“Those carved circular lines and human face-like symbols, were they left by extraterrestrials or are they unique creations by artists?” asked introductory notes to an exhibition at the Kaohsiung Museum of History earlier this year. The show featured replicas and rubbings of rock carvings known as the Wanshan petroglyphs, which are located in a tribal village of the same name in the Maolin District of Kaohsiung City, southern Taiwan. “The Wanshan petroglyph groups are full of mysterious symbols,” the notes continued. “These engraved patterns were created by prehistoric people and, due to their uniqueness, the area has been designated a national historical site. We hold this exhibition so that the people of Kaohsiung can learn more about local, ancient rock art. The only large-scale petroglyph heritage site in Taiwan, the Wanshan site boasts great value in terms of ethnic cultural development and has great stories to tell.”
In the 1970s, Taiwanese saw a renewed emphasis on the history and literature of local life and people. In an increasingly liberalized society, the rebirth of interest in native roots represented a move away from a mainland Chinese perspective on historical events, the dominant version of Taiwan’s history at the time. Consequently, many Taiwanese began rethinking their traditions. Among other things, knowledge of the country’s indigenous peoples began to be explored for its own ethnic and cultural value rather than as just a backdrop for much later settlement by Han Chinese immigrants. Along with the emerging discipline of Taiwan studies, scholarship on the country’s prehistory has been contributing to that intellectual tradition.
Notably, rock engravings found in 1978 in the mountains of what is now Kaohsiung City added another entry to the world’s list of prehistoric petroglyphs. The discovery was made in April that year by Kao Yeh-jung (高業榮), who was an instructor at the college that is now southern Taiwan’s National Pingtung University of Education. Kao explored the upper reaches of the Zhuokou River in Kaohsiung guided by three members of the local Wanshan tribe of the Rukai people. One of the 14 officially recognized indigenous groups in Taiwan, the Rukai live mostly in Kaohsiung, Pingtung and neighboring Taitung County, also in southern Taiwan.
An image of a face at Kopaca’e (Photo Courtesy of Hsu Sheng-fa and Tseng Yi-jen)
The first discovered petroglyph site in Maolin District was called Kopaca’e, meaning “stone with patterns” in the Rukai language. “That place is our traditional hunting ground,” says Male, who uses only one name and is a former executive chief of the Wanshan community development association. “Now it has taken on academic value for researchers.” From Male’s community, a round trip to Kopaca’e takes about four days. Although the distance there and back is just 40 kilometers, the journey can be made only on foot and goes through difficult, rugged terrain.
Since 1978, Kao has found three more sites with several engraved rocks in the same region. Like Kopaca’e, they occupy mountainous regions at elevations from 800 to 1,500 meters. “They filled in a significant portion of Taiwan’s cultural history,” Kao says. “They also added a new aspect to archaeology in Taiwan, which had been mostly devoted to the rescue of relics at building or road construction sites on the plains, with less attention paid to mountainous areas.” Kao retired from teaching in 2011, although he still conducts research and speaks on the Wanshan petroglyphs. Among the four groups of carvings, Kopaca’e offers the richest repertoire, including patterns of concentric circles, swirls, and images of human faces and human figures over more than 80 square meters of flat rock.
In 1989, the three groups of carvings known at that time were designated by the Ministry of the Interior as “a historical site administered by the county government.” In 2008, following revisions to the Cultural Heritage Preservation Act, the 14 carved rock faces now known at four sites were upgraded to a “national historical site” by the Council of Cultural Affairs (now Ministry of Culture.) Currently, Taiwan has seven national-level prehistoric sites in addition to 36 similar sites administered by local governments.
A full-length human figure among the Wanshan rock carvings (Photo Courtesy of Hsu Sheng-fa and Tseng Yi-jen)
Out of Harm’s Way
The Kaohsiung City Government’s Bureau of Cultural Affairs is responsible for making two inspection tours of the Wanshan petroglyphs each year to report on their condition, in particular any harm due to natural disasters or human activity. “It seems that, through some kind of ancient wisdom, the carved rocks stand in a place where landslides are unlikely,” says Tseng Yi-jen (曾逸仁), an assistant professor in the Department of Architecture at National Quemoy University in outlying Kinmen County. “If the rocks stood just 100 meters away from their present location, there’d be big problems,” he says. Tseng has been a member of several teams of government officials and scholars that have visited the site for field studies or 3-D scanning.
Kao was inspired to search for the petroglyphs by an aboriginal story. He started teaching at the Pingtung school in 1969, with a number of his students hailing from neighboring Rukai and Paiwan communities. Over the years, students from the Wanshan tribe told him a local legend about a woman from a Bunun tribe in the north, who was married to a Rukai man, but eventually had to leave because she ate snake meat. Snakes are worshiped in traditional Rukai society. Before returning to her hometown, the woman was said to have left carvings on rocks that were “as soft as a rice cake.” “By 1978, I’d been researching aboriginal art patterns for 10 years and learned to appreciate artistic representations from a different cultural system,” Kao says of his motivation to search for the petroglyphs.
