Old Tribe as a Happy Farm: Eco-Tourism Shares Paiwan Culture

The old village preserves the complete wisdom of Paiwan culture

Reverend Kuo Ming-hui, senior pastor of the Dawadawang Church, said that beyond being moved by the tribespeople's determination to hold on to their homeland, Associate Professor Chen Mei-hui of the Department of Forestry at National Pingtung University of Science and Technology leading students from the Community Forestry Laboratory to accompany the village in developing ecotourism was the key to Dalai Village being able to stand back up within five years after the disaster.

Dalai Village is the least populous and latest-relocated village in Sandimen Township, having moved to its current site from the old village on the river terrace across the Ailiao North Creek only about twenty-some years ago. The new and old villages on the two banks of the river valley are connected by a suspension bridge, and from the old village one can still gaze at the towering forms of South Dawu Mountain and North Dawu Mountain in the distance.

During Typhoon Morakot five years ago, the foundation of the current site of Dalai Village was scoured by the river and suffered a landslide, while the old Dalai Village on the river terrace across the river remained perfectly intact. "This makes us have no choice but to admire the wisdom of our indigenous ancestors in observing nature, understanding nature, and adapting to nature," Chen Mei-hui said.

Although the old village is inconvenient to reach and stands alone, cut off from the world, it has for that very reason preserved a complete cluster of Paiwan slate houses, whose number and quality can be called the finest in the country. Besides the houses, the streets are also built of slate and stone, full of authentic character. These clusters of slate houses and stone streets, originally buried amid overgrown weeds, became Chen Mei-hui's capital for helping Dalai Village seek its roots and develop ecotourism.

The old Dalai Village was established more than one hundred and ten years ago, when the Japanese rulers, for the convenience of administration, ordered the village to move out of the deep mountains; after the village's ancestors chose to settle on the left bank of the Ailiao North Creek, it has a history of more than a hundred years to this day. In the 1970s of the Republic of China era, the government, on the grounds of the old village's inconvenient external transportation and other factors, relocated the village once more to the current site of Dalai Village beside Provincial Highway 24.

(This article was funded by the Jianzhen Environmental Education Foundation for personnel expenses as a project sponsor, but it did not interfere at all with news topic selection and interview writing, ensuring journalistic independence.)