Content area
Full Text
Examined in this essay is a shift in the circumstances of Taiwan's “Northern Mountains” as guided at the turn of the twentieth century by Japan's colonial policy and the discourse of state-sanctioned newspapers such as the Taiwan Daily News (Taiwan riri xinbao/Taiwan nichinichi shinpō 臺灣日日新報).1 Extant scholarship has considered this transition in connection to the subjugation of anti-Japanese fighters, labeled as “local bandits” (tufei 土匪) (Xu 2005; Zhuang 2008). Explored here is a deeper question that has faced many nations, including other colonial powers, addressed in connection to the “Grass Mountain” (Caoshan 草山) upland refuge that would later become Yangming Mountain National Park. Such effort is endeavored, as Robert Eskildsen advocates, to connect “microlevel analyses of life in Taiwan to macrolevel questions of East Asian and world history” (2005, p. 281).
Nations and empires of the past have claimed areas, both along and within their boundaries, that persistently resisted their rule. Identified now as “nonstate spaces,” “regions of refuge,” or “internal frontiers,” these have been lands whose climate, terrain, and ecology (as found, e.g., in high mountains or vast deserts) disrupted the systems of transportation, settlement, production, taxation, education, and policing required to sustain either integration or administration. There indigenous peoples defied and outsiders sheltered, in some instances over centuries (Beltran 1979; McMahon 2021; Scott 2009). That early modern regimes, echoed by their modern counterparts, sought a solution to the ordering of such spaces is not a coincidence. Nor, I would argue, is the fact that many such territories had by the twentieth century been reconfigured as national parks.
In considering the “bandits” and the “bandit nests” of Grass Mountain in particular, we see elements of what was, and was then promoted by colonial authorities as, a modern transformation. Local place and past were discursively linked to Chinese “barbarism,” while concurrently subjected to a Western-modeled vision of history, nature, and civilization, if in fact also profoundly contextualized by both Qing Chinese and Meiji Japanese culture. Over a decade, the area was pacified and emptied, then recast as hot springs, bucolic scenery, and Sakura orchards, opened for the pleasure of colonized and colonizer alike. The template for this change, reflective of colonial ambitions for Taiwan more broadly, was offered in the cultivation...