Who were the Basay? A look back on Spanish encounters with indigenous Formosans

Abstract: The indigenous people who once inhabited the northern coastal area of Taiwan are not well understood. Large-scale Chinese immigration to Taiwan began in the seventeenth century, and the indigenous cultures, languages, and ethnic identities were virtually erased by the time they were properly surveyed by Japanese scholars such as Ino Kanori in the late nineteenth century. While the Japanese records leave us fragmentary language data from a handful of villages in the Taipei area, very little was remembered regarding their way of life prior to sinicization. The Spanish, who briefly occupied northern Taiwan in the seventeenth century, made some notes on indigenous society and languages in the Taipei and Keelung areas. While the commentary which survives is brief, writings such as those by Fr. Jacinto Esquivel give us valuable insights into what life in northern Taiwan was like prior to sinicization. Specifically, Esquivel mentions that there was a considerable degree of linguistic diversity in the area, but most people nonetheless spoke the Basay language as a lingua franca. This is supported by what little we know of these languages—linguistic data from the Japanese era shows that, while there were multiple languages spoken in and around Taipei, some key cultural terms such as the words for ‘clothing’ were shared across linguistic boundaries. It is also important to identify who exactly the “Basay” were, as the term is only found in linguistic data collected in certain areas in the nineteenth century, and not always as an endonym. By comparing the Spanish and Japanese records, it is possible to bridge the two-hundred-year gap between them and make better sense of what the Spanish witnessed.