An Island of Women: The Discourse of Gender in Qing Travel Writing about Taiwan Author(s): Emma Jinhua Teng Source:

The International History Review, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Jun., 1998), pp. 353-370 Published by: The International History Review Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40108226 Accessed: 03/03/2010 00:30
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ihr. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The International History Review is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The International History Review.

http://www.jstor.org

EMMAJINHUATENG

An Islandof Women: The Discourse of Genderin Qing TravelWritingabout Taiwan

and EiGHTEENTH-century Chinese

travellers to the

island colony of Taiwan almost invariablyremarked that indigenous custom Seventeenth- gave precedence to the female sex. 'The savages value woman and undervalue man' became a commonplace of Qing ethnographic fan (savages) writing about the indigenous peoples of the island, known 2^ to the Chinese. As an inversion of the Confucian patriarchalmaxim Value man and undervalue woman', this pithy expression indexed the alterity of Taiwan to the Chinese who colonized the island in 1683. Encountering a land with female tribal heads, uxorilocal-residence marriage, and matrilineal inheritance, Chinese travellersperhaps thought that they had stumbled upon the mythical Kingdom of Women - the Chinese equivalent of Amazon. As in the Kingdom of Women, it seemed, here women took the lead, and men followed. The anomalous gender roles of the indigenous peoples thus became one of the most popular topics in Qing travelwriting about Taiwan. As writers were fascinated with the habits of 'the savage woman', women and their daily lives were a favouritesubject of illustrated ethnographic albums. Female sex roles attracted this intense interest not only because they appeared strange in and of themselves, but also because they served as a markerof the strangeness of Taiwan as a whole. The discourse of gender was central to Qing colonial representationsof Taiwan's 'savagery'. Indeed, gender is closely intertwined with ethnicity in pre-modern Chinese ethnographic discourse. As far back as the Six Dynasties (222589), the trope of gender inversion (the reversal of normative sex roles) was used to represent foreignness in both historical and literary texts. Kingdoms of Women were widely recorded'in geographical texts such as the ancient Shanhaijing {Classicof Mountains and Seas, 6c. bc-ic. ad), as well as in dynastic histories and travelaccounts. Such lands also became a favourite subject of fiction, the most famous Qing example being the nineteenth-century satiric novel Jinghua yuan (Flowers in the Mirror). The trope of gender inversion was particularlypopular in accounts of the region now known as South-East Asia, and (in the late Qing) of America
The International History Review, xx. 2: June 1998, pp. 253-504. cn issn 0707-5332 The International History Review. All InternationalRights Reserved.

354

Emmajinhua Teng

and Europe. In such writings, the discourse of gender became a means of demarcatingthe civilized from the barbarianor savage. The rigidity of sex roles in Confucian ideology meant that deviations from normative definitions of femininity and masculinity were readily interpreted as signs of barbarism. Similarly gendered tropes, such as hypermasculinization and hyperfeminization,were employed to establish the alterity of non-Chinese groups and were particularly popular in literary forms such as frontier poetry. In Qing colonial discourse, gendered, or sexualized, tropes are often employed not only as a means of signifying the 'otherness' of the colonial subject, but also as a form of denigration. Thus, gender functions much as it does in the European discourses of discovery and colonialism; to express relations of domination and subordination. A critical difference, however, is that Qing colonial discourse does not represent the colonized land itself as metaphorically feminine, or as virgin.1 Exploration and conquest, in turn, are not figured as sexualized acts of penetrationand possession. Qing travel writers did, however, represent colonial expansion as a masculine quest for sexual experience, a trope which post-colonial scholars have identified as a major theme of Western imperialist writings.2 Colonial relations, too, are sexualized in travel texts; colonial power and ethnic prestige being symbolized by Chinese sexual licence with indigenous women. The Qing colonial discourse of gender therefore overlaps with European colonial discourses, though it is not identical. The gender dynamics found in travel literatureabout Taiwan reveal that insights from Western colonial theory can provide useful tools of analysis, but also that the gendered tropes of this particularliteratureare derived from within the Chinese literarytradition. The use of gender as a metaphor for conceptualizing inequality, or as a means of signifying power relationships, has been extensively theorized by anthropologists and post-colonial and feminist scholars.3 Gender appears to be a particularly apt metaphor for colonial discourse because it expresses both differenceand hierarchy;and the link between gender and the
1 See Louis Montrose, 'The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery', inNew WorldEncounters, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Berkeley, 1993), pp. 177-217;Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill, 1975); and Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest(New York, 1995), pp. 21-74. 2 See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1979), p. 190; Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London, 1992); and Susan Morgan, Place Matters: Gendered Geography in Victorian Women'sTravel Booksabout South-East Asia (New Brunswick, NJ, 1996), pp. 1-30. 3 See Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988); Marilyn Strathern, The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia (Berkeley, 1988); and Roy Grinker, 'Images of Denigration: Structuring Inequality between Foragers and Farmers in the Ituri Forest, Zaire', American Ethnologist, xvii (1990), 111-30.

