From bandit nests to Sakura orchards: colonial rule, press images, and the stating of Taiwan's Northern Mountains, 1896–1908

Abstract

Addressing a question of how states in both Asia and the world have resolved the dilemma posed by ecologically recalcitrant “nonstate spaces,” this essay examines a refuge in Taiwan's Northern Mountains. Resistance to Japanese rule from 1896, sheltered in the Grass Mountain uplands, precipitated not just colonial pacification, but a platform of “modern” (Western-modeled, but Meiji Japanese and Qing Chinese influenced) transformation. This was promoted through the educational and symbolic cultivation of Zhishan Rock, a press discourse of nature for public edification, as well as policies that strengthened policing, guided resettlement, and opened the area to recreation. Such tailored “stating” processes altered the image of the region, infused a culture of ecological veneration, and established a more sustainable system of oversight. A critical phase to Grass Mountain becoming a national park, these changes presented a template for Japanese (as subsequent) authorities as they struggled to manage Taiwan's unruly highland frontiers.

Examined in this essay is a shift in the circumstances of Taiwan's “Northern Mountains” as guided at the turn of the twentieth century by Japan's colonial policy and the discourse of state-sanctioned newspapers such as the Taiwan Daily News (Taiwan riri xinbao/Taiwan nichinichi shinpō 臺灣日日新報).¹ Extant scholarship has considered this transition in connection to the subjugation of anti-Japanese fighters, labeled as “local bandits” (tufei 土匪) (Xu 2005; Zhuang 2008). Explored here is a deeper question that has faced many nations, including other colonial powers, addressed in connection to the “Grass Mountain” (Caoshan 草山) upland refuge that would later become Yangming Mountain National Park. Such effort is endeavored, as Robert Eskildsen advocates, to connect “microlevel analyses of life in Taiwan to macrolevel questions of East Asian and world history” (2005, p. 281).

Nations and empires of the past have claimed areas, both along and within their boundaries, that persistently resisted their rule. Identified now as “nonstate spaces,” “regions of refuge,” or “internal frontiers,” these have been lands whose climate, terrain, and ecology (as found, e.g., in high mountains or vast deserts) disrupted the systems of transportation, settlement, production, taxation, education, and policing required to sustain either integration or administration. There indigenous peoples defied and outsiders sheltered, in some instances over centuries (Beltran 1979; McMahon 2021; Scott 2009). That early modern regimes, echoed by their modern counterparts, sought a solution to the ordering of such spaces is not a coincidence. Nor, I would argue, is the fact that many such territories had by the twentieth century been reconfigured as national parks.

In considering the “bandits” and the “bandit nests” of Grass Mountain in particular, we see elements of what was, and was then promoted by colonial authorities as, a modern transformation. Local place and past were discursively linked to Chinese “barbarism,” while concurrently subjected to a Western-modeled vision of history, nature, and civilization, if in fact also profoundly contextualized by both Qing Chinese and Meiji Japanese culture. Over a decade, the area was pacified and emptied, then recast as hot springs, bucolic scenery, and Sakura orchards, opened for the pleasure of colonized and colonizer alike. The template for this change, reflective of colonial ambitions for Taiwan more broadly, was offered in the cultivation of Zhishan Rock (Zhishan yan 芝山巖), but more fully expressed in a redefinition of Grass Mountain as a tamed recreational space, harnessing nature and population in the setting of a Nipponized vision of a “civilized world.” In this manner, a specific kind of nonstate space transitioned, by colonial design, into a specific kind of stated space.²

Jiang and quarantine

Grass Mountain, as it was then known, is a patch of highlands sited north of the mouth of the Danshui River, between the northwestern edge of the Taipei Basin and the Straits of Taiwan. Encompassing several volcanic peaks (such as Datun, Qixing, Shamao, and Huangzui mountains), it extends 800–1120 meters in elevation with dense forests, steep hillsides, abundant streams, scattered alpine valleys, and interspersed subterranean vents spewing sulfuric gas or water (Chen 1987; Yangming 2020). An area with millennia of indigenous habitation and hunting, it had come briefly under the influence of the Dutch and Spanish, followed by a more enduring claim by China's Qing 清Empire (1644–1911) from the seventeenth century. Initial Chinese settlement concentrated in lowland areas along the coast, notably Danshui, Jinbaoli, and Jilong, extending up the Danshui River into the Taipei Basin. Early towns and villages largely ringed Grass Mountain and neighboring hills rather than being situated in the higher reaches (Chen 1987, pp. 8–53; Chou 2015, pp. 13–88; Wen and Dai 1998, pp. 11–64).

