Thao Erotic

The Thao are the people of one lake. Their homeland is Sun Moon Lake, high in the mountains of Nantou County in central Taiwan, and their history is a history of that water: who fished it, who held the shore, and how high the surface stands. Thao means person in their own language. Their account of arrival is a hunting story: a party tracking a white deer over the ridges, losing it at the shore, finding water thick with fish and ground worth farming, and going home for their families. They are among the smallest of Taiwan's recognized indigenous peoples, counted in the hundreds, and for most of the twentieth century they were not recognized at all. Japanese ethnographers filed them as a branch of the Tsou, the Republic of China inherited that classification and kept it, and the Thao spent decades insisting they were nobody's subgroup. The government conceded in 2001. Their language is Austronesian, which matters more than the community's size suggests: Taiwan is where the Austronesian family began, and the Formosan languages hold depths that the Pacific branches shed on the way out. Thao resists tidy placement on that family tree, and it is nearly gone: fluent speakers number in the single figures, all of them old, and what keeps the language in the world is classroom teaching, recording, and a romanized orthography that did not exist a lifetime ago.

Thao religion runs on ancestral spirits and the objects that house them. Each household keeps an ancestor basket holding clothing that belonged to its dead, and the basket is where the ancestors are addressed; the ritual office that handles it belongs to women. The year turns on Lus'an, the harvest observance held around the eighth lunar month, which runs for days and carries the music the Thao are known for: long wooden pestles struck against a stone slab, each tuned by its own length, played by a line of women. Lalu, the small island near the center of the lake, is where the ancestral spirits are held to live. In 1934 the Japanese colonial administration dammed the lake for hydroelectric power, raised the water, drowned Thao fields and most of Lalu, and moved the survivors to the southern shore. The 1999 earthquake hit them again, hard, though the rebuilding that followed is also what gave the recognition campaign its momentum. What stands there now is Ita Thao, a village of a few hundred people inside one of Taiwan's busiest tourist destinations, selling crafts and performing for the boat traffic, which is a living and a strange way to have to be a people.