Through carbon-14 dating, charcoal collected during an archaeological survey at Wanshan in 2012 was found to be between 480 and 520 years old, Kao says, a time predating Dutch rule in Taiwan (1624–1662). “But we’re unsure if it was left by the people who carved the rocks,” he says. “It’s more difficult to determine the age of a petroglyph than a petrograph, which can be dated by the material used as paint.” Tseng says that a possible way of dating a rock carving is to try to determine what kind of tools were used, for example whether they were made of iron, and estimate the age of those implements.
Slate coasters by Wanshan resident and stone artist Male are decorated with a local petroglyph pattern. (Photo Courtesy of Male)
According to archaeologist Liu Yi-chang (劉益昌), the Wanshan petroglyphs are anywhere from 500 to more than 1,000 years ago. Liu is a research fellow in the Institute of History and Philology at Academia Sinica, Taiwan’s foremost research institution, and teaches in the Graduate Institute of Anthropology at National Chi Nan University in central Taiwan’s Nantou County. In 2008, he led the government inspection of the Wanshan location that resulted in its being upgraded to a national-level historical site. Liu says that it is likely the site was used for tribal rituals and ceremonies only, judging by the fact that no everyday objects have been found there. “It must have a close connection with the indigenous noble class that, rather than being rulers in the political sense, had high social status or a privileged position that entitled them to conduct rituals,” Liu says. “The symbols they used, which would have decayed elsewhere such as on wooden sculptures, were left behind in stone.”
The researcher views the Wanshan petroglyphs as a mark of human migration and interaction between ethnic groups. Members of the nobility might have moved from Taiwan’s east coast to the Wanshan region, causing tension due to the mixture of different ethnic groups, with the conflict possibly giving rise to the Rukai legend about the snake-eating woman, Liu explains. “But Bunun people are probably absent from that story,” he says. “They came to the Wanshan region at a much later time.”
Various carvings cover a flat rock surface measuring more than 80 square meters at Kopaca’e. (Photo Courtesy of Hsu Sheng-fa and Tseng Yi-jen)
Bridge to the World
Liu also rules out the possibility that the marks were left by early Han immigrants. “Han people did not usually express themselves in this way, as the carvings are more akin to those of Austronesian peoples in Southeast Asia,” Liu says. Through pictorial analyses, Kao associates the patterns found at Wanshan more broadly with those from pan-Pacific regions in Hawaii, Hong Kong, mainland China and North America. For example, “the Wanshan pattern of radiating lines above a human head has also been found in the Yellow River area in northern China,” says Kao, who has made several visits with Tseng and other scholars to rock art sites in mainland China and met with researchers there. He says that, given the similarity and common aspects of rock art in different places of the world, the Wanshan petroglyphs are neither an isolated example nor improvised expressions. “Taiwan stood like a bridge between ancient cultures in mainland China and the Pacific region,” Kao notes, “and became a significant link in their interaction.”
Kao says that the Wanshan petroglyphs should be seen as an integral part of Taiwan’s art history and taught as such. “They might be primitive, but by no means are they an inferior form of art,” he says. “They’re original and creative in a way that might not correspond to our aesthetic concepts because we have a relatively poor understanding of history and culture in Taiwan beyond the 500 years of inhabitation by Han people.”
A rubbing in the making at a Wanshan petroglyph site (Photo Courtesy of Hsu Sheng-fa and Tseng Yi-jen)
Exhibitions of the Wanshan petroglyphs have taken place at museums around the country in recent years, including the Shihsanhang Museum of Archaeology in New Taipei City, northern Taiwan and National Museum of Prehistory in Taitung City, in addition to the show earlier this year at the Kaohsiung Museum of History. The displays include copies of the carvings made through increasingly mature techniques of 3-D scanning of the original site. Kao suggests setting up a permanent exhibition center near the Wanshan site for replicas of the engraved rocks, improving road access and hiring local aboriginal residents as tour guides. “They have their myths and legends to tell,” Kao says. “It’s part of their ethnic heritage.”
Male, who returned to Wanshan in 2006 to operate a stone art studio, suggests the petroglyphs could be developed into a distinct tribal image for the community and incorporated into public art, clothing and other designs. Slate coasters he decorated with Wanshan petroglyph patterns won a prize at a 2012 competition for cultural creative products organized by the Kaohsiung City Government. “Our ethnic tradition and cultural heritage could be made more visible in modern society,” Male says, “for the benefit of our own people and for Taiwan society in general.”
Write to Pat Gao at cjkao@mofa.gov.tw