Qing literati identified these mountains as a menacing “frontier” (jiang 疆). Best known is Yu Yonghe 郁永河, a traveler dispatched by the Qing government to Taiwan in 1697 to investigate the island's sulfur deposits (Keliher 2004, pp. 59–125; Teng 2004, pp. 266–80). His search brought him to the Taipei basin and the Danshui settlement. From there he traveled to the cliffs of Shamao Mountain, finding fumaroles and volcanic springs that had for centuries been mined by indigenes, yielding sulfur that could be traded or manufactured into gunpowder. Yu's account reads like a descent into the Heart of Darkness. Warned off from this “land of danger and death” and the “demon creatures” that inhabited it, he had journeyed past villages of tattooed natives, through blinding fog, crushing rains, cutting grasses, and dense jungle filled with venomous snakes and wild apes (Keliher 2004, pp. 60–90; Teng 2004, pp. 268–77). Yu's writing, and later descriptions like it, established an image of Taiwan as a “mud ball in the sea” and Grass Mountain as “a place where people do not venture and where they cannot endure” (Chen 1963 [1871], pp. 391–93; Keliher 2004, pp. 99, 124).

The threat of illegal mining during the 1786–1788 Lin Shuangwen Revolt precipitated a new (albeit not unprecedented) Qing policy that banned the exploitation of, or even entry into, Grass Mountain. This ushered in a century-long effort to keep local sulfur reserves off-limits, but was largely frustrated by the continuing action of “treacherous folk” (jianmin 奸民) and native peoples. As in the past, undesirables took shelter in the slopes, dug the deposits, sold to foreign traders, and made illicit gunpowder, even as local garrisons employed periodic restrictions such as mountain patrols or setting fire to the forests around the sulfur pits (Chen 1963, p. 337; Chen 1987, pp. 82–83; Shepherd 1993, pp. 106, 354, 505n123, 514n97).

The Grass Mountain region thus remained a “nonstate space” of a sort, albeit one linked to regional and international trade in sulfur, timber, and other mountain products. Nearby areas of the Danshui and Jilong rivers also continued to be settled over the nineteenth century, with some movement into, and residence within, the Datun Mountain complex, where cultivation of commercial crops such as tea was possible. The late Qing government refashioned Taiwan into a province and even introduced plans for the industrial extraction of sulfur in 1887 (Wen and Dai 1998: Ch. 4). To the late nineteenth century, however, the area remained difficult to access, generally unpopulated, associated with savagery, and only loosely patrolled by a handful of military posts ringing (or, in a few spots, within) the hills. Upland residents – be it new migrants, local merchants, or the remaining indigenous peoples – generally lingered beyond imperial reach, with the capacity to vanish at will into the region's forests and dells. Such were the circumstances still when the Japanese colonial government landed troops in northern Taiwan in 1895.

“Bandits” and “Bandit Nests”

The end of the 1894–1895 Sino-Japanese War gave Japan sovereignty over Taiwan. Occupation began in May 1895 and required much of that year to establish a colonial governor, take control of larger settlements, and recalibrate existing administrative units. This they endeavored using not only the government's vision of empire and the colonial models of Europe's “Great Powers,” but also the local tools of language and culture embedded in that space. New plans were, to a significant extent, arranged in the context of familiar “precolonial sociopolitical and economic legacies,” as would also occur in Korea (McNamara 1986, p. 56). The Taiwan population viewed initial change with concern, although the northern towns of Taipei, Jilong, and Yilan offered only limited armed resistance. Greater defiance soon arose in the hills beyond, where insurgents could conceal and seek out support from friendly local hamlets (Chen 2001, p. 223; Chou 2015, pp. 148–62; Xu 2005, pp. 108–18).

Considerable prejudice informed the initial exchange between colonial authorities and recalcitrant Taiwanese. Many locals still identified with the Qing Empire, with concomitant sentiment that the Japanese were illegitimate invaders whose rule would transmogrify the island into a “land of savages and barbarians” (Roy 2003, p. 33). The Japanese, bringing an imperial mission wrapped in ideologies of colonization and modernization, viewed the Taiwan residents with commensurate contempt, as “half-civilized” denizens of a backward and moribund civilization (Chou 2015, Ch. 9; Chen 2001, pp. 214–16). The new administration, and its supporting media, presented Taiwan's social landscape in simplified terms: as a struggle between “good folk” (liangmin 良民) and evil “bandits” (tufei) – terminology and nuance mirroring that used by the previous Qing regime (McMahon, Ch. 6). The good were those that supported colonial rule and aided the pacification forces (Chen 2001, pp. 221–22).³ The bandits were those that opposed this rule, either directly with unlawful defiance or guerilla warfare, or indirectly through the assistance of enemy designs (Xu 2005, pp. 119–20).

Japan's occupation of Taipei in June 1895 ushered in plans for urban surveying, education, and development. Progress, however, was disrupted by a rebel strike on New Year's Day 1896. Flowing down from Guanyin Mountain “like bees and ants,” anti-Japanese fighters attacked military checkpoints, burned police stations, and murdered Japanese, including six newly-arrived teachers from the language school on Zhishan Rock. When this incursion was repelled, the insurgents faded back into the hills, where they would remain active for years (Guo 2011, pp. 6–7, 43; Roy 2003, p. 35).

