For history, written records are immensely useful – some may even say necessary – to understand certain places, people, and practices. However, large parts of the world developed socioeconomically and thrived culturally despite the absence of written records in bureaucratic governing practices. They had other forms of engaging with the past, including oral and visual memory traditions. Textual archives are thus both a blessing and a curse for global history where hegemonic epistemologies continue to complicate efforts to integrate oral traditions and nonwritten narrative strategies into global knowledge regimes. Like other formerly colonized peoples, Indigenous Taiwanese see their histories underrepresented as an effect of their colonizers’ inability or downright refusal to understand, value, and integrate other practices of remembering the past. That said, this chapter will look at how the applied scholarly colonialism of imperial scholars, including Murakami Naojirō, colored how Indigenous Taiwanese pasts were perceived and how these perceptions would inflect imperial historiography.

The allegedly pure character of historical source compilations introduced in Chapter 5 has cast a long shadow over the narration of the island’s past. This actuality offers an important opportunity for global intellectual history to reposition itself and its tools as they relate to underlying questions of power asymmetries and the conspicuous relationship between language, past, and politics. The absence of Indigenous peoples in historical accounts did not mean that they were not involved. This silence was the result of the disappearance of knowledge caused by the privileging of certain epistemic practices and the dismissal of Indigenous forms of knowledge.Footnote ¹ This view is not new; in fact, it is reminiscent of Malay historians’ criticism in the 1960s and 1970s of Euro- and Asiacentric historiography that focused primarily on elites.Footnote ² However, the internal struggles of the competing disciplines of history and anthropology, and the abusive elements in storytelling about Taiwan, have yet to be problematized in global intellectual history.Footnote ³

A first step is to acknowledge that against all odds there are ways to trace Indigenous voices in written, printed, and normative colonial text production. To unpack asymmetries and silences, I turn to the concurrences approach that theorizes the simultaneity of different orders, scales, and knowledge claims in colonial histories. The notion of concurrences forces scholars to recognize that all intellectual and social connections in colonial encounters were entangled with political violence and economic asymmetries.Footnote ⁴ I will complement the concept of concurrences that highlights the impact of colonial dominion on marginalized groups with reflections on the historiography of the other, a concept I created together with Leigh Jenco.Footnote ⁵ By focusing on the historiography of the other, we aimed to integrate regions and peoples traditionally placed outside the frames of global history and to do justice to multiple, overlapping historiographical traditions and the power dynamics engrained in them.Footnote ⁶ I, therefore, suggest that we include an archive of silence, in line with Jacques Derrida’s contention of the reciprocal dependence on the ‘other,’ into global intellectual history. Derrida’s différance (the combination of difference and deferral) demonstrates how, throughout the history of ideas, complex thinkers struggled to “enclose the other.”Footnote ⁷ Being aware of the central place of difference for ideas and knowledge has helped me contextualize the material and documentary body of sources against the background of conscious and unconscious acts of exclusion.

The Dynamics of Silencing Indigenous Pasts

In Chapter 5, I wrote about the marginalization of Taiwan’s past in the nan’yō history program during Murakami’s term as dean at the Faculty of Letters at Taihoku Imperial University. The current chapter takes a closer look at how Indigenous peoples’ past became excluded from research and teaching. That said, it is important to recognize that the absence of the Indigenous population from the history curriculum did not equate with disinterest. Rather, the desire to control Indigenous peoples, on the one hand, and the choices guided by empirical imperialism, on the other, determined what was studied and how it was disseminated by the colonial regime.

Anthropologist Johannes Fabian’s work on language and colonial power expatiated on how colonizers and their Darwinist civilizing missions denied the Indigenous peoples they encountered coequalness. In other words, the ‘other’ was placed outside the flow of time. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, anthropologists played an important role in providing arguments for such perceptions and helped to legitimize imperialist projects.Footnote ⁸ Indigenous Taiwanese pasts became epistemologically disconnected from the history of the Chinese on the island.Footnote ⁹ Indigenous Taiwanese were perceived as existing outside the flow of evolutionary time and, therefore, stuck in an archaic stage. Anthropologists’ strong belief that the differences among civilizations could be explained using a linear time scale would have a strong impact on the Japanese colonial administration of Taiwan. At the beginning of the twentieth century, this belief was promoted by colonial administrators such as Gotō Shimpei and quickly disseminated in the Japanese media.Footnote ¹⁰

Over the sixty years of Japanese colonial rule, the practices of empirical imperialism in Taiwan changed. How both colonial and metropolitan stakeholders institutionalized and employed knowledge for controlling territories under formal and informal rule has been well researched.Footnote ¹¹ Matsuda Kyōko explored how the colonial regime used scholarship and political thought to homogenize the heterogenous local population.Footnote ¹² Taiwanese historian Yao Jen-to pointed out that by 1920 the colonized were important to the colonizer, which accentuates that colonizing was a complex process of constant, albeit asymmetrical, negotiations for all sides. The expanding empire needed its subjects not only as enthusiastic banzai shouters and obedient laborers but also as objects of study – in effect, they were “test subjects.”Footnote ¹³ Institutional innovations, including higher education, libraries, and museums, introduced by the colonizers contributed to unprecedented documentary and material production.Footnote ¹⁴ In the field of historiography, educational and preservatory intentions resulted in archival source compilations whose Euro-Chinese bias established an ahistorical conception of the Taiwanese past.

To the question of why the past is told differently around the globe, the disciplinary dichotomies that resulted from positivist delimitations can provide some answers. With the persistence of the telos of modernity in the humanities and cultural sciences, national history-writing intensified the already rigid demarcation of disciplines within the field. History, as the study of civilizations, was considered superior to the “general sciences of man,”Footnote ¹⁵ a somewhat derogatory concept used by leading late nineteenth-century theorists when referring to sociology and anthropology. Anthropology, ethnology, and especially folklore were considered unrelated scholarly disciplines that were most appropriate for exploring the customs of societies that fell outside the frame and ambitions of nation-states. In turn, the division between history and the other disciplines implicitly denied Indigenous populations the intellectual capacity for progress and development. In the Japanese Empire, the scholarly study of the Indigenous populations and their customs was influenced by the broader institutional environment where historiography constantly used Europe as a reference.Footnote ¹⁶ Outside the Japanese core, in places like Taiwan or Hokkaido, the absence of scripts and written records was persuasive enough to maintain boundaries between history and those disciplines that studied the pasts of peoples with no or limited writing traditions.Footnote ¹⁷ The institutionalization of knowledge of Taiwan’s history was determined by disciplinary boundaries and the fact that twentieth-century historians were insufficiently equipped for the task of approximating Aboriginal pasts.Footnote ¹⁸

