The History of Religion in Taiwan is the History of Violence, Migration & Coexistence
Plus: Happy New Year and a sobering read from Noah Smith
Hello dear readers,
Happy New Year! We went to a lovely New Year gathering hosted by one of Michelle’s work friends; it was so nice, although we definitely were the oldest people there. We were home in bed by 11:30. We wished we had attended the “crying to welcome the new year” party in Da’an Park, in which thousands of people gathered to watch a Tsai Ming-Liang film, Vive l’amour, about urban alienation (there’s apparently a 7 minute crying scene). The months of December and January are always a bit intense for us in Taiwan, because three members of our families have birthdays, we’re still in full-on work mode, and loved ones from abroad come home. But we’ve been so happy to see people—especially those of you whom we’ve reconnected with after so long. Hope you’ve all had a great start to the new year and we hope you have a wonderful 2025.
Albert here. About a month ago, I was lucky to participate in a workshop in Hualien hosted at National Donghwa University, Taiwan’s first indigenous studies college. Several months ago I wrote about my religious landscapes project and how Taiwan is the second most religiously diverse country in the world. This workshop activated our partnership with the history department at Donghwa.
Hualien is the hometown of my parents. Even though I’ve visited regularly since I was a child, I’ve realized only recently how little I know about its religious history. Most vividly, the workshop taught me that Taiwanese religion is entangled with the histories of colonialism, migration, and ethnic conflict.
One site brought these overlapping histories home: a Shinto shrine-turned-Catholic Church in Xincheng county. Japanese settlers had built the shrine in honor of Japanese who had died waging a cruel decades-long war against the Truku (Taroko) people, a group that lives largely in an area that now constitutes the county of Hualien. Xincheng had long been an area of conflict between Han settlers and the indigenous Truku. Earlier during the Qing period, Han settlers abandoned their occupation because indigenous warriors successfully expelled them. In 1875, Han settlers established a fortified town, which became an important node in the burgeoning camphor trade.
Tensions between the Truku and the Japanese colonizers began almost immediately after Japanese settlers arrived in the small township of Xincheng in July of 1896. In December of 1896, violence erupted when Truku warriors raided the Japanese soldiers, killing twenty-one, including the Japanese second lieutenant in charge. The spark: Japanese soldiers had sexually assaulted a Truku woman, enraging the Truku people.
Over the following year, the Japanese colonial forces launched four separate attacks on the Truku; each time the indigenous troops successfully beat the Japanese back. For the next decade, tensions between the Japanese and Truku tribes continued to mount, with sporadic cases of intense violence. In 1906, 36 Japanese merchants and bureaucrats were killed because the government tried to monopolize the camphor trade, an important source of income for the Truku.
That year, General Count Sakuma Samata (佐久間 左馬太, 1844–1915) assumed the post of governor-general of Taiwan. A veteran of the Meiji pacification campaigns, the Sino-Japanese war, and the Russo-Japanese war, Sakuma turned his attention to the “indigenous problem” in Taiwan. In 1913, he decided to launch a full out assault on the Truku people. He mobilized 20,000 soldiers and police officers, a number that I find astonishing; about 2000 indigenous warriors resisted them. By August 1914, the Japanese declared the area pacified, even though sporadic resistance continued into the 1930s.
To commemorate its dead, the Japanese built a Shinto shrine. The original Shinto shrine had wooden gates and contained a stone tablet with the names of the dead. They later re-built the gates with cement in the 1930s. After the Second World War and the end of Japanese colonial rule, parts of the Shinto shrine's structures were destroyed. The only facilities that remained were the torii gate made of reinforced concrete, stone lanterns, and the guardian lion-dog statues (komainu). The area was abandoned, as locals considered it an area haunted by angry spirits.
In the 1960s, Swiss missionaries from the Congregation of Great St. Bernard purchased the land to construct a church and dormitories for its priests. The missionaries built a church shaped as a "Noah's Ark.”
The Swiss restored and re-purposed some materials from the Shinto shrine. For instance, they preserved the stone lanterns and stone lions that had guarded the main sanctuary. The baptismal fount in the Church was originally a Shinto granite water basin, designed for purification before entering the shrine.
The missionaries placed a statue of the Virgin Mary where the main sanctuary structure (Honden) of the Shrine used to be. Before you enter the “Garden of the Virgin Mary”—which looks like a grotto—you pass two guardian dogs, which once guarded the souls of dead Japanese soldiers.
There are a lot more stories to tell about this church alone—not least the story of Father Gabriel Délèze, who came to Taiwan in 1976, conducts masses in Truku, and takes care of nine stray cats. He was a pioneer in combating sexual slavery and the trafficking of indigenous minors; his activism nearly led to his expulsion from the country. The site—like so many others in Taiwan—reflects how this country’s complicated and fractious history has been transformed into spaces of ethnic and religious coexistence.
Book Club: Taiwan Travelogue
We’re talking about Yang Shuangzi’s celebrated Taiwan Travelogue (tr. Lin King) for our next book club on Friday, January 24th at 7:00 PM EST / Saturday January 25th at 8:00 AM Taiwan time. If you’re in Taipei, you can get an English-language copy at the wonderful English-language bookshop Bookman Books. Reply here for a Zoom link!
Happy New Year and a sobering read
The Taipei 101 fireworks show is certainly the most famous and iconic among all the fireworks celebrations in Taiwan, but for our money, the Tamsui fireworks are the best:
And if you wanted to start your year off for a sobering (but beautiful) read, check out this post by Noah Smith about the precarity of Taiwan’s situation in a world where the “insanity of war” has returned.
I too would like a zoom link!
One zoom link please :)