One important “bandit” leader rising to prominence by 1897, claiming the Grass Mountain highlands, was Jian Dashi 簡大獅 (d.1900) (Guo 2011, pp. 44, 46). This man's staunch opposition to colonial rule won recruits, supplies, and local sympathy as his band sheltered in Datun Mountain, Zhuzi Mountain, and the Lengshui Valley: the “deepest areas” utilized by outlaws (Xu 2005, pp. 118–38). From there they emerged within reach of lowland Shilin, Danshui, and Jinbaoli, attacking and then retreating to the high forests.⁴ As Xu Shijie reports, need for weapons and supplies was relentless, but food was scarce and morale deteriorated as the colonial authorities expanded pressure on regional hamlets. As initial popular goodwill waned, insurgents turned to predatory strategies of looting and extortion in order to obtain the tools needed to survive (2005, pp. 140–45).

The colonial government and media, unsurprisingly, portrayed North Mountain resistance negatively. In contrast to the “good folk,” the insurgents were reported to be violent, vicious, and greedy, with ire focused not just on Japanese authorities, but ordinary people. “Like tigers and wolves,” they looted villages, kidnapped villagers, and murdered indiscriminately, leaving locals panicked and fleeing.⁵ Among the worst was said to be Jian Dashi himself, depicted as cunning, treacherous, and “cruelly harming the good people.”⁶ Again, this mirrored governmental language defining rebellion and rebel leaders engaged by the previous Qing regime (McMahon 2021, Ch. 7). Contemporary colonial representation, however, also had modernist elements tied to the Japanese vision of Taiwan. This included commentary that the bandits, “recessed in deep mountains,” were much like the wild lands they inhabited: uncivilized “folk who act like beasts.” In December 1898, for example, the former Chief of Home Affairs, Jun Mizuno水野遵 (1851–1900), asserted that they embodied a disease grounded in unthinking adherence to ancient Chinese tradition. The cure to that illness required a response that eradicated lingering barbarism and replaced it with something new in both intellectual and material realms (Chen 2001, pp. 223, 252).

In early 1898, the new governor Kodama Gentarō 兒玉 源太郎 (1852–1906) initiated a softer plan aimed at winning hearts and minds while sharpening the divide between good supporters and diehard insurgents (Roy 2003, p. 36). Measures included redefining bandits and citizens, sterner regulations to protect the innocent, organizing communities, and stricter penalties for the recalcitrant. Significantly, this led to the pioneering use of the baojia 保甲system, drawn from Qing precedent and later deployed in colonial Manchuria (Hsiao 1960, Ch. 3; Mo 2016). Rural villages were organized into surveillance networks, serving both to link local authority to larger policing and (as occurred under the Qing) create a structured space to limit movement and inculcate imperial values (McMahon 2021, Ch. 5; Ts'ai 2006, pp. 97–98). Important as well, the colonial government offered amnesty to bandits willing to surrender, aid public works projects, and submit to observation (Botsman 2005, pp. 206–7; Chen 2001, pp. 234–40; Xu 2005, pp. 152, 160–63, 170, 225–27). The Taiwan Daily News proclaimed these policies to be a means to transform criminals into “good folk of a prosperous age.”⁷

Jian Dashi, Lin Qingxiu 林清秀, and 600 others accepted the offer of clemency.⁸ In September 1898, the “surrendered bandits” formally submitted to the governor, colonial officers, and community leaders on Zhishan Rock, as well as led processions into Taipei to “bow in thanks for this great mercy.”⁹ In fact, the surrender ceremony did not go smoothly. Jian and his followers arrived hours late, armed to the teeth. In a scene described as something more like the Japanese surrendering, Jian Dashi had eyed the officials insolently, mumbled vague promises, then grabbed the 30,000 yen offered him to help build a mountain road from Jinbaoli to Shilin (Xu 2005, 164–65). Nor was that the end. Some former insurgents, such as Lin Qingxiu, seemed sincere.¹⁰ But other “arrogant” men wandered the Shilin market, got into fights, and bullied local merchants. Fears abound that “the evil are revitalized in their intentions” and “have not necessarily been transformed into good folk.”¹¹

Jian Dashi, based in the fiercely independent Shaogengliao 燒庚療 vale, was kept under surveillance.¹² Following the submission ceremony, he retreated into the mountains where he allegedly again kidnapped locals, extorted villages, and conspired to resume the resistance (Guo 1979, pp. 7–38; Xu 2005, pp. 166–67).¹³ Colonial authorities raided Shaogengliao on 10 December 1898, although Jian slipped away to Datun Mountain. Following was several months of lingering struggle as the remaining rebels starved in a space largely hemmed in and deserted. Authorities sought Jian Dashi, learning that he had fled across the Taiwan straits to China (Xu 2005, 167–69).¹⁴ The policing action, however, effectively ended the Grass Mountain insurgency.

