Thao

From Freepedia

The Thao (邵族) are a small group of Taiwanese aborigines, with a population of only a few hundred, who have lived near Sun Moon Lake (Lake Candidius) in central Taiwan for at least a century, and probably since the time of the Qing dynasty.

They are the smallest of the Taiwanese aborigine group in terms of population and the smallest ethnic group in Taiwan. Despite their small group size, the Thao have retained their customs, beliefs and traditional culture and language up until now, though they have been assimilated into mainstream Chinese culture as well. Most of the members of this ethnic group work today as menial workers, cooks and vendors in the tourism industry at Sun Moon Lake. The Chi-Chi earthquake of 1999 damaged or destroyed 80% of the houses of the Thao tribe and made many of them lose employment.

The Thao people have their own language, which is nearly extinct and spoken by only a few, mostly elders, of the (already small) Thao ethnic population. The language has been sinicized. Most people who speak Thao are bilingual and can speak Mandarin Chinese as well. The Thao language is classified as a Paiwanic language, a subgroup of the Formosan language family which is a subgroup of the much larger Austronesian language family. The Thao language has loanwords from the Bunun language, spoken by the Bunun ethnic group of which the Thao tribe cooperated with as well as intermarried.

On 15 August 2001, the Executive Yuan (Council) of Taiwan officially recognized the Thao tribe as the tenth ethnic group among Taiwan's indigenous peoples. The Thao have been mistakenly regarded as the ‘Tsou’ tribe (a separate and different ethnic group of aborigines) since the time of Japanese occupation. The error was caused by both a misunderstanding of the legend saying that “the ancestors of Thao were from the mountain Alishan (Mountain A Li)” and the similar pronunciation of ‘Thao’ and ‘Tsou’. Thus, the domain of the Thaos had been registered as “Tsous from the flatlands of the mountains” under the nine ethnic groups of Taiwan’s indigenous peoples.

Taiwanese aborigines