side knew it was doing something it could not afford to have seen. On November 5, 1930, the Vice-Minister of the Army sent a confidential telegram to the Chief of Staff of the Taiwan Army, the gist of which was: the use of blister munitions will not be discussed for reasons of foreign relations, and henceforth all matters involving gas shells are to be communicated only in code.²⁷ This telegram is held in the archives of Japan's Ministry of Defense (JACAR, S5-2-26). It does not order a halt to the use of poison gas — it orders that poison gas not be left on paper. This is ironclad evidence of deliberate concealment.²⁸ In the wake of the protests, the Taiwan People's Party was forcibly dissolved in February 1931; Japan did not sign the Geneva Protocol banning poison gas until 1975.²⁹

During the suppression, an event occurred that has been written about repeatedly and repeatedly romanticized: the collective hanging of women and children. The numbers vary — Chinese sources give approximately 296, English Wikipedia approximately 290.³⁰ They hanged themselves from large trees so as not to be a burden on the men still fighting, freeing the warriors to continue the battle without后顾之忧. The film depicted this as a heroic sacrifice; but the descendants of the survivors in Cingliuan understand it as a desperate last resort within the logic of Gaya — with no way out: cold and hunger in the rock cave, the paths to survival already sealed shut.³¹

📝 Curator's note
The difference between these two readings ultimately comes down to the question of who has the right to assign meaning to the dead. "Heroic sacrifice" is a word chosen for them from the audience seats; "no way out" is what descendants understand within the context of the rock cave. This article chooses to stand with the latter, and chooses not to reconstruct the details of that morning one by one — not to describe methods, not to linger on the dead — only to record the time, the place, and what a people did when driven to the edge. This is a matter of Gaya, not spectacle.

As for Mona Rudao himself, his date of death is a structural mystery. Because his remains were not recovered until 1933, the date of death is essentially an estimate, with versions ranging from November 5, mid-November, November 28, to December 1. This article adopts "around late November 1930" and notes that this date is uncertain.³² What is certain is this: he used a Type 38 rifle to take his own life in a cave on the right bank of the Mehebu River.

One scene in the film depicts Mona personally shooting his wife. But this is adaptation. A 1936 Japanese publication claimed Mona killed his wife and children, but survivors of the event later confirmed that Mona's wife in fact hanged herself, because killing one's wife and children is itself a violation of Seediq Gaya.³³ Wikipedia records this correction:

Because killing one's wife and children is a violation of Seediq Gaya, it was later confirmed by survivors of the event that Mona Rudao's wife in fact hanged herself.³⁴

Regarding the death toll, different sources contradict each other. Rather than silently choosing one, this article lays out the discrepancies: the Chinese Wikipedia breaks down deaths among the six villages as 85 by blade/gun, 137 by bombing, 34 by shelling, 87 by headhunting, 296 by hanging, totaling 639, plus 265 prisoners and approximately 500 who surrendered, with 1,236 participants in the uprising; the English Wikipedia records approximately 1,200 participants, 644 dead, and 290 by hanging.³⁵ The numbers do not match, but the direction is consistent: of the roughly one thousand-plus people from the six villages who rose up, nearly half died in the uprising.

The Half They Don't Teach in School

If the story ended here, it would be a clean tragedy: a people united in resistance against tyranny, dying heroically. But the real second half of the Musha Incident — the half they almost never teach in school — is not clean at all. On April 25, 1931, the "Second Musha Incident" took place. After the survivors of the six villages surrendered, they were detained in "protected aborigine" detention camps at Sipo and Drodux. Japanese police officer Kojima Genji (the name mentioned earlier) instigated the pro-Japanese Toda group, forming a roughly two-hundred-strong "Mikata-Ban (Allied Aborigine) Raiding Party" that attacked the camps under cover of night. Those killed and those who took their own lives numbered 216 in total (some sources give 214, 216, or 218); 101 heads were taken, a figure corroborated by photographs in the collection of the National Museum of Taiwan History (accession no. 2017.025.0192.0019).³⁶ The Japanese also offered bounties: 200 yen for a chieftain's head, 100 yen for a warrior, 30 yen for a woman, 20 yen for a child. Afterward, the Toda group was granted the land of the six insurgent villages.³⁷

In other words, the people who finished off the last of the Musha insurgents were another group of Indigenous people. Indigenous people killing Indigenous people.

