The fate of the first inhabitants of Taiwan

The first inhabitants of Taiwan were aborigines, a term which comes from the Latin ab origin, an expression which means... from the origin. Easy.

It should be noted in passing that the term aboriginal therefore does not exclusively designate the first inhabitants of Australia.

Be that as it may, the aborigines of Taiwan would have won the island from the south-east of present-day China, no doubt between the 6th and the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC. J.-C. Since a lease, therefore.

The languages ​​of the aborigines of Taiwan are called Formosan (from Formosa, the name the Portuguese gave to the island when they discovered it in the middle of the 16th century).

These languages ​​belong to the Austronesian language family, which includes the languages ​​of the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Madagascar and Oceania.

If the aborigines of Taiwan constituted the crushing majority of the population of the island until the beginning of the XVIIth century, their descendants do not represent any more today than 2% of the population of Taiwan.

Attempts at European colonization (Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch) in the 16th and 17th centuries, then, above all, Japanese (first half of the 20th century) and Chinese (essentially since 1949) colonization explain the sad fate of the first inhabitants of Taiwan.

Below: Taiwan aborigines drawn by the Dutchman Olfert Dapper (1636-1689). The work from which this drawing is taken is now kept in the library of the University of Radboud, in the Netherlands.

Storia Mundi

Copy and paste: 2 October 2022 : 5 Rabiulawal 1444H: 3.21 am