Colonial media presented the December raid as both a victory and the start of a new era. One editorial wrote of expelling malignant vapors, guiding errant waters, expunging filth, and cleaning out nests to argue that a firm hand was justified to “eradicate the violent and secure the good.” The final push had arrived, it asserted, and would make of the banditry “dead ash, unable to reignite.” In March 1900, Jian was arrested and returned to Taiwan for trial.¹⁵ The press offered further state-sanctioned images of the man as having “dared resist officials and the government,” “caused disturbances among the people,” and “soiled” the grace granted him by continuing to plot.¹⁶ His speedy sentencing and execution ostensibly marked the end of “evil monsters” and a time when the highland “snows had cleared and fogs dispersed.”¹⁷

The “Taiwan dream”

At this juncture, it is instructive to turn to the larger ideological context that shaped media and government discussion of “North Mountain banditry,” as well as the important choices in colonial policy that proceeded from it. The Japanese administration had, as was directly referenced in 1906 and clearly implied years prior, a vision of the “Taiwan Dream.”¹⁸ This was the plan for colonial modernization that not just encompassed the island, but also linked directly to the intended transformation of the people, place, and meaning of Grass Mountain.

The idea of Taiwan's development was informed by Meiji Japan's (1868–1912) project of national change, “opening to the universal values of civilization,” and union with the “community of nations” (Chou 2015, pp. 190–94; Gluck 1985). As Wan-yao Chou argues, “‘modernization’ was seen not as ‘Japanization,’ but ‘civilization.’” It was a process implicitly, and profoundly, based on Western models, if with a concurrent embrace of key Japanese institutions and norms, as well as bitter national debate regarding how much foreign influence was, in fact, acceptable (Chou 2015, pp. 194, 199; Leheny 2000; Liao 2006, p. 83). Modernization was generally posed as an objective evolution, constituted of distinct values and state-building steps that, if followed, could bring a nation along a shared track to the point of equality with, and basic similarity to, the powerful nations of the West.

In the context of this concept of linear progression, Taiwan – as a ward of China – was asserted to have been backwards, even barbaric. The “people [were] ferocious and treacherous,” having lived chaotically over the centuries in accord with their stubbornness and savage customs. The “disease” of banditry observed by Jun Mizuno in 1898 seemed only to confirm that the remnants of a shadowed past yet persisted (Chen 2001, p. 223). As the administration had designs to “set up Taiwan as a ‘showcase’ for Japanese colonial rule,” serving as an example of the empire's entry into the modern age, plans for the island's advancement were formulated and promoted (Chou 2015, p. 194). This entailed improved systems of governance, policing, justice, press, and political participation, expanded infrastructure such as roads, railroads, postal services, and banks, as well as a public education system better focused on inculcating the values, deportment, and scientific skills needed for a new society; and, indeed, plans to this effect were initiated almost immediately in the Taipei basin from the onset of imperial rule in 1895 (Chou 2015, pp. 190–202).

Revealing elements of the contemporary modernist perspective are offered in the article “The Taiwan Dream” (Taiwan meng hua 台灣夢話), published in the Taiwan Daily News on the tenth anniversary of the New Year's Day Incident.¹⁹ Tracing the island's past, present, and future, it begins by observing the disorder of Taiwan's old society. Chinese settlers and island indigenes had mixed indiscriminately, it states, “treacherous folk” created disturbances, and armed violence was rampant, leading to subethnic feuds and outright rebellion: “a world of barbarism.” Even when Taiwan “returned to the [Japanese] Empire,” there was resistance from those “not yet civilized,” such as Jian Dashi. Within a few years, however, this recalcitrance had been quelled and “the people of Taiwan began to enjoy the blessing of security.”²⁰

The original plan for the colony's stabilization was “to rule Taiwan using the laws of civilization.” By 1907, it is asserted, this had been done …

Nowadays, the whole island is at peace and all of its people are secure. All is ordered and all neglected tasks have been undertaken. Transportation has the convenience of automobiles. Industry has flourished in its mechanization. All matters have been improved. Operations are running to their utmost. In addition, there has been advancement along focused tracks, including efforts toward pacification and land reclamation, opening the frontier (jiang) and developing the earth…It can be said this is the transformation of the day… A civilized world. Compared to a decade ago, one cannot but feel the vast difference between the past and the present.²¹

With Japanese rule, it is suggested, there had been a definitive historical turn, carrying colonial Taiwan into a (Western-modeled, but Japanese-guided) modern era. Explaining circumstances in such terms supports Jordan Sand's observation that “Japanese imperialists were unusually preoccupied with the example of other empires, which provided models, object lessons, and justifications for their policies,” even as they may have significantly adapted (or ignored) those models in practice (Sand 2014, p. 275).