During the Japanese occupation of Taiwan, Japanese scholars were certainly not the only practitioners of history on the island. However, their voices were the most authoritative ones and thus heard above the others. The questions they asked and the ontological frames they applied left scant possibility for other forms of storytelling or history-making to be recognized outside the Indigenous communities.Footnote ¹⁹ Murakami’s access to multilingual archives proved irrelevant in this regard. Tropes of savagery and perceptions of “people without history” (phrase made popular by Eric R. Wolf) were kept alive due to academic historians’ inability and lack of willingness to use or read the Indigenous archive. The emphasis on foreign influences on the history of Taiwan (what I call the outside perspective of the nan’yō history narrative of the Taipei-based southern sea history curriculum) made ‘othering’ conveniently simple for Murakami and his colleagues. Almost paradoxically, colonial scholars trained in world history disregarded the circumstances under which Taiwanese encounters linked foreign and Indigenous pasts and ignored the fact that Taiwan’s Austronesian population was considered to be made up of ancestors to many peoples in maritime Southeast Asia and the Pacific.Footnote ²⁰

In recent decades, Taiwanese scholars have done important work to show how complex politics of memory and identity affected the historical consciousness of the island’s people and their pasts.Footnote ²¹ Following the “controversy on Taiwan’s modernization” in the 1980s, literary scholars in the 1990s began to question the usefulness of postcolonial studies for the complex issues of language and memory loss.Footnote ²² Over the course of one hundred years, from the Japanese conquest in 1895 to the end of martial law in 1987, the idea of Taiwanese as Han Chinese grew to become the dominant belief in the formal academic history of Taiwan. Indeed, the history of Taiwan has largely been influenced by the dichotomy between writing the history of an independent nation and writing the history of a part of the Chinese people. Sinocentric narratives focusing on the impact of migration from mainland China were dominant and conditioned epistemic violence. A major shift occurred with the cultural revival in the 1990s when Indigenous movements battled for more rights and visibility. The reintegration of Plains Indigenous Peoples into the history of Taiwan is a long process. Throughout the twentieth century, plains Indigenous landowners (the Siraya being one of them) were considered assimilated as a result of Han Chinese immigration during the Qing era and thus excluded from academic and local histories. Only in the 1990s did their history become part of the “collective search for a new Taiwanese identity on the island.”Footnote ²³ In the 2000s, a boom in the writing of ethno-history developed concurrently with the rise of marginalized voices claiming that the history of Taiwan should be first and foremost the history of its Indigenous people.Footnote ²⁴ The subsequent integration of plural Indigenous pasts into a more inclusive historiography of Taiwan also led to a revival of Japanese anthropological studies of Takasago Aborigines, as the Indigenous peoples of Taiwan came to call themselves based on a historic Japanese appellation. This process boosted what could be called Indigenous public history with community-led initiatives to study Indigenous participation in historical processes of the previous century. Within such identification processes, the archive of Indigenous pasts came to expand beyond written documents to include such unconventional sources as Japanese colonial picture postcards produced for domestic and foreign audiences.Footnote ²⁵ While such Indigenous history projects have yielded novel insights into the more recent past, knowledge of events that occurred further back in time is far more difficult to approximate, with large parts of it beyond reconstruction.

Reflections on the Absence of Aboriginal Pasts in Imperial Historiography

For my attempt to explain the silencing of Indigenous pasts in Taiwanese history, I suggest starting with how foreign visitors have described the Indigenous encounter since the late sixteenth century.Footnote ²⁶ In the seventeenth century, sporadic foreign trade and coastal confrontations were complemented by territorial colonialism. Between 1636 and 1662, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) extended its influence as colonial master over significant parts of the southern plains, producing the largest documentary corpus and colonial references (including daily records, resolutions, and missives) written in seventeenth-century Taiwan by colonial officials and Protestant priests. Dutch descriptions resonate chiefly with Spanish accounts produced during colonization attempts from the Philippines in the 1620s and 1630s.Footnote ²⁷ Combining historical and anthropological sources and methods, Taiwan scholar Chiu Hsin-Hui elucidated what early modern territorial colonialism meant for the Indigenous population of Tayouan.Footnote ²⁸ The foreigners’ dependence on a Chinese supply of commodities increased the number of Chinese settlers rapidly. Chiu described the Tayouan Indigenous as “prestige conscious people” who drew foreigners, above all the Dutch and the Japanese, into their intervillage rivalries and made sure they regularly would receive gifts. Seeking mediation, as the people from Sinkan did in their conflict with the rival village of Mattauw, was a further aspect of regular exchange between Indigenous communities and foreign colonizers. The Dutch, on the other hand, took advantage of Indigenous enmity and used alliances to support the political ambitions of what had started as a mere trading outpost in 1624.

During mid-seventeenth-century colonization, Dutch and Spanish officials, missionaries, and soldiers applied the parameters of the pseudo-ethnographic work from other colonial contexts in their records.Footnote ²⁹ Spanish and Dutch colonial agents in Taiwan grappled with the linguistic and ethnic diversity they encountered. Hence, they began to label the Indigenous people of Taiwan according to the names of their villages.Footnote ³⁰ In 1632, the Spanish Dominican friar Jacinto Esquivel, who lived in the north of the island for two years, compiled a detailed list of villages with explicit references to their gold and silver mines.Footnote ³¹ Although the village itself would be defined as the political unit for Dutch colonial administration, as an organizing categorization it had its limits. Not only would members of the same ethnicity often inhabit several villages, but also in many cases they were not unified and regularly engaged in armed conflicts. Despite on-the-ground awareness of diversity, amateur European ethnographers would soon lump together the entire sum of Austronesian inhabitants of Taiwan as allegedly homogenous Formosans.Footnote ³² The term Formosan originated from the sixteenth-century Portuguese toponym and has survived as a generic term in Anglophone writing into the twenty-first century. While Qing frontier governance after 1683 added distinction to the concepts describing Indigenous groups, its simplified civilizational binary of ‘cooked’ and ‘uncooked’ for acculturated Aborigines (shufan 熟番) and nonacculturated Aborigines (shengfan 生番), respectively, was equally demeaning.Footnote ³³ Later visitors to the island would adopt these terms uncritically.

After Japanese colonial rule began in 1895, the Aboriginal population would be administered separately from the Chinese as ethnic minorities. In 1904, most Aborigines of the lowland cultural complex (Plains Aborigines, Pingpu 平埔), who numbered an estimated 135,000, were Sinophone and acculturated in Han folkways.Footnote ³⁴ While this process of administration has silenced many Indigenous voices since the mid-seventeenth century, it did not mean that the Chinese language had completely replaced Indigenous forms of communication.Footnote ³⁵ Although certain Indigenous languages had become extinct by the end of Qing rule, many lowland communities were bilingual. Japanese colonialism added yet another dimension to everyday language policies. Nervous concerns about the inferior knowledge of Chinese on the part of the Japanese colonial officials led to a gradual replacement of Chinese vernaculars with Japanese as the lingua franca. This policy targeted the 2,800,000 members of the Chinese-speaking population of Taiwan. For the Aboriginal population, the systematic use of an imported language was further marginalizing, making it easier for the colonizers to exoticize them.Footnote ³⁶

