Siraya Erotic

The Siraya are the people the Dutch met first when they built Fort Zeelandia on the Tainan coast in 1624, and for most of the next four centuries outsiders assumed they had melted into the Chinese population. They had not, quite. They are a Plains indigenous group of southwestern Taiwan, one of the peoples known collectively as Pingpu, and their heartland is the flat, hot Chianan Plain around Tainan, where the four big villages in Dutch ledgers, Sinckan, Soulang, Mattau and Bakloan, are now the districts of Xinshi, Jiali, Madou and Shanhua. As Chinese settlers took the paddy land, some Siraya moved into the hills toward Yujing, and in the nineteenth century others crossed the mountains to the east coast, so Siraya descendants also live around Fuli in Hualien and in Taitung.

Their language is Austronesian, one of the Formosan languages that make Taiwan the likely starting point for the family that stretches from Madagascar to Easter Island. It had fallen silent as an everyday tongue by the early twentieth century, but Dutch missionaries had taught the Siraya to write it in Roman letters, and villagers kept using that script for land contracts long after the Dutch were expelled in 1662. Those contracts, the Sinckan Manuscripts, plus a 1661 translation of the Gospel of Matthew, are the raw material a small group of activists has used since the 2000s to rebuild the language and get it into a handful of Tainan primary schools.

Seventeenth-century Dutch writers were startled by Siraya society: women farmed and ran the religion, priestesses called inibs presided over spirit rites, husbands lived apart in men's houses and visited their wives at night, and villages were run by councils of elders rather than chiefs. What survives of that world is the worship of Alid, the ancestral spirit, kept in a village shrine called a kuva as water-filled pots rather than images. In Jibeishua and Toushe the annual Night Festival still brings pig offerings, female mediums, and lines of women in white singing and stepping in a slow circle, everyone crowned with garlands of Eupatorium leaves. In daily life most Siraya practice the same folk religion, Buddhism or Christianity as their neighbors, and the kuva is where the older identity concentrates.

Legally they have spent decades in limbo. Taiwan's national indigenous status excludes the Plains peoples, so Tainan granted the Siraya local recognition in 2005, and in 2022 the Constitutional Court ruled the exclusion unconstitutional and ordered the law changed. Recognition matters beyond the registered families, because a large share of southern Taiwanese who consider themselves Han have Siraya grandmothers somewhere in the line.