The Japanese-mobilized "Mikata-Ban" (pro-Japanese aborigines) column (1931). Photo: Kohei Ebhara, Musha Tōbatsu Shashinchō. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The leader was Temu Walis, chieftain of the Toda group (approximately 1898 to November 11, 1930). He was almost a mirror image of Mona. The Toda and Tgdaya groups had a long-standing inter-group feud over hunting grounds, which the Japanese had long exploited, and Kojima Genji made use of precisely this old grudge.³⁸ Mona's wife had once tried to recruit Temu to join the uprising; he refused and instead sheltered Kojima. In the end, Temu led the raiding party in pursuit of the insurgents and was ambushed and beheaded by Tgdaya warriors in the Habun River valley, dying in battle along with more than ten of his men.³⁹

The film portrayed Mona and Temu as sworn personal enemies, but this is fiction. Seediq language translator Iwan Pering has pointed out that according to Gaya, Mona could not possibly have invaded another group's hunting ground, and the two may even have been related by marriage.⁴⁰ Temu was not a villain; he was another chieftain following the same Gaya logic, just standing on the opposite side. Vilifying him as a "pro-Japanese traitor" is a later convenience. Seediq cultural consultant Dakis Pawan (Kuo Ming-cheng) refuses to view the Toda group this way. He says: when you give your word, a Seediq sees it through to the end — this too is the spirit of Seediq Bale.⁴¹

Between the two extremes of Mona and Temu lay a third kind of person: Hanaoka Ichiro and Hanaoka Jiro.

The two were not blood relatives, both from Hogo village, and were "model aborigines" cultivated by Japan: educated in the Japanese system, they became elite Seediq police officers. Scholar Nakao Eki Pacidal calls them "inbetweeners."⁴² When the incident broke out, they made the most painful of choices. Hanaoka Ichiro (Seediq name Dakis Nobing), who had studied at Taichung Normal School, first dealt to his family, then stabbed himself in the abdomen with a native blade (not a Japanese-style seppuku disembowelment); Hanaoka Jiro (Dakis Nawi) led his people in hanging themselves.⁴³ They left behind a suicide note in Japanese, which began:

我等は此の世を去らねばならぬ／蕃人のこうふんは出役の多い為にこんな事件になりました (We must leave this world / The aborigines' uprising came about because there was too much forced labor.)⁴⁴

Hanaoka Jiro's wife Takayama Hatsuko (Seedibo Tadao) survived and later became the most crucial witness for writer Deng Xiangyang in his research on the Musha Incident.⁴⁵ Her posthumous child Kao Guang-hua (Awi Dakis, 1930–2001) later became mayor of Ren'ai Township and was, in fact, the person who received Mona Rudao's remains in 1973.⁴⁶ The Japanese did not trust them, and the Seediq did not necessarily accept them either. The Hanaoka brothers died in the crack between two worlds, and even the last words they left for posterity were written in Japanese.

After the incident, the survivors paid the final price. On May 6, 1931, the roughly 298 survivors of the six villages (Japanese sources alternatively give 278) were forcibly relocated to "Kawanakajima" (Chungliutun). Despite the word "island" in the name, it was in fact a plateau surrounded by the Beigang, Meiyuan, and Abis Rivers. They were forbidden to return home; four who attempted to do so were executed, and three were put to death; dysentery and malaria spread through the settlement.⁴⁷ The Japanese government also assigned responsibility: Governor-General Ishizuka Eizō and Chief Secretary Hitomi Jirō stepped down on January 16, 1931, as did Police Bureau Director Ishii Tamotsu and Taichū Prefecture Governor Mizukoshi Koichi.⁴⁸

📝 Curator's note
Why do textbooks only teach the first half and not the second? Because the first half fits neatly into the "Chinese anti-Japanese" frame; the second half does not. The Second Musha Incident, the Toda group, Indigenous people killing Indigenous people — once these are laid bare, the myth of "a united people resisting tyranny" shatters. Revisionist historian Barclay punctures precisely this clean narrative: the Toda and Truku groups cooperated with the Japanese in hunting down the insurgents, and the immediate trigger was humiliation and forced labor, not a systematic plan of extermination.⁴⁹ But Barclay simultaneously emphasizes that he is not whitewashing the colonial regime — the Japanese response to the insurgents was indeed a "genocidal fury." What he punctures is the clean coat that nationalism draped over the uprising, not the uprising's own legitimacy.