More was envisioned. Looking to the future, the editorial expounds, the island's rich land and resources should be exploited, the “rear highlands” opened, and “the native people must be civilized,” just as transportation and commerce is continually improved. Taiwan should also create large parks in its mountains, open for public recreation and linked with an ease of rail access, as had been done with Hong Kong's Taiping Mountain.²² “If this is done, then the Taiwan of later decades will know civilization and certainly progress daily.”²³

Insurgent pacification was thus only the start of the anticipated colonial development of the island. To follow would be trends of agricultural and commercial expansion, improved infrastructure, and “civilizing” of Taiwan's peoples extending into the most remote highlands – indeed even making recreational parkland of newly-cleared mountains reserves in line with, and surpassing, “White” imperial models.²⁴ As Kate McDonald indicates, similar ideas were soon advanced more broadly in the Japanese empire. To be transformed were “select portions of Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria into permanent exhibitions,” indicative of both Japan's national capability and the asserted (if, in fact, still ambiguous) position of these areas within the larger empire (2017, pp. 50–53).

Zhishan rock as colonial template

It is proposed that the circumstances reviewed to this point – the obstacle and savagery associated with the North Mountains, menace and pacification of “banditry,” and colonial vision for changing Taiwan – were not disparate but intertwined. These strands linked in imperial policy and discourse, with implications for how Grass Mountain was conceived. The following discussion will explore such interconnections in two contexts. The first involves examination of Zhishan Rock as a site of symbolic, ceremonial, and administrative activity that, in combined form, functioned as a template for colonial goals and action.

Zhishan Rock is an isolated knoll about five kilometers northward of the Taipei center, on the outskirts of Grass Mountain, siting (in Qing times) a Wenchang temple 文昌祠 and community school. When the Japanese military took Taipei, the new government converted the Wenchang temple and its school into the “Zhishan Rock Institute,” the first Japanese language center it established in Taiwan (Taipei 1990 [1919], p. 384).²⁵ By 1903, the hill had also been fixed as a recreational space, touted by the press as a sightseeing spot of natural beauty accessible to the Taipei citizenry.²⁶

Public education, particularly language education, was a cornerstone of colonial plans for both Taiwan and Korea, intended to infuse the “spiritual blood of the Japanese people” and transform colonial folk into Japanese subjects (Chou 2015, pp. 201–2; McDonald 2017, pp. 135–39; Roy 2003, p. 42). In this context, the refashioning of a Wenchang temple, a Qing institution for instilling Chinese culture, into a center of Japanese and modern civilization was likely not a coincidence. Rather, it signaled transition, within which Zhishan Rock would be positioned (but also continue) as “a sacred space for Taiwan education.”²⁷ The shift was further emphasized through the patronage of the colonial governor, publicized success of the school's alumni, who (following “the blueprint of empire”) became teachers, translators, and government servants, as well as in local commemorations.²⁸ One 1919 commentary states that “the learning of Zhishan served as a model when the nation had not yet begun to be transformed” (Taipei 1990, p. 385). “The civilization of the whole island is based upon it.”²⁹

The relevance of Zhishan Rock as a nexus of colonial ideals was publicly amplified with the murder of Institute instructors during the New Year's Day Incident (Roy 2003, pp. 35–36).³⁰ The “Six Teachers” were lauded as martyrs, not just of the school but of the empire's entire cultural enterprise, with a stele erected to them on Zhishan Rock in June 1896.³¹ In 1897, the governor paid his respects to this site, and in late January 1898, there was a ceremony attended by educational officials, Taipei gentry, and students. On that occasion, songs were sung, scriptures chanted, and local writers composed thirty poems extolling how the teachers, threatened by barbarism, “were strong and would not submit.”³² Discussing in 1916, one writer posed the story as one in which men of “the scholarship of civilization” had been menaced by “ignorant violent folk.” “Promotion of the Way,” however, had prevailed.³³

The cultivation of Zhishan Rock was, however, linked not just to a vision for all Taiwan, but also to the transmutation of Taipei's troubled highlands. One connection is seen with the bandit submission of 12 September 1898, held on this site. The imagery of the ceremony was clearly intentional. The penitents, ascending the hill, had filed past the monument to the Six Teachers, arriving at the clearing in front of the Zhishan Rock Institute. There they swore an oath of loyalty before colonial officials, giving thanks for the leniency of their punishment.³⁴ The ceremony was, in this way, connected to the symbolism of change. It took place in a center of a new civilization, with action that rectified damage done to that civilization, asserting proper authority in the course of taming primitivism. As represented, if not fully in fact, “Jian Dashi and those below him certainly repented sincerely and mended their mistaken ways.”³⁵ This signified a “transformation of grass bandits into good folk.”³⁶