The notion of a benevolent Japanese imperial state in Taiwan, Korea, Manchuria, and Southeast Asia has long been challenged. The Japanese Empire employed a diverse approach toward colonizing heterogenous subjects. Scholars speak of a “peculiar discourse of multiethnicity and assimilation” and have identified discrimination as part of the colonizing and assimilating efforts.Footnote ³⁷ This strategy of othering Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples contradicted the propaganda mantra of an ethnically and culturally diverse empire embodied by a homogenous Yamato state in which all interests should be subdued to those of the emperor. Indigenous submission to Japanese rule was scattered and failed to integrate diversity across the island.Footnote ³⁸ Meeting resistance from both Han Chinese and Indigenous populations, Japanese empire builders and policymakers had to find a balance between coercion and gaining support.Footnote ³⁹ Likewise, in the frontier economy, Japanese attempts to control and exploit Indigenous production were met with violent self-defense and resistance.Footnote ⁴⁰ For this purpose, they applied bureaucratic research tools, including censuses, statistics, and land surveys, all associated with modern statecraft. The newly gathered knowledge transformed unknown subjects into numbers, charts, and maps that, in turn, aimed at making the colony governable.Footnote ⁴¹ On the ground, relations between Indigenes and outsiders were dependent on mediation through cultural brokers and intermarriage arrangements and the Japanese adaptation of traditional rituals.Footnote ⁴² The study of the practices and traditions of the Aboriginal people and Austronesian connections was assigned to Japanese anthropologists. As early as 1900, while historians still exclusively focused on nation-building, Japanese anthropologists became concerned that the Aboriginal peoples of Taiwan would cease to exist under an extended Japanese colonial reign.

The different customs of Indigenous people and the recurringly displayed hostilities against foreign intruders had posed a serious challenge to the colonial project since Meiji times. Once colonial rule had been established, the classifications of Japanese “race science”Footnote ⁴³ were crucial to the establishment of Japanese rule outside the naichi.Footnote ⁴⁴ The early proponents of Japanese anthropological studies included pioneers of Japanese ethnology such as Inō Kanori (伊能嘉矩, 1867–1925) and Torii Ryūzō (鳥居龍藏, 1870–1953). In providing practical knowledge for governing the newly integrated populations of Hokkaido, Okinawa, and Taiwan, they adapted methods and epistemologies from US cultural anthropology and Franz Boas’s cultural relativism.Footnote ⁴⁵ Inō’s classification of the Indigenous People of Taiwan into eight major peoples (平埔 ‘peipo,’ including Atayal, Bunun, Saisiyat, Tsou, Paiwan, Puyuma, Ami, and Pepo) became the basis for the contemporary taxonomy. The anthropologist Inō was also the first to survey the island’s integration on a world historical stage.Footnote ⁴⁶ He aimed to demonstrate the Chinese origins of the Aboriginal population and to stress the ancient links with other nations in East Asia.Footnote ⁴⁷

Historians working with an anthropological focus have revealed the impact of othering in the relationship between the metropole and Taiwan Aborigines. Studying this relationship, Robert Eskildsen demonstrated how the empire’s ethnic and geographical pluralism was translated to the Japanese people at home.Footnote ⁴⁸ In Outcasts of Empire, Paul Barclay showed how Indigenous groups contested colonial rule and the modernizing measures taken by the colonizers in everyday life.Footnote ⁴⁹ Like other colonized subjects in the geographically diverse Japanese Empire, including the Ainu of Hokkaido or the Ryukyans of Okinawa, the Indigenous population of Taiwan was able to negotiate with the sovereign power, which in turn depended on their collaboration as colonial subjects, as Kirsten Ziomek has shown.Footnote ⁵⁰ They did so regardless of hegemonizing policies and attempts to appropriate local traditions by institutions such as Taiwan’s Cultural Society (文化協会, bunka kyōkai) that was founded in 1921. This society closely collaborated with the Home Rule Movement, which petitioned the Japanese Diet for political autonomy and social equality and lobbied for the acknowledgment of a distinct Taiwanese identity within the empire.Footnote ⁵¹ Needless to say, members of the Indigenous groups, who often lived in geographically remote areas and had limited contact with the Japanese and Sinicized population, were neither the main protagonists nor the main beneficiaries of such cosmopolitan activism.

The strategy of representing the Indigenous ‘savage’ other as part of Japanese modernization was motivated by both racial and scientific agendas. In the beginning, Japanese investigations of local customs were based on Chinese written texts. Knowledge was continuously created since 1898 when the new civil governor, Gotō Shimpei, invited a significant number of Japanese scientists to the island to study the institutions and laws of the non-Japanese population, primarily the group they referred to as Chinese. In 1901, the Commission for the Investigation of Old Laws and Customs of Taiwan (Rinji Taiwan kyūkan chōsakai) followed.Footnote ⁵²

Murakami had first encountered the Indigenous other, both in person and in historical sources, during his first visit to Taiwan in 1897. In the decades to follow, Murakami’s publications typically framed Taiwan as the place of Japanese–Dutch protocapitalism and commercial competition, which escalated in the late 1620s. Take, for instance, his 1915 monograph on Hirado’s history as a commercial port (Bōekishijō no Hirado). Taiwan, after the arrival of the Dutch in 1624, is introduced to the reader as a sort of entrepot for trade with China (shina bōeki) that engages with the Indigenous population (dojin) of the area surrounding Tainan.Footnote ⁵³ One chapter of the book deals with Japan’s historical relations with the island (Nihon to Taiwan to no rekishiteki kankei), in which Murakami informs his readers of Hideyoshi’s request for tribute from Taiwan (‘Takayama’) in 1593.Footnote ⁵⁴ Murakami’s focus is the increasing Japanese commercial activity in the area. He explained that because the country was divided among manifold ‘Barbarian tribes,’ it was impossible for the Japanese envoy to deliver Hideyoshi’s letter. Murakami identified the envoy Harada Magoshijirō by name and his function as Japanese carrier of an official letter, in sharp contrast to the nameless natives who attacked visiting merchants during the same encounter. Murakami neither questioned the authenticity of these historical accounts, nor did he critically examine the circumstances of the Japanese–Indigenous encounter.Footnote ⁵⁵

It was only in the 1920s that the colonial institutionalization of history turned the topic of encountering the islands’ Aboriginal population into a question of epistemologies. In 1928 anthropologists opened their university department at Taihoku Imperial University. The same year, Murakami began to promote the nan’yō history narrative with its focus on European colonial powers in Southeast Asia. Murakami’s nan’yō history not only overemphasized foreign influences on Taiwanese history but also introduced linear Eurocentric timeframes that at best marginalized Indigenous pasts, but mostly ignored them altogether.Footnote ⁵⁶ This is a classic example of epistemic violence. As an empirically trained historian, Murakami based his conclusions on archival sources. Yet the sources he consulted were produced by previous colonial regimes, mostly bureaucratic in nature, and in the rare cases that their content included ethnographic descriptions, they presented a strong colonial gaze. These circumstances clearly misrepresented and ultimately silenced many stories.Footnote ⁵⁷ What remains to be explored is whether Murakami’s nan’yō narrative was guided by a specific agenda or whether his years in Taiwan were simply those of an opportunistic scholar at the mercy of a geopolitically challenged imperial government and the lingering threat of war resulting from rising imperial rivalry.