A Specimen's Forty-Year Journey

Mona Rudao died, but his story was not over. Because his remains were about to embark on a strange journey of nearly forty years. On July 6, 1933, hunters from Boalun village discovered a set of remains in a cave on the right bank of the Mehebu River. Mona's daughter Mahung Mona identified them by the cloth, silver wrist rings, and native blade, confirming they were her father's.⁵⁰

A scene from the Musha Tōbatsu Shashinchō (1930). Turning conquest into an exhibit, and turning Mona's bones into a specimen, are the same impulse. Photo: Kohei Ebhara, Musha Tōbatsu Shashinchō. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

What happened next remains jarring to read today. On June 13, 1934, at the completion ceremony of the Noko District office, Mona's bones were put on public display as an exhibit, drawing nearly ten thousand spectators. On July 1 of the same year, they were placed in a glass case at a police exhibition in the botanical garden. According to records, the exhibit that drew the most interest from visitors was precisely Mona's bones.⁵¹ On July 28, the remains were sent to Taihoku Imperial University, received by Utsurikawa Nenozo of the Lectureship in Folklore and Ethnology, and later subjected to the so-called "big foot" research by anatomist Suzuki Takao. From that point on, Mona Rudao became a catalogued anthropological specimen, stored for approximately forty years.⁵²

The person who rescued Mona from the specimen cabinet was an anthropologist. On September 17, 1973, Li I-yuan, acting chair of the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at National Taiwan University, wrote to President Yen Chen-hsing recommending the return of the remains. On December 24 of that year, Mona Rudao left National Taiwan University.⁵³

There is a bitter闭环 here: it was anthropology that made him a specimen "for research," and it was also anthropology that eventually released him from the specimen cabinet. A person who rose up so as not to be treated as "evidence of a primitive people" spent forty full years after death as precisely that kind of evidence — which is exactly what the Musha Incident was originally used by the colonizers to "prove": how "primitive" and "savage" the Indigenous peoples were.⁵⁴

And the way he came home was still not his own way. The reburial ceremony was presided over by Taiwan Provincial Governor Hsieh Tung-min, conducted entirely in Han Chinese ritual: memorial hall, wreaths, funeral music, hearse, and at the gravesite a white Chinese-style archway inscribed with "Heroic Blood, Noble Spirit" and "Righteous Courage, Loyal Heart."⁵⁵ Even his homecoming was not across his own rainbow bridge.

_Another view of the same beaded ankle ornament, held in the National Taiwan Museum. A person who spent a lifetime upholding Gaya ended up, body and belongings, as a display in a cabinet. Photo: Shizi, 2019. CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons._

📝 Curator's note
From 1934 to 1973, the same set of remains was defined in turn by three forces. The Japanese treated him as "evidence of savagery," making him a specimen for exhibition; the Nationalist government treated him as a "Chinese anti-Japanese hero," erecting monuments, inducting him into the Martyrs' Shrine, and issuing commendation orders; and after localization, he became a symbol of "Taiwanese indigenous consciousness." Michael Berry's edited volume The Musha Incident: A Reader (Columbia University Press, 2022) describes this process clearly: three regimes, three uses, each one driving the Seediq people from the position of narrative subjects. Mona being engraved on the twenty-dollar coin is in fact the third appropriation.

Berry summarizes these three uses in the book (translated here):

The Japanese used it to prove the "savagery" of the Indigenous peoples; the Nationalist government cited the uprising as evidence of the Taiwanese people's heroic, united resistance alongside the Chinese; and pro-independence groups took it as an example of "authentic" cultural tradition.⁵⁶

This line of appropriation extends all the way to the present. In 1969, Mona Rudao was inducted into the Martyrs' Shrine, reportedly the first Indigenous person to be so honored; in 1970, the Executive Yuan issued a commendation order, signed by Interior Minister Hsu Ching-chung.⁵⁷ The Musha monuments were altered again and again: in 1950, Kao Yung-ching first tore down the Shinto shrine and erected the "Survivors' Monument"; in 1953, the "Heroic Blood, Noble Spirit" archway and the Martyrdom Monument were erected, bearing the inscription of Taiwan Provincial Chairman Wu Kuo-chen; after Wu Kuo-chen became embroiled in a political scandal, the inscription was changed to "Musha Mountain Compatriots Anti-Japanese Uprising Monument," with Huang Chieh's name substituted.⁵⁸ Historian Ku Heng-chan, in his article "Circulating Memory," points out that each regime change brought a new signatory and a new inscription, the state thus carving the politics of memory into the same stone.⁵⁹

As for the twenty-dollar coin, the Central Bank's official reason was "to respect Taiwan's Indigenous history and culture, and to promote ethnic harmony."⁶⁰ The words are fine. But when you know that the face was pulled from a Japanese magazine, that the coin was refused as fake money, and that the remains spent forty years as a specimen — the phrase "promote ethnic harmony" takes on a different weight.