Travel Writing about Taiwan

355

construction of the 'other' has been widely noted since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism. Said argues that, in European representations of the 'Orient' from the late eighteenth century onwards, the Oriental subject is gendered feminine (weak, subordinate,irrational,lascivious), in contrast to the normative Western self which is gendered masculine (strong, dominant, rational, continent).1 As such, there is a structuralequivalence between male and female, majorand minor. In Chinese studies, anthropologists such as Dru Gladney and Stevan Harrell find parallels with Western 'Orientalism' in Chinese representations of non-Han 'minority' peoples as a feminized and subordinated Other recent scholarship, such as the work of 'other' to the Han majority.2 Ann Stoler, Anne McClintock, and Susan Morgan challenges the oversimplification of Said's paradigm and calls attention to colonial women's differentialexperiences of gender politics.3Much of the recent work examines the connections between race, gender, class, and sexuality. In elaborating those between gender and ethnicity, Sau-ling Wong points to the 'ethnicizing of gender', the reverse of Orientalism'sgendering of ethnicity, which she describes as the 'attributionof allegedly naturalethnic essences such as "Chineseness" or "Americanness"to "masculine"and "feminine" behavior'.4In the case of Qing travel literature, one sees a similar attribution of 'civility'and 'barbarism'to 'masculine'and 'feminine'behaviour. This essay examines the representation of the 'savage woman' in Qing travel accounts of Taiwan, and the links between gender and ethnicity in Qing colonial discourse. It argues that gender inversion is fundamentalto the construction of the ethnic difference of the Taiwanese indigenes. One aspect of the inversion, the feminization of indigenous men, may be regardedas a means of representingthe subordinate status of the colonized subject. However, it is less the feminization of men than the anomalous roles of women that preoccupy Chinese travel writers, a fascination stemming largely from their desire to imagine 'another world'. Taiwan frequently served in the travel literature as a projection of this desire, whether as a timeless world, a world of marvels, or a Kingdom of Women. The savage woman not only symbolized difference to Chinese
1 Said, Orientalism, 203-9. pp. Identities journal 2 Dru Gladney,'Representing in , Nationality China:RehgunngMajority/Minority on Encounters China's Colonial 'Introduction', ofAsianStudies,liii (1994),92-123and StevanHarrell, EthnicFrontiers (Seattle,1995),pp. 3-36. in 3 AnnStoler,'Making The Respectable: Politicsof Raceand SexualMorality 20th-century Empire xvi ColonialCultures',American ImperialLeather,and Ethnologist, (1989), 634-60; McClintock, 4 Sau-lingWong, 'Ethnicizing ot Gender:An Exploration bexuahtyas bign in Chinese Immigrant ed. in 1992), Literature', ReadingtheLiteratures AsianAmerica, S. LimandA. Ling(Philadelphia, of p. 113.
Morgan, Place Matters.

