THE PRESENT POPULATION OF FORMOSA Hakkas and other Chinese-Formosans, Japanese, Aborigines. As regards this particular odd corner of the world, naturally, in my peregrinations about the island, I picked up a certain amount of information. Among other things, I learned that those who make up the vast majority of the population of the island at the present time, and who are known as “Formosans”—this not only among themselves, but who also are so called (i.e. Taiwan-jin, “men of Formosa”) by their Japanese conquerors, and by Europeans resident in the island—are Chinese; that is, descendants of the immigrants from the mainland of China. Of these, between 80,000 and 90,000 are Hakkas, originally from the Kwantung Province of China—a people rather despised by the other Chinese. The Japanese, who since the treaty of Shimonoseki (1895) have been masters of the island, number between 120,000 and 125,000, and are constantly increasing in population. All official positions, and those of authority of any sort, are in the hands of the Japanese as is now all the wealth of the island. The aboriginal population it is naturally more difficult to estimate. But the number of the aborigines at the present time cannot, in reality, exceed 105,000. Personally I doubt if a carefully taken census would reveal that number. If an effort were really made by an exceptionally industrious or far-seeing aborigine to redeem his land, some method was usually found by the Chinaman to thwart this effort. The land remained in Chinese hands. Since 1895 all the land of agricultural value in the island has passed from the hands of the Chinese-Formosans into those of their Japanese The well-being, or the reverse, of the aborigines has been little affected by the change of masters. On this point I should be contradicted by the Japanese, who would point out that they have introduced the eating, and—as far as this is possible in the mountains—the cultivation, of rice, instead of millet, among the aborigines. Also they would lay stress upon the fact that they have established among the aborigines schools for the “teaching of Japanese language, Japanese customs, and Japanese manners.” Apart, however, from wondering just how the displacement of millet by rice, as a staple of diet, and compulsory training in Japanese language and customs and Japanese “good manners” will be of benefit to the aborigine (the eating of white rice will probably give him berri-berri—as it has given this disease to so many of the Japanese—from which up to this time he has been spared by the eating of millet), one notes that the Japanese in their As a matter of fact, the only people ever dominant in Formosa who seem to have treated the aborigines with either kindness or equity were the Dutch during their thirty-seven years’ over-lordship in the seventeenth century. The story of this period of just and kindly rule in their island has been handed down among the aborigines from parent to child and still remains a tradition among them—one of a Golden Age long past; just how long of course they have no idea, but in the time of “many grandfathers back.” There is Only the memory of past culture given by “fair gods who came over the sea in white-winged boats”—or, as some of the tribes have it, “came up out of the sea”—remains. It seems that there exists among some of the tribes a belief that a reincarnation of a former “Great White Chief”—presumably Father Candidius, a Dutch priest, who devoted his life to the care, spiritual and temporal, of the aboriginal people—will return and help them throw off the yoke of their Chinese and Japanese conquerors. |