Personally visiting historic sites
Listening to Hsu discuss historic trails, her comprehensive knowledge of the mountains is astonishing. This is the cumulative result of countless exploratory trips into the mountains and was also her and Yang’s way of understanding Taiwan. Yang once said: “Geography is the stage of history, and you can only learn the truth about history by visiting that stage.”
Three of the major indigenous rebellions against Japanese rule were the Truku War of 1914, the Dafen Incident of 1915, and the Wushe Incident of 1930. Hsu explains that one must personally visit the local terrain to properly understand that historical events are not merely assemblages of people, actions, times and places, but are full of conflicts, choices, and compromises driven by complex factors including greed, group interests, and indigenous communities’ sense of dignity.
Hsu cites an example: “Mona Rudao, a member of the Seediq community at Wushe (Mosha) and a leader of the Wushe rebellion, had previously helped the Japanese to attack the Seediq communities of Tauda and Truku, because there had long been conflicts of interest and land disputes between them, so he had used the Japanese to suppress his neighbors and expand his own influence.”
Whenever Hsu Ju-lin leads a group of hikers along the Guanshan Historic Trail, she stops at the Japanese-era Zhongzhiguan Police Post. “It was from here that Dahu Ali, one of the three main leaders of Bunun resistance against the Japanese, looked down on his own community of Tamahu through a powerful telescope owned by the Japanese, and realized that they could watch everything that went on in the village. At that point he knew that his people would need to compromise with the Japanese or they would have no future.”
At age 76, Yang Nan-chun translated a book by the Japanese scholar Nenozo Utsurikawa called The Formosan Native Tribes: A Genealogical and Classificatory Study, published in 1935. “The difficulty with this book was not in the language, but in understanding Taiwan’s geography. When it comes to things like the community migrations spoken of by tribal chiefs, such as which ridgelines and passes were crossed, or which ridgelines and rivers marked the boundaries of a community’s hunting grounds, or why some communities formed mutual alliances while others were mortal enemies, unless one has a comprehensive understanding of Taiwan’s mountain areas, it is impossible to understand the information they imparted,” wrote Hsu in a book on the Hehuan Historical Trail.
Hsu Ju-lin says that to understand Taiwan’s history one needs to learn about its geography, as only then can one appreciate that this history is filled with conflicts, contradictions, choices and compromises.