Sinkan Manuscripts: Sources of Indigenous or Colonial Pasts?

The Sinkan manuscripts are arguably Murakami’s most significant legacy for the study of Taiwanese history. At first glance, the source compilation and the enormous effort Murakami put into editing and disseminating these seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Indigenous-language sources contradict everything I have said so far. At a closer look, the edition reveals a more complicated multilayered story of knowledge creation and circulation. I will use the following pages to show that nowhere else in Murakami’s work is the conglomerate of rationalization, hegemonic thinking, and silencing more obvious.

The Sinkan manuscripts refer to land rental agreements concluded during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They were written in the Latinized script of the Siraya (西拉雅, Chinese Xilaya) language known as Sinkan. In Japanese, the term Sinkan referred to the language of the Siraya. In their original form, the Sinkan manuscripts were legal documents, largely land tenure contracts and mortgage bonds of the late seventeenth century. Such contracts were drawn up between Siraya people and Han Chinese settlers. Some of these contracts were bilingual, with one section in Chinese characters and one in Sinkan. The original beneficiaries of the manuscripts inhabited several fortified villages (Soulang, Sinkan, Bacaluan, Mattauw) in southern Taiwan. In the mid-nineteenth century, Sirayan descendants, who had anxiously kept the documents over the centuries, approached English missionaries with their precious sources.Footnote ⁵⁸ When Murakami first visited Taiwan to do research on Zheng Chenggong, he came across leaves of Chinese paper with Roman letters in a language unintelligible to him. After a preliminary investigation of the material featuring an East Asian vernacular in Latinized script, he came to name these leaves ‘Sinkan manuscripts (Mss.).’

Figure 6.1 Bilingual Sinkan manuscript. This is a land contract written in Chinese on the right and in the Sinkan language using the Latin alphabet on the left. It was contracted between members of an Indigenous community (identified as Madou) from present-day Tainan and Chinese settlers.

Source: https://collections.nmth.gov.tw/CollectionContent.aspx?a=132&rno=2013.039.0001 (accessed March 13, 2023), open data.

The Siraya people lived in the lowlands, spoke an Austronesian language, and are estimated to have had about 20,000 members upon first contact with the visitors from outside Taiwan.Footnote ⁵⁹ The global connections of the Siraya presumably date back to 1582, when a vessel with Portuguese and Chinese merchants and four Jesuit priests on their way from Macau to Japan shipwrecked on the shores of Taiwan.Footnote ⁶⁰ The group stayed for more than two months in a makeshift camp in a small bay in constant fear of becoming victims of Indigenous attacks before being able to return to Macau on a tiny junk.Footnote ⁶¹ While missionary accounts only narrate how the Siraya helped collect the scattered belongings of the stranded, indicating their helpfulness, other survivors describe the Indigenous people’s hunting rituals and relate how they would occasionally bring supplies to the starving camp. These early European accounts, moreover, mention frequent armed conflicts between the Indigenous villages.Footnote ⁶²

After the first encounter between the Siraya and the Portuguese, the Sirayan language became known as ‘Formosan’ in colonial speech. The semantics behind the label are a strong indication of the multilayered colonial encounter.Footnote ⁶³ In 1603, Ming military official Chen Di composed the Dongfan ji (東番記), a widely read description of the Aborigines of Taiwan. The account became known as ‘Record of Formosa’ and included a substantial section on the ‘savage’ (‘uncooked’) Siraya people.Footnote ⁶⁴ Half a century later, the Taiwan-based Dutch Protestant minister Daniel Gravius (1616–81), who taught in missionary schools from 1647 until 1651, used the term ‘Formosan’ in his linguistic classifications. He would later translate the gospel in the Sirayan language and selected the language for teaching and educational work with Indigenous children.Footnote ⁶⁵ Another Dutch Reformed Church missionary, Georg Candidius (1597–1647), a resident on the island for eight years, also based his account of the Taiwan Indigenes on the Siraya.Footnote ⁶⁶ His writings focused on the village Sinkan, the village closest to the Dutch base at Fort Zeelandia.Footnote ⁶⁷ Half a decade later, Candidius’s disparaging observations about southern plain Indigenous peoples ended up in the voluminous writings of Batavia-based priest and author François Valentijn (1666–1727), which included chapters on ‘Tayouan of Formosa.’Footnote ⁶⁸ Valentijn’s biased account of 1724 would be translated to English by the Scottish Presbyterian missionary William Campbell.Footnote ⁶⁹ Campbell had found a bilingual gospel in Dutch and Sinkan and obtained nine Sinkan manuscripts from villagers in the hilly district east of Tainan during 1884 and 1886. He would subsequently translate them on behalf of the British China Office.Footnote ⁷⁰ He also published an English translation of the Taiwan chapter in Valentijn’s biased account of 1724.Footnote ⁷¹ The Siraya’s frequent mention in foreign-language records gave them a special place in Indigenous Taiwanese historiography. In hegemonic scholarship, Sirayans became essentialized as Formosans, while the ‘Siraya discourse’ forged a stereotypical image of all Indigenes as primitive with similar characteristics (e.g., nakedness) and practices (e.g., headhunting and pursuing a gender-divided subsistence economy based on agriculture and hunting). The generic image disregarded the Indigenous populations’ ethnic pluralism and the diverse forms of socioeconomic and social systems of Indigenous communities that often spoke mutually unintelligible languages.Footnote ⁷²

Like the Sirayans, the Sinkan manuscripts have a dynamic history. In 1874, an American professor from Michigan University stumbled upon twenty-one manuscripts during a visit to Taiwan and thereupon discussed them in the China Review. The short publication for an international audience led to the British Museum’s purchase of two of the manuscripts the following year. In 1881, the earliest collection of Dutch materials on the Sirayan manuscripts from the 1660s, which had been kept in Batavia, were published in Amsterdam.Footnote ⁷³ Over the following decades, interest in the documents was limited to a few efforts made by missionaries trying to trace the history of Christianity in the seventeenth century. Still, an incomplete body of Siraya-related knowledge was available to foreign parties at the time of Murakami’s encounter with the Sinkan manuscripts.

