Ketagalan Erotic

The Ketagalan were the plains Austronesian people of Taiwan's northern end. For centuries they lived in the Taipei Basin and along the coast from Tamsui to Keelung, until Han Chinese settlement picked up in the eighteenth century and absorbed them into the rice-farming, Hokkien-speaking society that became modern Taipei. They did not so much vanish as blend in. Their descendants are part of the ordinary Taiwanese population, and some now claim the lineage openly.

The name is a modern umbrella term, spread by ethnographers during the Japanese colonial period. It covers peoples who may not have seen themselves as one: the Basay of the north coast, the Luilang of the Taipei Basin and the Kulon toward Taoyuan. Scholars still argue over where to draw the lines. What these groups shared was location. They held the river mouths, the natural harbor at Keelung and the sulfur country around Beitou, so every outsider who came to northern Taiwan met them first. The Spanish fortified Keelung in 1626 and Tamsui soon after. They found the Basay farming little and living instead as fishermen, salt makers and craftsmen who traded knives, arrows and cloth along the coast. Dominican friars baptized converts and compiled a vocabulary of the local speech before the Dutch drove the Spanish out in 1642. In 1697 the Chinese traveler Yu Yonghe came to Beitou to extract sulfur. His diary remains one of the sharpest early portraits of the basin and its villages.

Under Qing rule, farmers from Fujian cleared the basin, leased or took village land, and married into Ketagalan families. Chinese surnames, Hokkien speech and worship at folk temples followed, and the older spirit practices faded. George Leslie Mackay's Presbyterian mission, based in Tamsui from 1872, later drew converts among the plains communities of the north. By the Japanese period the languages were nearly gone, and Basay survives mainly in word lists taken down from its last speakers.

The legacy is written on the map. Mengjia, Taipei's oldest neighborhood, is commonly traced to a Ketagalan word for canoe, and Beitou to one associated with a sorceress. In 1996 the city renamed the broad avenue in front of the Presidential Office Building as Ketagalan Boulevard, putting an indigenous name at the ceremonial center of the state. Beitou's Ketagalan Culture Center followed in 2002. Descendants have joined the wider Pingpu campaign for legal indigenous status. Assimilation blurred the Ketagalan, but it did not erase them.