Hi, I'll be traveling to Taiwan next month to do some research on their ancient history (pre-14th century CE) and to produce YouTube episodes about it. Does anyone have recommendations of fiction that cover these issues?
Why Taiwan? Well, in 2022 a 6000 year-old skull that had been discovered in Xiaoma Cave in the 80s turned out to be much older than expected and from a surprising lineage.
With the exception of the Yami (Tao) people on Orchid Island, Taiwan's 15 other indigenous peoples have legends about "little Black people" who were short in stature, with dark skin, and frizzy hair who lived in remote mountain areas. Some 258 accounts of these peoples by Indigenous tribes have been recorded by researchers in the Qing Dynasty, the Japanese colonial period, and since 1945.
Yet until the discovery of this skull, these accounts had been relegated to folktale. Now we understand that these lost people were real and the remnant of an extraordinary migration called the Negritos, (a name I'm uncomfortable using for obvious reasons but we have yet to update the label besides local names) a movement of people from the East coast of Africa that populated the islands of the Indian Ocean and the Malay/Thai peninsula before terminating in the Philippines as much as 70,000 years ago. This also has implications for the peopling of Polynesia, and indicates that Taiwan was a much more important jumping-off point to islands further than east than expected.
So. I'm just an amateur historian but I'm a lifelong reader and writer of fiction. I learn best through literature. Has anyone tackled this issue at all? The mythical little dark people of Taiwan were demonized, displaced, and eventually exterminated by the surrounding communities. I'd like to learn these stories.
by futureslave