Qauqaut Erotic

The Qauqaut were a small Indigenous people of Su-ao, a harbor town on the northeast coast of Taiwan, who had been absorbed into the neighboring Kavalan by the early 20th century. Any Qauqaut ancestry that survives runs through Kavalan families, and the name itself lives on mostly in ethnography and in the study of Taiwan's Formosan languages.

Their speech and their location set them apart. The Kavalan held the broad Lanyang Plain of Yilan to the north, yet the Qauqaut spoke a form of Basay. Most Basay speakers lived much farther up the coast, around what is now Keelung and Taipei. Basay and Kavalan are close relatives, both in the Kavalanic branch of the Austronesian family, but they were separate languages. A Basay-speaking community at the southern edge of Kavalan country hints at a coast where small groups moved and settled by sea. Su-ao sits where the plain runs out. South of town the mountains fall straight into the Pacific, and the town's sheltered bay makes a natural harbor.

The Qauqaut faded as a named people during a hard century for Yilan's Indigenous communities. Han Chinese settlers began pushing onto the plain in the 1790s, and the Qing court brought the area under formal rule in 1812. Over the following decades many Kavalan left for the coast of Hualien to the south. After Japan took Taiwan in 1895, the anthropologist Inō Kanori traveled the island to catalog its Indigenous peoples. He reported that the Qauqaut had already been assimilated by the Kavalan.

Past that, the record goes quiet. Little is documented about Qauqaut religion, dress, kinship or village life. Filling those gaps with details borrowed from the Kavalan or the northern Basay would be guesswork passed off as history. Taiwan's government does not count the Qauqaut among its 16 recognized Indigenous peoples, and the Kavalan themselves won official recognition only in 2002. The Qauqaut are a reminder that the island once held more Indigenous peoples than any modern list shows. Some were small groups who left behind little more than a name and a scrap of language.