Murakami recalled how, during his first visit to Taiwan, Campbell showed him thirty-nine Indigenous-language manuscripts written in Roman letters.Footnote ⁷⁴ Some had “Chinese text alongside the Formosan” and all were in the “possession of the natives of neighbouring villages [of Tainan].”Footnote ⁷⁵ Murakami published an overview of forty-two manuscripts in the Tokyo University–based Shigaku zasshi in July 1897.Footnote ⁷⁶ He explained how all manuscripts were written with Chinese ink on yellowish Chinese paper, more or less 40 cm in length.Footnote ⁷⁷ Murakami transformed the Sinkan Mss. into a key source for reading Indigenous pasts and contributed to the distinction of Siraya within the large and diverse group of Indigenous people. By labeling them Taiwan Shinkansha monjo (or Formosan manuscripts) when presenting to international audiences, Murakami put the private documents at the same level as historical sources stored in national archives in other parts of the world and made them commensurable and accessible.Footnote ⁷⁸ Murakami’s name became somewhat ironically linked to the Sinkan manuscripts, even though he neither discovered nor decoded them. In contemporary Taiwan, his efforts are interpreted as attempts to add to objective perceptions of past events.Footnote ⁷⁹

A few months after the publication of Murakami’s article in the Shigaku zasshi, the Taiwan Government-General recruited Murakami as an editor of a Taiwan history source collection (Taiwan rekishi hensan jimu shokutaku). This involved a second fully funded source-collecting trip to southern Taiwan, Kagoshima, and Okinawa and ultimately resulted in the integration of the Sinkan manuscripts into a government-sponsored modern historical source compilation.Footnote ⁸⁰ Murakami’s interest was first and foremost of a material nature and guided by the notion of discoverable komonjo. A strong calling to find documents of a formal and official nature to further historical knowledge triggered in Murakami an urge to keep looking for more Sinkan manuscripts. Due to his continuous search for documents from 1897 until 1933, Murakami significantly helped expand the collection. By 1933, he had gathered a total of 101 manuscripts. That quantity mattered resonates in the proud self-awareness of his achievements.Footnote ⁸¹

My reading of Murakami’s writings reveals his conviction that something new had begun. He tracked indications of change due to the Indigenous populations’ engagement with Dutch and Han Chinese settlers.Footnote ⁸² He framed contract-making as a learned early modern practice introduced by European visitors. More explicitly, in a book chapter on the history of education in Taiwan, Murakami stressed that the Siraya were the first Indigenes that had contact with the Dutch after the latter’s arrival in 1623.Footnote ⁸³ On other occasions he referred to the manuscripts as contracts made by ‘savage’ fanzi (based on the Chinese term for savage, fan-tzu), describing Siraya as a ‘dead language’ (死語, shigo) among the ‘barbarian languages’ (蕃語, bango).Footnote ⁸⁴ This categorization was informed by the colonial government’s attempt to regulate Japanese–Austronesian interpreting. In 1907, nine separate tongues (Atayal, Saisiyat, Bunun, Tsou, Tsarisen, Amis, Puyuma, Paiwan, and Yami) were classified as bango.Footnote ⁸⁵ Siraya/Sinkan was considered extinct at this point.Footnote ⁸⁶ Murakami’s interpretation of the political importance of the Sinkan manuscripts was informed by the framework of Japanese empirical imperialism. His ignorance of the content of the manuscripts is evidence for the power differentials inherent in his positivist research agenda. Without doubt, his work can help narrate the history of early modern Taiwan by injecting novel repertoires of meaning, but Murakami himself never showed an interest in analyzing the content of the manuscripts. Hence, it is essential to note that while mapping the Indigenous Siraya of Taiwan onto the Japanese intellectual landscape, neither he nor his colleagues intended to include the study of the history of the Indigenous population in imperial historiography. Instead, their work added another layer to narratives of difference, establishing a written archive that would overwrite the historical memory of the colonized people on the ground.

The Sinkan Archive

As I have noted in previous chapters, Murakami and his colleagues stressed the epistemic importance of historical concepts and practices with the help of images. This approach of combining language, visuality, and materiality inevitably created biases among the readers of academic studies. When Murakami decided to reproduce the image of a Sinkan manuscript in a publication on Dutch-Japanese gaikō in Fort Zeelandia, the images filled a gap in Taiwanese historical documents and could be freely interpreted as gaikō monjo.Footnote ⁸⁷

Table 6.1 outlines Murakami’s extensive publications in relation to the Sinkan manuscripts. While linguist Ogawa Naoyoshi (小川尚善, 1869–1947) was in charge of the translation of the documents, Murakami only drafted a brief comparative analysis of the bilingual texts.Footnote ⁸⁸ Both Murakami’s choice to use English to introduce the manuscripts to an international audience of scholars and his attempt to frame their use within foreign relations are noteworthy.Footnote ⁸⁹ His short analysis includes references to how French and Chinese records of the eighteenth century referred to Sinkan accounts, indicating the foreigners’ awareness of the Indigenous uses of the script introduced by the Dutch (‘Red Hairs’).Footnote ⁹⁰ Murakami elaborated on how it all began with a diplomatic episode in 1861, when a headman of a Taiwanese village presented a Sinkan manuscript to the British Consul of Tainan, who arrogantly dismissed the value of the document.Footnote ⁹¹ A few years later, the American consul in Amoy recognized the historic and linguistic value of the manuscripts. The mention of the diplomats involved in unearthing historical documents (according to Murakami, the ‘key to the past’) demonstrates once again how the metanarrative of foreign relations determined Murakami’s entire historical understanding.

In addition to the foreign relations factor, Murakami made an effort to stress the world-historical importance of the manuscripts. In the Japanese article entitled ‘Taiwanese Barbarian Manuscripts’ (Taiwan bango monjo) of 1930, Murakami emphasized how valuable the manuscripts were for the study of forgotten languages such as hieroglyphs. He claimed that a stone monument with both Egyptian and Greek script discovered by a Napoleon’s regional official in Rosetta became key in deciphering hieroglyphs.Footnote ⁹² Like the Rosetta Stone, the bilingual Sinkan manuscripts would equally be “key in deciphering the dead Sinkan language.”Footnote ⁹³ Murakami, who presumably saw the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum, did not mention that the trilingual (Hieroglyphic, Demotic, and Ancient Greek) artifact was part of a long effort to decipher the hieroglyphs. Rather, he framed its sudden discovery as an emblematic moment of empirical imperialism in connection with Napoleon’s southern expansion (my term). The same symbolic value for the study of remote or even untranslatable pasts was embedded in the Sinkan manuscripts. Hence, on the most abstract level, Murakami makes use of comparison to implicitly put Japanese imperial interventions (and their subsequent scientific achievements) on an equal level with those of European empires. In so doing, he indirectly denied the Taiwan Indigenes their ability to speak for themselves.

While the Sinkan manuscripts’ political importance and Murakami’s emphasis on it may well be contested, their ethnolinguistic value is not. Out of the 101 documents in Murakami’s compilation, twenty-eight are bilingual and thus written in Siraya and Chinese. In twenty-five cases the two language versions are written side by side, the other three being interlinear.Footnote ⁹⁴ For his analysis, Murakami relied on a comparative linguistic methodology: He identified native terms for words including ‘silver’ and ‘cattle,’ for measurements such as a ‘picul,’ and for the Chinese loanwords for ‘year,’ ‘month,’ and ‘interpreter.’Footnote ⁹⁵ Murakami claimed that the surviving bilingual contracts had traditionally received the closest attention from scholars. I agree that this was true for their value for comparative linguistics. However, it was also the result of the Han Chinese hegemonic discourse inherited by the Japanese colonial apparatus that overemphasized the superiority of Chinese cultural techniques such as language and script.