Whose Hero

In 2011, director Wei Te-sheng's Seediq Bale was released, in two parts: Flag of the Sun and Rainbow Bridge. The film grossed approximately NT$880 million at the Taiwan box office; it was in competition at the Venice Film Festival, won the Golden Horse Award for Best Feature Film, and made the Oscar shortlist for Best Foreign Language Film.⁶¹ For Taiwanese born after 1985, Mona Rudao's face is now the face of Atayal pastor Lin Ching-tai, who played the adult Mona.

ARS Film official theatrical trailer. For the post-1985 generation, the face in this trailer became Mona Rudao's face.

The film made Mona remembered by an entire generation — that is its achievement. But it is also the version most criticized by scholars for "romanticization."

The sharpest critic was in fact the film's own cultural consultant, Dakis Pawan (Kuo Ming-cheng), a descendant from Cingliuan and author of The Truth About Seediq Bale. He pointed out that phrases like "blood sacrifice to the ancestral spirits" and "pride" were invented by Wei Te-sheng and have no equivalent in Seediq; that Mona shooting his wife violates Gaya, and he warned Wei Te-sheng about this, but Wei filmed it anyway; and that headhunting was glamorized as an individual male achievement.⁶² Indigenous writer Walis Nokan criticized the film's individual heroism as contrary to the tradition of collective decision-making: traditional tribal leadership followed collective decisions, and no single person could act alone.⁶³ Scholar Lin Jin-ru systematically catalogued these cultural distortions in a 2018 paper in CLCWeb.⁶⁴

If Seediq Bale is spectacle, then Tang Hsiang-chu's 2014 documentary The Remaining Life: Seediq Bale is its counterpoint. The film was nominated for Best Documentary and Best Sound at the 50th Golden Horse Awards (ultimately not winning either), following the descendants of survivors as they search for the ancestral origin site Pusu Qhuni (Mudan Rock), responding to the grandeur of the silver screen with the perspective of those who lived.⁶⁵ Everyone can write the climax of the uprising, but "how to live, after surviving" is almost never written. Novelist Wu He's The Remaining Life also takes this path, interviewing survivor descendants and criticizing Lee Teng-hui's monument and Chen Shui-bian's coin as politicizing Mona rather than truly mourning him; the survivors actually lived in a shameful silence.⁶⁶

ARS Film official release of The Remaining Life (2014, Tang Hsiang-chu) documentary trailer. Compared to the spectacle of Seediq Bale, it hands the camera to those who survived.

The contemporary puzzle continues. On April 23, 2008, the Seediq were officially recognized as Taiwan's 14th Indigenous people, independent from the Atayal, divided into three dialect groups: Tgdaya, Toda, and Truku.⁶⁷ On August 1, 2016, Indigenous Peoples' Day, President Tsai Ing-wen offered a government apology to Indigenous peoples:

For four hundred years, every regime that has come to Taiwan, through armed conquest and land dispossession, has gravely violated the inherent rights of Indigenous peoples.⁶⁸

She also established the Indigenous Historical Justice and Transitional Justice Committee, with Seedawi Mona (Tsai Chih-wei), a Seediq doctor of law and Taiwan's first Indigenous PhD in jurisprudence, serving as convener of the land subcommittee.⁶⁹ But justice was not thereby completed. The 2017 traditional territory demarcation regulations excluded private land, reducing the demarcable area from approximately 1.8 million hectares to approximately 800,000 hectares, triggering years of protest on Ketagalan Boulevard.⁷⁰

And the sharpest question was left for the present. In 2025, Seediq Bale was re-released in China under the name "80th Anniversary of Retrocession." A Seediq descendant, Walis Pawan, responded in an interview (translated from the English report):

This is a matter between China and Japan. They use a film about us to say what we feel, but China has never come to ask us.⁷¹

This sentence could almost serve as the key to the entire article. Mona Rudao has been claimed by three sides: Han/Taiwanese nationalism, the Chinese nation narrative, and the silence of Mikata-Ban descendants — three parties with three mutually incompatible relationships to the same person. And the person himself, who was repeatedly appropriated, was never asked.⁷²

The True Person

Back to Cingliuan.

