Eastern Taiwan Culture & Language

Eastern culture is Austronesian first, and it is the part of Taiwan where that is most evident in daily life.

Amis harvest festivals

The ilisin, held across Amis villages in July and August, runs for several days and is the central event of the year: circle dancing in strict order of age group, singing that is genuinely polyphonic, and a structure that confirms the community’s age-set system. Some are open to visitors, others are not, and the difference matters. An Amis song recorded in the 1980s was sampled without permission on an international hit and the resulting legal case became a landmark in indigenous intellectual property.

Weaving and carving

Truku and Amis backstrap weaving produces patterned cloth in red and white; Paiwan-influenced carving appears on the coast, and driftwood sculpture has become a signature of the Dulan artists.

The Tao of Orchid Island

A culture built around the flying fish, with a ceremonial calendar governed by its migration, plank-built canoes painted with eyes and geometric patterns, and underground houses built against typhoons.

Dulan

A former sugar-factory village that has become a centre for indigenous and settler artists, with music at the old factory and a slow-living ethos.

Music

The east has produced a disproportionate share of Taiwan’s best-known singers, many of them indigenous, and the tradition runs from the polyphonic village singing through to contemporary Mandarin and Amis-language pop. Difang Duana, an Amis elder from Taitung county, is the clearest example of both the reach and the risk: his recorded voice travelled the world on someone else’s record before his name did, and the settlement that followed changed how such recordings are treated.

Hot springs and Japanese traces

Ruisui and Antong keep Japanese-era bathhouses, and the immigrant villages retain shrines and street plans.

Mandarin is universal, written in traditional characters, and Taiwanese Hokkien is widely spoken.

Indigenous languages are more present here than anywhere in Taiwan. Amis has the most speakers of any Formosan language; Truku, Bunun, Puyuma, Kavalan and, on Orchid Island, Tao are all spoken. These are Austronesian languages, related to Malay, Tagalog and Maori rather than to Chinese, and several are endangered and the subject of school programmes.

English is limited outside the main hotels and the Taroko visitor centre. A translation app is worth having.

Useful Mandarin: ni hao, xie xie, duo shao qian. In Amis, nga’ay ho means hello and is very well received — it is also the name of a lot of things in Hualien, so you will see it written up.