Murakami’s linguistic knowledge came entirely from Ogawa Naoyoshi, who was the author of several Austronesian language dictionaries and, moreover, introduced Japanese elite culture from the metropolis, such as Noh theater, to the colonial society.Footnote ⁹⁶ Relying on Ogawa’s insights, Murakami translated several of the Sinkan transcriptions to English. For further contextualization, it may be imperative to have a closer look at one of Murakami’s translations. I chose an example from the 1933 edition.Footnote ⁹⁷

Murakami’s English translation stays close to the layout of the original document. Compared to all other compilations of historical manuscripts edited by Murakami, the Sinkan manuscripts have conspicuously few annotations. This first and foremost reveals Murakami’s knowledge gaps when it comes to Indigenous–Chinese relations in Taiwan. He neither provided any explicit analysis of the content nor any background on the production of the source material. Murakami was equally silent about the manuscripts’ function as binding land tenure agreements and certainly did not formulate an argument for the socioeconomic progress of the Austronesian inhabitants. The frequent mention of payments made in silver should have led to the conclusion that the Indigenous inhabitants of Taiwan were integrated into seventeenth-century global trade. Even more so, as the account of silver payments resonates with seventeenth-century descriptions of Taiwan Indigenes, in which resources and commercial orientation held center-stage. Murakami’s silence about what these sources could say about the lives of the contracting parties and how this mattered for Taiwanese history added to his image as an impartial scholar. From a gender perspective, the explicit reference to masculine actors (‘uncles, brothers, cousins’) provides further ground for reflection. While the gendering of the actors already happened in the eighteenth-century Chinese version of the contract, the patriarchal framing stands in sharp contrast to what anthropologists found out about the equal gender relations of Austronesian societies. Murakami’s edition was thus no mirror of colonial reality but rather perpetuated the hegemonic and gender-related asymmetries of the records.

Instead of offering a critical interpretation, Murakami was committed to underscoring the world-historical significance of the manuscripts. In this process, the written documents themselves were key as they confirmed long-held Japanese views about the superiority of Chinese and European cultural practices. The simultaneous arrival of script and scripture turned certain Indigenous inhabitants of Taiwan into recipients of civilization and culture, while others were doomed to a life of resistance and subsistence in the mountains.Footnote ⁹⁹ Murakami commented on how the spread of Chinese rule resulted in a higher standard of civilization, highlighted by the use of official Chinese titles (in which Murakami also counted ‘interpreter,’ 通事, tsūji) and the Siraya’s attempts to sign contracts with their names. Interestingly, this remark is woven into an explanation of the external features and formalities of the manuscript, which served as evidence of Sirayan people developing into educated people as a result of adapting foreign techniques.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ He underlined that very point when notifying his international readership that in 1930 a historical exhibition was held at Tainan “to commemorate three centuries of cultural progress in Formosa.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ He further explained that the six exhibited newly discovered Sinkan manuscripts demonstrated this cultural progress. Yet, Murakami also argued that the “language of the Sinkan … became utterly forgotten” as a result of the close collaboration between the Sirayans and foreigners, which resulted in their complete assimilation into the Chinese population.Footnote ¹⁰² Indeed, it cannot be denied that the Sirayans became heavily Sinicized during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, albeit not entirely extinct as Japanese imperial scholars at the beginning of the twentieth century assumed. To add a note of decoloniality: In the twenty-first century the Siraya not only reclaimed their voice but also emerged as visible and audible representatives of Taiwan’s multiethnic society.

Alternative Narrations of Diplomatic Negotiations

The history of the Siraya was obviously not limited to signing land contracts, nor were the Sirayan people passive recipients of foreign techniques or modes of engagement. In 1627, a delegation of sixteen Sirayans under their headman Rika (理加 in Japanese; Dika in Dutch accounts) traveled to Japan. From the moment of the event until recently, many historians, including Murakami, debated the motivation of this journey and struggled to come to terms with the agency of the Sirayans in this episode. I think that the Sirayans played an active role and that their trip should be understood as an official mission. I argue that this episode of early modern Taiwan–Japan relations had an impact beyond the Sirayan realm and indeed Taiwan. The Sirayans, who did not know Japanese, were accompanied by two Chinese interpreters.Footnote ¹⁰³ Taking place in 1627, the trip happened several decades before the Siraya learned how to write in their language.

Based on the biased and scarce primary sources dealing with the event, we know that a delegation of sixteen Sirayans sailed on Suetsugu Heizō’s licensed shuinsen with Captain Hamada Yahyōe from Taiwan to Nagasaki. After their credentials had been inspected by the Nagasaki authorities, they were permitted to continue on to the shogun’s capital in Edo.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Ishin Sūden, the seventeenth-century author of the Ikoku nikki, only recorded an audience in Edo, during which no letter was presented, as he found it necessary to underline. While such contemporary Japanese primary accounts imply that the event had little bearing on Tokugawa foreign affairs, contemporary observers, who did not belong to any of the diplomatic parties involved, noted the geopolitical significance of the Siraya delegation in relation to the failed Dutch embassy. Japan-based Jesuits immediately informed the Spaniards in Manila in the following way: “Indians of the island of Hermosa sent ambassadors to the emperor of Xapon, asking for assistance to help them expel the Dutch from that port where they have their fortress. They were well received, and help was offered to them, and they were sent back with assurances of friendship. The Dutch themselves were arrested in Xapon and their ships detained, because they owed large sums and did not pay.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The Iberian intelligence-gathering reveals both the Spaniards’ fear of a larger Japanese intervention in Taiwan and the Japanese–Dutch diplomatic crisis of the time that culminated in the shogun’s refusal to receive the Dutch ambassador from Taiwan, Pieter Nuyts.

Murakami included the episode of the Sirayan visit to Japan in various publications. When writing about it, he chose a vocabulary that placed the Indigenous delegation in a Japan-centric diplomatic protocol that emphasized Sirayan tribute offerings in Edo.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ However, not once did he comment on the negotiation power of the actors involved, nor did he mention their achievements in organizing an overseas delegation to an unfamiliar territory.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In Murakami’s narration, the whole setup was the sole scheme of Nagasaki magistrate Suetsugu Heizō. As a heavy investor in maritime trade himself, Heizō intended to counter Dutch interference with Japanese purchases in Taiwan. Elaborating on the incident, Murakami described the island as being populated by ‘bannin’ (蕃人, ‘Barbarians’) who had not unified the land. Setting the stage this way, Murakami struggled to integrate the Indigenous delegation from Takasago into his canon of early modern foreign relations.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The lack of real interest in the Indigenous population as historical actors stood in sharp contrast to the image of proactive Japanese merchants as on a similar level to Dutch trading company merchants. This overemphasis on the Japanese merchant spirit within the foreign impact narrative of Southeast Asian history inevitably resulted in silencing others.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ To be fair, Murakami did not ignore the travelers from Takasago to Edo altogether. On one occasion, he highlighted the special honors the “locals (dojin) from the Sinkan village” received from the shogun.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Murakami also dealt with the episode in Edo in his edition of Sūden’s Ikoku nikki (Journal of Foreign Affairs). In a two-page-long annotation that was heavily based on seventeenth-century Dutch records, he introduced Rika as head of the delegation. Murakami explained how the Sirayans returned to Taiwan on Hamada’s ship in May 1628, where eleven members of the delegation got caught up in a fight with the Dutch merchants. Being accused of political offenseFootnote ¹¹¹ by the Dutch authorities in Taiwan, eleven Sirayans were punished and detained, while the other five were sent to their homes.Footnote ¹¹² Murakami concluded that the escalation was the result of the recent humiliation of the Dutch merchants in Japan.