A related connection, drawing on the resources of Zhishan Rock to effect upland “modernization,” was a project for road construction across Grass Mountain. The colonial regime had envisioned greater control over Taiwan's mountains by opening lands for cultivation, improving roadways, and developing local commodities – work to be done, in part, with the labor of surrendered bandits (Li 1999, pp. 45, 133–34; Xu 2005, 165). The terms of clemency for North Mountain outlaws included stipulation that they assist in building a twelve-kilometer trail from Jinbaoli (on the coast), over the highlands into the Taipei basin. It was a route that would pass near recalcitrant bandit camps at Qixing Mountain, Datun Mountain, and Shaogengliao (Guo 2011, p. 45). The commencement ceremony was held on 13 October, when the former bandits again assembled in submission at Zhishan Rock.³⁷

The second ritual followed much of the same symbolic and narrative form as the first. Colonial officials presided and the reformed insurgents made their promises, followed by speeches, banquets, and presentation of construction tools at Shilin's Mazu Temple.³⁸ Once again, Zhishan Rock, as a center of (Japan-oriented, modern) civilization, contextualized a vision of transformation, intended to refashion both recalcitrant land and the benighted who sheltered within it. “Those submissive bands will work hard to pay back their crimes,” one press piece asserts. “It will not be difficult to level dozens of li of rugged mountain road with one sweep,” opening the way for “benevolent rule” (wang dao 王道). In the end, “those taking the road will sing its praises and it will endure forever.”³⁹

The project bore fruit. In the week prior to the road opening ceremony, the former insurgents Jian Dashi, Lin Qingxiu, and Wang Yan 王研 helped the Japanese military revise maps of the upland bandit areas.⁴⁰ On 16 October 1898, these leaders and their men commenced road work under the direction of Japanese engineers.⁴¹ Even when Jian Dashi defected and was rooted out of Shaogengliao in late 1898, the labor led by Lin Qingxiu and other “good folk” continued on. That project, a contribution to the integration of Grass Mountain, was completed in 1903, with a track that ran by the foot of Zhishan Rock.⁴²

Grass Mountain reconfigured

The changes that came to Grass Mountain, however, extended beyond pacification, ceremony, and road-building. The region was more fully subject to a developmental “Taiwan Dream” project, to be “civilized,” not merely calmed, in accord with Japanese colonial ideals, emerging imperial notions of leisure, and the promotion of cultural nodes such as Zhishan Rock. The ecological, social, and historical conditions of the North Mountains necessitated that this be envisioned, then implemented, with an adjusted approach. Within a decade of the onset of Japanese rule, the region had become not just more firmly ordered, but starkly redefined in policy and public imagination, engaging an image of benign highland landscape open to the edification of Taipei's citizenry and at the service of Taiwan's colonizers. This promised the modern benefits of physical fitness, sporting, and appreciation of nature, as well as re-created ostensibly authentic aspects of Japan's “mainland.”

In the first years of pacification, imperial discussion of North Mountain reconstruction had been framed in an idiom of cleansing.⁴³ By 1899, after three years of conflict, this was enabled by significant population decline on Grass Mountain, combined with intensified patrolling, policing, and arrests, as well as the enlistment of remaining settlements to assist in work such as roadblocks and household investigations.⁴⁴ In terms of colonial discourse, the capstone was likely the execution of Jian Dashi, marking a final symbolic purging of forces of recessed barbarism. A 1907 editorial observed the results. Lauding the pristine beauty and the potential of Grass Mountain, it noted that the land had once been Jian's “bandit nest,” but had since become overgrown and forgotten. “It is a land completely neglected, abandoned by men and choked by weeds. Is this not a shame?”⁴⁵

With the new century, there emerged a changed understanding, or at least media depiction, of the region, a consequence of a firmer peace and more benign Japanese views of Taiwan, as well as, likely, expanded non-governmental management of newspapers and its response to imperial interest in leisure (Brecher 2018; Liao 2006, p. 83; McDonald 2017, pp. 56–57). Grass Mountain had never truly been forgotten. By 1902, contemporary with the assertion of Zhishan Rock as a site of natural beauty, press attention turned to the splendors of its highland environs. This included poems and essays praising the clouds, rain, frost, and snows of Datun Mountain, marked as one of the “eight vistas of Taiwan.”⁴⁶ It also included raptures over Zhuzi Lake's Sakura blossoms. Subsequent years saw a flurry of print that further expounded on the region's stunning orchids, hot springs, and scenery.⁴⁷

The transition was not just in content, but tone. Absent was the resonance of peril and degeneration so replete in accounts of Grass Mountain reaching back to the seventeenth century. Largely gone as well was the mandate of isolation and quarantine, warning folk from contact with, or action within, the uplands. Indeed, many of the early twentieth-century essays read like travel guides, reviewing flora, fauna, terrain, weather, and attractions, as well as the trails accessing them.⁴⁸ The area was now posed as a resource rather than a danger, which people were encouraged to visit and appreciate.

