About This Issue
They are the faint stars before daybreak—hidden sparks that burn through themselves in an exchange for shared light. At times, they gather beneath heavy clouds for cover, concentrating individual brilliance, pushing back against the world’s fixed coordinates. They confront power with intellect, move toward death in order to live, and carve open an era—letting dawn break through, allowing the future to arrive.
Long framed by later generations as an episode of religious fanaticism, the Tapani (Xibaian) Incident deserves to be reexamined. As Taiwan’s final large-scale armed peasant uprising, and as a turning point after which the Governor-General’s Office imposed strict bans on civil and religious associations, the incident can be understood as the crystallization of collective will among the colonized populace—people whose ways of living had been comprehensively denied and suppressed, and who sought to break through their conditions. Beyond the event’s mystical dimensions—religious forces and charismatic leadership—the unexpected role of local hokō (neighborhood defense units) in “choosing sides” would prove decisive in shaping its outcome.
In the aftermath of the Tapani Incident, the Japanese authorities shifted their governance strategies—renovating Confucian temples and extending policies of assimilation—to soften their image and win Taiwanese support. Under this protective canopy of conciliation, Taiwanese elites learned to work within the system. Donations by Tainan gentry toward the reconstruction of the Confucian Temple and the Martial Temple, for instance, effectively cultivated bases for social movements. The stone inscriptions preserved within these temples stand today as monuments to Taiwan’s cultural awakening, recording how intellectuals and their communities sustained cultural lifelines and political rights under the surveillance apparatus of the modern state.
Looking back to the Qing period, the resistance of Taiwan’s many peoples—Han, Hakka, Indigenous groups—to centralized authoritarian power, and the complex patterns of rivalry and alliance among them, resemble storm clouds perpetually circling above imperial dreams of order. Migrants who crossed the strait during Qing-era settlement formed territorial communities or sworn brotherhoods out of pragmatic necessity. From the Japanese colonial period through the postwar years, Taiwan’s underground societies—local factions, mainlander-linked brotherhoods, and the ruling authorities—became entangled in ongoing struggles for power.
The contest over Taiwanese culture unfolded not only in the underworld, but also on stage. During the colonial period, Guangdong Yiren Yuan—known as Taiwan’s first Peking opera troupe—along with Tianma Film Company and Tianma Teahouse founded by famed benshi (film narrator) Chan Tian-ma, brought global and regional cultural currents into sync, expanding audiences’ horizons. Yet the dust storms of history left little ground to stand on; figures once full of ambition gradually vanished into silence.
Among opposition political and cultural groups during the Japanese era, the Taiwan Cultural Association was the most active and achieved the greatest impact. In contrast, the Lone Souls Alliance failed to realize its anarchist ideals. Its members—who devoted themselves to art and social work—drifted through the latter half of their lives like solitary spirits, yet nonetheless set benchmarks for future social movements. Liu Na’ou, whose dandy-like presence echoed Baudelaire, was both writer and filmmaker. The First Line Bookstore he financed was shut down under police scrutiny, and he was shot dead at the age of thirty-five under mysterious circumstances. Still, the journal Unrailed Train, which he led, continued racing along the front lines of leftist thought and modern literature.
As modern literary communities came under increasing suppression, traditional classical poetry societies experienced a revival, aided by the authorities’ desire to project an atmosphere of peace and order. When the empire’s rhetoric of “moral instruction” filtered into everyday life, some poetry societies nonetheless positioned themselves as intermediaries of public opinion, treating poetry gatherings as a vital form of social participation. Western painting societies during the Japanese period also flourished. These can be broadly divided between Taiyang, led primarily by Taiwanese painters, and organizations headed by Japanese artists such as the Taiwan Art Alliance and the Chuangyuan Art Association. Moving from opposition to exchange, within Taiwan’s distinctive warm tonal palette, histories torn apart by borders and dark hearts hidden by secrecy found, at last, the possibility of repair.
ISBN 9772518947009 07