Despite Murakami’s reluctance to see the Siraya envoys as formal diplomatic actors with their own agency, he referred to the Sinkan delegates as ‘envoys (使者)’ who as ‘natives’ were granted an audience with the shogun on the fifth day of the eleventh month of Kan’ei 4.Footnote ¹¹³ Describing the meeting with the shogun, Murakami applied the Japanese calendar, a fundamental element of the Sino-Japanese diplomatic protocol, and repeatedly mentioned that the ‘natives’ brought material offerings for the Japanese ruler.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Although Murakami repeatedly wrote how Iemitsu approached the Taiwanese envoys in a friendly manner before sending them back to Taiwan via Nagasaki, the briefness of this description suggests that he had no strong source evidence for his claim. In a different publication, he added that the small group of visitors from Taiwan were given the chance to recover from smallpox before being granted an audience with the bakufu.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Murakami’s narrative plot of a smooth diplomatic reception received momentum when he contrasted the visit of the ‘Sinkan envoys’ with the visit of a parallel Dutch delegation to Edo. Murakami placed the lavish delegation by special envoy and appointed governor general of Taiwan, Pieter Nuyts, with an entourage of 140 people and 80 horses, who traveled all the way to Edo only to be rejected, next to the modest visitors from Taiwan.Footnote ¹¹⁶

In contrast to Murakami, Adam Clulow called the entire episode a fake embassy.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Given the absence of an official letter from an Indigenous Taiwanese authority, he even casts doubt on whether the shogun was present during the audience with members of the Sirayan delegation.Footnote ¹¹⁸ According to Clulow, it was Suetsugu who dressed the Indigenes in Chinese fashion and provided them with appropriate native Taiwanese products as gifts for the shogun. He elaborated on how Suetsugu used the Sirayans in his fierce fight against the VOC. The Japanese merchant hoped to make the Taiwanese testify that contrary to Dutch claims, they did not willingly cede territorial rights to the Dutch.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Clulow argues that the Sirayans functioned for Heizō and his party as a ‘mobile counterclaim’ in securing a better position for Japanese foreign trade in Taiwan, while the Dutch understood the Sirayans as their subjects who should not have left the island without their permission.Footnote ¹²⁰ Clulow thus supports the binary between official and unofficial diplomatic relations as determined by the principles of the Confucian understanding of sovereign relations, which also informed Murakami’s understanding. This shows that the concept of official diplomatic relations guided by a formal protocol dictated by a textual, bureaucratic regime has lived on into the twenty-first century.

I think that such a rigid framework of what constitutes foreign relations is unproductive. I thus suggest viewing the Sirayans as diplomatic actors, in concurrence with Tonio Andrade, who did so already more than two decades ago. In a study on the Taiwan Plains Austronesians engagement with European colonialism, he singled out the Siraya people as strategic diplomatic actors who made regular attempts to seek alliances with the Dutch. The fact that they challenged the Dutch with a delegation to the Tokugawa court is evidence of their own agency.Footnote ¹²¹ Andrade’s thesis objects to seventeenth-century Dutch speculations about the Japanese tricking the Sirayans or even kidnapping the sixteen delegates.Footnote ¹²² Arguing that Sinkan villagers joined Suetsugu Heizō’s campaign in reaction to the VOC’s inability to defend them against their enemies (i.e., Sirayans from the village of Mattauw), Andrade stressed local Indigenous rivalry in his analysis. Despite belonging to the same ethnicity and speaking the same language, the inhabitants of the villages of Sinkan and Mattauw found themselves in endemic violent conflict. In this climate, the Indigenous communities used outsiders including the Japanese and the Dutch to further their own sociopolitical agendas.

I would like to stress that despite its limitations, the textual archive is indicative of the Sirayans’ involvement in multiple negotiation processes both in Taiwan and Japan. It provides insight into the diplomatic agency and negotiating capital of the inhabitants of the village called Sinkan. While the abovementioned accounts allow us to reflect on Sirayan agency, the question remains about how interested parties in the twenty-first century can hear Sirayan voices underneath hegemonic accounts.Footnote ¹²³ What were the expectations of these men who left their island and kin to cross the ocean to unknown lands? Nothing is known about how they felt about being dressed in a strange way and having to rehearse an unfamiliar choreography once they disembarked. It is safe to assume that they had notions of the geographical space, but not the political landscape, of what lay beyond the shores of their native island. They were conscious of the maritime realm and aware of their negotiating power over foreign visitors. Both the Sinkan manuscripts and the delegation to Japan should thus be interpreted as proof of a flexible bargaining repertoire and an interest in entertaining business relations with people from overseas. The Siraya and many other Indigenous communities (native to both the plains and the mountains) participated in trade. The Indigenous people of Taiwan maintained control over extracting deerskin, wood, and other resources from the forest. Their efforts to supply these commodities to foreign traders were frequently mentioned in the records of foreign visitors, and they retained a monopoly on the market.Footnote ¹²⁴ The abovementioned Dominican friar Jacinto Esquivel, moreover, described the Indigenous population as gifted in languages and quick learners, and he praised their social organization as well as their positive attitude toward strangers.Footnote ¹²⁵

The Trope of the Barbarian

Finally, Murakami’s frequent references to the Siraya as ‘barbarian’ (‘bannin’) requires me to reflect on the notion of savagery. His choice of words resonated with colonial records and imperial scholarship. In fact, such civilizational assessment was common in written texts across the centuries. Seventeenth-century authors complemented the narratives of commercial rivalry and diplomatic maneuvering with patronizing descriptions of the Indigenous people. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the image of savage Indigenes in need of a civilizing mission gained new momentum in the Japanese Empire. Recent scholarship has explored how this trope of savagery shaped the image of Indigenous Taiwan during Japanese rule by, among other things, evaluating imperial body politics and anthropologists’ descriptions of head-hunting practices.Footnote ¹²⁶ The image of the bellicose Indigenous people of Taiwan fits well with the justification narrative for Japanese intervention: It was the 1873 killing of 114 Ryukyans by Taiwanese Indigenes that provided a pretext for a Japanese penal expedition to punish and civilize ‘savage people’ and drove proposals to establish a Japanese colony in eastern Taiwan.Footnote ¹²⁷ The civilizing mission of the subsequent decades came to play an important part in the Japanese colonial modernizing project. One recurring theme in Japanese historiography of the first half of the twentieth century is the killings of foreigners by Indigenous Taiwanese.

