Babuza Erotic

The Babuza are a plains people of west-central Taiwan, from the flat alluvial country between the Dadu and Zhuoshui rivers in what are now Changhua and Yunlin counties. Before the paddy fields, this was deer range, and the deer trade is what pulled Chinese merchants and then the Dutch East India Company onto their doorstep. Babuza villages sat on the fan of the plain and back toward the coastal sand flats; one of them, Banxian, stood where Changhua city stands today, so the county seat is built on a Babuza site under a Chinese name. The Dutch called them Favorlang after one cluster of their settlements, and the name stuck hardest to the language. Babuza, or Favorlang, is Austronesian, part of the Western Plains branch of the Formosan languages, closest to Taokas among its neighbors. It has no speakers left, and it is still one of the best recorded languages on the island: a Dutch chaplain named Gilbertus Happart assembled a Favorlang word book around 1650, Jacobus Vertrecht wrote sermons and dialogues in it, and Medhurst printed the dictionary in Batavia in 1840. Linguists working on the deep Austronesian past of Taiwan, which is to say the deep past of half the Pacific, still open that book.

The Dutch sent punitive expeditions against Favorlang villages in 1637 and 1642 before the villages came to terms and began sending elders to the colonial assemblies. When Koxinga's forces took the island, Babuza communities were part of the Middag confederation, a loose alliance of central plains villages under a paramount figure the Dutch called Quataong, and it fought the newcomers rather than folding. Under the Qing the pressure changed shape: Han settlers arrived in numbers, village land passed into tenancy and then out of Babuza hands through rents and debt, and families took Chinese surnames, Pan above all. Babuza villages joined the rising that began at Dajia in 1731 and ran south through the central plains. In 1823 a coalition of plains groups, Babuza among them, negotiated their way into the Puli basin in the hills of Nantou and moved, which is why descendants are scattered inland as well as along the coast. The language went quiet, Hokkien took over, and the official record stopped counting them. Taiwan recognizes sixteen indigenous peoples and the Babuza are not one of them, a status the Pingpu peoples have contested for decades through the courts, local registration drives and their own associations. There are families in Changhua and Yunlin who can still name the village they came from.