The colonial regime also promoted new settlement by “good” and “loyal” folk: that is, “those fully dedicated to their duties as imperial subjects,” who “sincerely submit and engage in all manner of proper labor,” and “encourage industry and devote themselves to public works.” Farmers who had fled were allowed to return and new families were directed to “reside in the empty valleys.”⁴⁹ The reported result was “a fragrant and pure atmosphere,” peace and prosperity, as well as hikers' accounts of friendly homespun locals in the hills.⁵⁰ Such cheery representation was, however, mitigated by continuing hard-edged imperial concerns, such as the spread of disease and fear of lingering insurgent sympathies.⁵¹

At roughly the same time, infrastructural projects pursued in the Taipei basin extended into the highlands. Ecological conditions continued to impede full opening, exploitation, or transformation. Regional space did, however, permit the pursuit of common developmental plans. This included expanded road building (such as one to Zhuzi Lake), promotion of gold mining, improved water management (leading in the 1920s Grass Mountain Waterworks that supplied the Taipei basin), as well as innovations in animal husbandry (a herd of 500 water buffalo near Lengshui Valley).⁵² By 1905, one could look down from Datun Mountain upon the new electrical lights shining in Taipei below, by sight connecting these highlands to modernist dreams in the process of being realized.⁵³

Grass Mountain had, in this way, been significantly reconfigured as a recreational space. Banditry having been consigned to the distant past, newspapers posed the region as an accessible site not just for hiking, but also excursions of picnicking, drinking, singing, poetry, and family fun.⁵⁴ In the winter, one might view snow on Datun Mountain, as had groups of frolicking students.⁵⁵ In the spring, there were cherry blossoms to contemplate and orchids to pick.⁵⁶ All year round, both lower and upper reaches offered hot springs. Beitou, in particular, quickly developed into a popular location catering to a Japanese clientele, as a “scenic spot, not inferior to the hot springs and scenery of [Japan's] mainland.”⁵⁷

Likely the best-known site, indicative of how a bandit nest was recast as a colonial playground, was Zhuzi Lake. This valley, positioned between Qixing and Datun mountains, had seen a pitched battle in 1898, but was subsequently cultivated with better roads, a police station, and the transplant of roughly 1000 Sakura trees from Japan (Taipei 1990, p. 591). It was touted as one of Taiwan's best places for the viewing of cherry blossoms, as well as other assorted flowers and vegetation “no different from the products of the [Japanese] mainland.”⁵⁸ With a majestic view of surrounding mountain cliffs, as well as nearby forests to explore, it promised a taste of the homeland, like “a nearby view of the scenery of Yoshino Japan in Taipei” (Taipei 1990, p. 591).

The manner that such regional recreation was presented indicates a range of influences. There is resonance with Qing literati practices of trips to sites of natural beauty to contemplate, drink, and compose poetry linking internal feeling with external beauty. So too is there a suggestion of the traditional Japanese connection between landscape and famous sites, numinous objects, or curative springs, the focus of Tokugawa (1600–1868) elite travel and popular pilgrimages (Brecher 2018, p. 36; Nute 2018, p. 1). More fully, however, the change hints at an “epistemological shift” in imperial views. This had been expressed in contemporary intellectuals' efforts to “discover landscapes as a reflection of how the subject observes it,” finding self-knowledge in dialogue with external space (Brecher 2018, p. 35); or, as one traveler to Grass Mountain put it: “from these flowers I know myself.”⁵⁹ It was also seen in a state-supported (if contested) vision of leisure that drew on Western models and encouraged tourism to Japan's colonies (Brecher 2018; Leheny 2000; McDonald 2017, pp. 50–58). Late Meiji society displayed enhanced openness to seeing rural areas as aesthetic space, suitable for sightseeing, as well as promoting the infrastructure and practices that enabled it – civilizing by “appropriating wild, inhospitable places as managed, utopian spaces” (Brecher 2018, p. 37). Discussion and plans for Grass Mountain echoed this shift, presumably being comprehensible, and even welcome, to the readers of Taiwan's newspapers.

Repurposing the region into recreational nature was, moreover, clearly intended not just for Taiwan's colonized, but also for Japanese colonizers. As seen in colonial situations worldwide, this entailed an effort to recreate the home left behind, reflected in the Nipponized hot springs, planting of Sakura orchards, and literature combining depiction of nature with poetic and individual expression. Recasting space in the nation's image. Also common to colonial circumstances, this included a contrary “orientalist” assertion of the region as primal: native wilds upon which civilized rulers might assert their distinct status and prerogative. Such is arguably seen in the formation of Japanese sports and climbing societies, as well as rifle and hunting clubs based on the British model.⁶⁰

A hunt on 27 October 1906 hints at how the uplands served as such transfigured colonial space. That day a group of forty Japanese and English hunters, with coolie guides and dogs, ascended Datun Mountain, where they flushed out and killed three boars. The quarry, it was observed, was extraordinary, “like pigs but not pigs, like mountain goats but not mountain goats,” and overall “rarely seen wild beasts.” The Englishmen who participated purportedly “were ecstatic, thinking that the natural products of Taiwan should be taken back to Hong Kong.”⁶¹ Press coverage of the event seems designed to show the success of the new order: that the Japanese had in Taiwan a rival to Hong Kong, and the Japanese were comparable to the British as colonial rulers. It concurrently cast Datun Mountain as a nation-affirming colonial zone: a site of romanticized nature contextualizing expressions of distinction and ascendence. In such representation, the region contributed to assertions of Japanese modernity by being – in fact, being further fashioned into – a plot of (secured, monitored, cultivated, and accessible) wilderness.