During the time of Murakami’s post in Taiwan, the notion of economic and civilizational progress justified the colonial project. The exploitation of natural and human resources and systematic control of the Indigenous people replaced ad-hoc attempts at neutralizing them. What can be said about Murakami’s take on the alleged savage nature of the Taiwanese Indigenous population? While he silenced rather than openly discussed past Indigenous lifestyles, the discourse of primitiveness and savagery nevertheless dominated his accounts. His practice of implicit comparison that placed early modern maritime trade and expansion at the center of historiographical attention also affected his representations of Indigenous people of the past. Hence, Murakami’s prejudiced accounts and language choices may have been informed by his encounter with the European archives and sources.

In this regard, it is imperative to remember that Murakami’s historiographical work on Taiwan-related topics dated back to the late 1890s, the same time as he absorbed derogatory tropes such as ‘indios’ or ‘gentiles’ from European accounts. His discourse was shaped by Spanish Dominicans, who were at the forefront of evangelizing the people in the north of the island, as well as by members of the Dutch Reformed Church, who collaborated with the VOC in setting in motion a process of civilizing the “barbarians and savages.”Footnote ¹²⁸ Murakami and his colleagues in Taiwan narrated historical episodes of newly encountered Indigenous people killing foreign visitors, such as the Spanish Dominican friar Juan Cobo who allegedly sought shelter on his return journey from Japan to Manila in 1592, men belonging to the crew of Arima Harunobu in 1609, or several Dutch merchants who were murdered by Indigenous people supporting Zheng in the early 1660s.Footnote ¹²⁹ It is noteworthy that Dominican missionaries based in Taiwan in the 1630s reported positively about having established mutual trust with the Indigenous population around Tamsui (or San Salvador to the Spaniards). Indeed, such descriptions are more telling about the mindset and agendas of their authors than about the people they described. Yet, such self-praising narrations were also part of the toolkit for controlling the ‘Other.’ In an environment of power asymmetries and fragile alliances, collaboration and friendly relations with initially hostile people were important aspects of colonial success stories.

In 1930, the Association for the Commemoration of 300 Years of Taiwanese Culture commissioned eminent Japanese scholars to write essays for an anthology on the history of the island. Orientalist Shidehara Taira (1870–1953), a scholar intrigued by Western education and a founding member and first president of Taihoku Teikoku University, provided the first chapter from the perspective of Japanese national history.Footnote ¹³⁰ Murakami contributed the remaining three chapters that were on the construction of Fort Zeelandia, the Dutch contribution to Indigenous education in the 1630s, and the Sinkan manuscripts, which he once again labeled “Barbarian language sources.”Footnote ¹³¹ Yet, in contrast to Shidehara’s Orientalist style, Murakami’s essays are characterized by his typically positivist, nonspectacular tone reminiscent of Ranke’s historicism.

A second essay collection entitled Taiwan bunka shisetsu (A cultural history of Taiwan) was published by the Association for the Commemoration of 300 Years of Taiwanese Culture in 1931.Footnote ¹³² Murakami belonged again to the group of Japanese scholars who prepared material for the event. Murakami made Taiwan’s history matter to the Japanese Empire. He gave permission to reprint parts of his Taiwan-related scholarship and even provided a lecture manuscript on the primary sources for Taiwanese history to complete the chapter.Footnote ¹³³ In the commemorating events of 1930/1, Murakami explicitly linked the birth of Taiwanese culture to the arrival of a European tradition of writing and the import of social practices such as making contracts and defining clear boundaries.Footnote ¹³⁴ In addition to naming historical sites, the association prepared a related exhibition held at the Library of the Governor General.Footnote ¹³⁵ For this purpose, Murakami studied the remaining historical sites that recalled the Spanish and Dutch presence.Footnote ¹³⁶ The implicit message of this process of turning colonial sites into cultural heritage was that the Indigenous population and their material practices did not matter for Taiwanese history.Footnote ¹³⁷ The fact that Indigenous contributions featured less than prominently in the ‘historiography of the other’ underpinned colonial epistemic violence.Footnote ¹³⁸

Reading seventeenth-century accounts, one gets the impression that authors such as Esquivel were in fact more sensitive to Indigenous practices and experiences than Murakami’s generation. Ignorant of the complexities of Indigenous pasts, Japanese imperial historians framed the Taiwanese past as a European and Japanese colonial project. They paid little attention to the impact of Qing rule and largely omitted Indigenous agency from the development of the island. References to the lives and institutions of the first and permanent inhabitants of the island are scarce. This is equally true for the Siraya and the manifold ‘tribes’ inhabiting the mountainous parts of the island (Gaoshanzu in Qing terminology). Japanese authors lumped all Indigenous communities together as Takasago-zoku in the 1930s.

Concluding Remarks

Throughout this book, I have traced the creation of the written archive of foreign relations. In this last chapter, I have focused on how silencing contributed to the creation of the archive of early modern foreign relations. As a result of the hegemonic knowledge regime, power asymmetries and epistemic gaps determined what was considered worthy of the label history.Footnote ¹³⁹ Intentional and unintentional silencing were part of the imperial Japanese scholarship and its authority over what was worth knowing of Taiwan and its people.

The outside narrative that dominated in the history of early modern Taiwan was a mix of silencing and othering, which drew heavily on colonial tropes of difference and backwardness. Through a close reading of Murakami’s dissemination practices of the so-called Sinkan manuscripts, this final chapter problematized the gaikōshi narrative and deconstructed the notion of benevolent empirical imperialism even further. My close reading of Murakami’s source collections has revealed another aspect of scholarly colonialism: Such allegedly unbiased compilations colored how Indigenous Taiwanese pasts were perceived and how they would shape imperial historiography. Murakami’s methodology of selectively translating European colonial records left a major imprint on the study of early modern East Asia. Yet while his work on southern sea history unleashed a tradition of historiography that has made important attempts to locate Taiwan as a bridge between the Sinosphere and Southeast Asia, the reason that Taiwan is still frequently left out of maritime histories is an omission that can be traced back to Murakami’s engineered silencing.

Two immediate steps need to be taken to arrive at a more inclusive global history. First, admitting to limitations and the potential risk of misinterpretation means that we must acknowledge the need for listening and learning from Indigenous scholars equipped with the tools necessary to enter these complex areas of knowledge and the skillsets required to interpret Indigenous sources accordingly. This process requires regular and systematic engagement with Indigenous and local communities and both safe and transparent communication channels that allow scholars to share research results with the descendants of past actors and, more importantly, enable the latter to voice their own concerns.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ It is imperative that scholars hear out Indigenous communities and let Indigenous questions guide new research projects. With my own contribution, I hope to add nuance to the story of the role of the Indigenous archive in multilayered knowledge production. This ambition leads to the second overdue task: committing to disseminate plural stories. In global history, we must seriously strive for an equal inclusion of multiple narratives and worldviews. Only in this way will we be able to start truly nonhierarchical conversations about how to counter ignoration, bias, or appropriation and go beyond the dialectics of them-and-us that come with cultural, political, disciplinary, or institutional differences.