The descendants of the survivors who were forcibly relocated to Kawanakajima still live here today. The place is called Gluban, administratively part of Ren'ai Township, Nantou County. They grow a rice called "Chungliu Rice" (Taikeng No. 9), which during the Japanese period was presented as tribute to the Emperor; the media often describe this as "the Indigenous tribe with the highest education level and the densest concentration of civil servants," though this claim cannot be supported by official statistics and is more of a common saying.⁷³ The village has a Survivors' Monument and a memorial hall. Golden rice ripens and is harvested year after year. In the final sequence of Tang Hsiang-chu's The Remaining Life, the descendants are still searching the mountains for the ancestral origin site called Pusu Qhuni.⁷⁴

Mona Rudao's bronze statue and the Musha Anti-Japanese Uprising Monument in Musha. Photo: Hsu Fang-lan (fanglan), 2012. CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

We need heroes. We need a clean story that fits in a textbook, a coin we can hold in our palm, a face we can hang on a wall. So we engraved Mona Rudao on a twenty-dollar coin, wrote him into "Chinese anti-Japanese resistance," filmed him as a grand epic.

But what Mona Rudao wanted to become was never a hero. He wanted to be a Seediq Bale — a true person. A person with facial tattoos on his face, who upheld Gaya, who could cross the rainbow bridge after death. In that world, there was no China and no Japan, only the ancestral spirits, the hunting grounds, that bridge, and the crab spirit at its entrance inspecting your hands.

The face on that coin was pulled from a Japanese magazine. Those remains spent approximately forty years as a specimen, and were finally buried in Han ritual — even his homecoming was not across his own rainbow bridge. We gave him everything except one thing: treating him as a person, rather than a monument.

Perhaps the first step in truly knowing Mona Rudao is not memorizing how many Japanese he killed, but understanding that the world he died defending never needed us to choose sides for it.

Further reading:

• Wei Te-sheng — Director of Seediq Bale, who brought Mona Rudao to the silver screen; the other side of "how film reshapes memory" in this article
• Taiwan Indigenous History and Naming Movement — How the Seediq gained independence from the Atayal in 2008 to become Taiwan's 14th Indigenous people
• Japanese Colonial Period — The aboriginal administration policies and fifty years of colonialism that form the backdrop of the Musha Incident
• Indigenous Land Justice and Traditional Territory — The hunting grounds Mona defended, extending to today's traditional territory demarcation disputes

Image and Video Sources

This article uses 7 public domain / CC-licensed images, all cached at public/article-images/people/ to avoid hotlinking; it also embeds two ARS Film official videos (fair use editorial commentary):

• Mona Rudao and Seediq tribal leaders (hero image) — From Kohei Ebhara, Musha Tōbatsu Shashinchō (Kyōeisha, 1931), Public domain (PD-Japan-oldphoto). Original is vertical; cropped to square for hero image.
• Mona Rudao's beaded ankle ornament (2019) — National Taiwan Museum collection, photo by Shizi, CC BY-SA 4.0.
• Musha Incident scene (1930) — From the Japanese Musha Tōbatsu Shashinchō, Public domain (PD-Japan-oldphoto).
• Musha Incident punitive force commanders and staff (1930) — From the Japanese Musha Tōbatsu Shashinchō, Public domain (PD-Japan-oldphoto).
• Mikata-Ban column (1931) — From the Japanese Musha Tōbatsu Shashinchō, Public domain (PD-Japan-oldphoto).
• Mona Rudao's beaded ankle ornament (alternate view) (2019) — National Taiwan Museum collection, photo by Shizi, CC BY-SA 4.0.
• Mona Rudao bronze statue and Musha Anti-Japanese Uprising Monument (2012) — Photo by Hsu Fang-lan (fanglan), CC BY 2.0.
• Video: _Seediq Bale_ theatrical trailer HD — ARS Film official channel.
• Video: _The Remaining Life: Seediq Bale_ trailer — ARS Film official channel, Tang Hsiang-chu 2014 documentary.

References