Such changes in the first decade of the twentieth century were only the start of the long-term “stating” of Grass Mountain, taking advantage of the area's natural beauty, volcanic activity, and proximity to the Taipei basin. The 1920s and 1930s saw the region further opened for recreation and tourism. Built were not just hiking trails and automobile-accessible roads, but also an assortment of hot spring bath houses, villas, guesthouse, and pavilions, as well as forestation projects for Datun and Qixing mountains. Particularly telling were the preparations made in 1923 for a visit from the crown prince of Japan, including the erection of pavilions and memorials, as well as planting of groves of Japanese pines. The opportunity, it seems, was embraced in order to display not just the attractiveness of the environment, but how it had become a kind of presentable civilized/Nipponized space. By the 1930s, parts of Grass Mountain had been designated public parkland, and in 1934, there were plans for the creation of a “Datun Mountain National Park,” anticipated as one among several such highland recreational areas, although these proposals were tabled with the challenges leading to World War II (Yangming 2020).

Conclusion

In this overview of the Japanese colonial response to the challenges of Taiwan's North Mountains, we see not just the pacification of insurgents in the uplands of the Taipei basin, but a physical and discursive reconfiguration of the uplands themselves. This tied to a colonial mission intent on economic and social transformation, articulated at the turn of the twentieth century as “civilizing” toward the realization of a “Taiwan Dream.” Here ambitions moved beyond neutralization of defiant populations to plans for education, socialization, and infrastructural improvement. As the contemporary refashioning of Zhishan Rock indicates, the process may have begun with institutions such as vocational schools, but soon extended to imperial symbolism, commemoration, ceremony, media representation, and contribution to policies that, among other projects, created highland roads and recreational space.

The response of the colonial administration and its press supporters was also directly focused on the Grass Mountain region. That area was an intractable patch of highlands traditionally associated with savagery and resistance to state influence. The challenge of these circumstances, and the threat posed by insurgency, led the Japanese regime to not only discursively position local people and place within its narrative of Taiwan's backwardness, but also advance tailored designs consistent with priorities of civilizing and control. Quelling “local bandits” emptied space and augmented policing while supporting an image of eradicated barbarism. What followed were efforts toward neither full quarantine nor full integration, both being unviable, but rather intensification of oversight, cultivation of regional populations, select economic development, and promotion of a discourse of Grass Mountain “nature” as beauteous, accessible, beneficial, and linked to civilized leisure.

This shift represented, accordingly, a colonial transition of imaginary space, from barbaric bandit nests to bucolic wilderness, as well as of physical space, from scattered fields and steep forests to recreational trails and flower orchards. Completion affirmed Japan's (and, by extension, Taiwan's) turn toward “modernity” while solidifying a system of rule more effective than heretofore had ever been achieved. This pocket of nonstate territory had been “stated” as something like a national park, linked not merely to a stronger system of management, but an economic base of farming and tourism, as well as a larger culture of ecological aesthetics. The approach would pose a model for Japanese (and subsequent) authorities as they grappled with Taiwan's other recalcitrant highlands.

There was much in this process that was distinctive, shaped as it was by Qing and Meiji legacies, Taiwan society, as well as the formation of imperial Japan's colonial territories. The case, however, is not unique in the context of late nineteenth and twentieth century colonial, or world, history. Rather, it might be argued, the circumstances affecting Taiwan's Grass Mountain also offer insight into a global pattern of national response to certain kinds of nonstate spaces. Seen here was a classic governmental confrontation with a rugged ecological zone, entrenched problems of supervision, and the recalcitrance of original peoples. Similar to the establishment of the United States' first national parks, this was addressed not only with powerful new technologies and managerial methods, but also a colonial ideology rooted in a romanticized focus on natural landscape for public welfare and as an expression of national greatness (Runte 2010, pp. 1–14).

The change was not, however, clearly catalyzed by “scenery for its own sake,” as has been asserted in histories of US parks (Runte 2010, p. 5). Any such suggestion obfuscates the Japanese regime's abiding concern with stability, civilization, and control. The Grass Mountain solution of pacification, followed by promotion of monitored recreational space, was arguably advanced because it enhanced natural beauty and “civilized” societal benefit; but even more fundamentally because this approach worked better as a means of ensuring the ordered, cost-effective, lasting integration of an environmentally-inhospitable region, in so doing mitigating a centuries-old dilemma. It was a lesson learned in colonial Taiwan, as indeed it has been learned in Asia and throughout the world in the modern era.