356

Emmajinhua Teng

observers, she also became a pivotal figure in the representationof colonial relationships: colonial dominance was represented in sexual relations with indigenous women, typically portrayed as hypersexualized, more erotic and promiscuous than Chinese women. Intermarriagebetween Han Chinese settlers and indigenous Taiwanese women became on the one hand a source of contention, with women serving as a contested terrain for the colonizer and colonized and, on the other, a vehicle for transcultural exchange in a two-way process of acculturation. At other times, the discourse of gender in the travel literature represented Taiwan itself less than Qing society, in particularthe changing roles of women. The idealization of the foreign woman became a common trope for a self-reflexivecritique of Chinese society; the foreign woman served as a projection for Confucian ideals perceived to be losing their hold in China. The figure of the savage woman, then, could serve a variety of rhetoricalpurposes, often in opposition to one another, to suit the needs of the writer. * * * Qing travel accounts of Taiwan were written by colonial officials, military men, and others who travelled on behalf of the Qing colonial enterprise. Few Chinese eyewitness accounts of the island exist from the period prior to the Qing, when Taiwan was a Dutch colony and later an outpost of the Ming loyalist rebel, Koxinga. The only first-handaccount of Taiwan from the Ming is Chen Di's Dongfanji (Record of the Eastern Savages, 1603), which was regarded as highly authoritative and widely quoted by Qing writers. It established many of the majortropes used later in travelwriting. The number of accounts written by Chinese increased dramaticallyafter the Qing colonization of Taiwan in 1683. They were written in a variety of genres - the travel diary, the travel essay, the topically organized account, or the 'randomjottings' (biji) style popular under the Qing - and most contained poetry as well as prose. Travel accounts, an importantsource of information for the colonial administration, were widely read by officials serving in Taiwan and were also used as sources in the compilation of geographicalworks, histories, and local gazetteers,and were read for entertainment by audiences in the metropolis seeking 'vicarious travel'. The most famous were anthologized in the literary collectanea so popular in nineteenth-centuryChina. The best-known Qing accounts include Lin Qianguang's Taiwan jilue (Brief Recordof Taiwan, c. 1685), the first eyewitness account of Taiwan written afterthe Qing conquest; Yu Yonghe's Pihaijiyou (Small Sea Travelogue, 1697), a diary of a sulphur expedition; Huang Shujing's Taihai shicha lu (Recordof a Tour of Duty in the Taiwan Strait, 1736), a record of

Travel Writing about Taiwan

357

an official's tour of inspection; and Wu Ziguang's Taiwan jishi (Taiwan Memoranda,c. 1875), a series of essays written by a Chinese settler. These accounts, among others, are emphasized here because of their representative status and their use by later writers. Owing to the high degree of intertextualityin accounts of Taiwan, the conclusions drawn here may be used to generalizeabout Qing representationsof the island. Certain practices emerged as indices of gender inversion in the literature: uxorilocal marriage, 'preference' for female children, matrilineal inheritance, sexual assertiveness of women, sexual division of labour, absence of post-partum seclusion, and the fact that women were not sequestered. Although the existence of female tribal heads among certain groups represented an obvious inversion of the Chinese norm of male rulership, the domestic rather than the public roles of indigenous women became the focus of attention. Chinese writers theorized that the savage woman's position in the family accounted for her social dominance. Aside from occasional references to 'female local chiefs', these writers ignored women's roles in indigenous political or religious life. According to modern anthropologists, the indigenous groups of Taiwan employed a variety of marriageand inheritance systems prior to Chinese colonization. The Siraya of the south-west region, the core of Dutch and Chinese settlement, practised uxorilocal marriageand matrilinealinheritance, while the rest of the groups on the west coast practised virilocal- and ambilocal-residence marriage,and a variety of inheritance patterns (patrilineal, ambilineal,and bilateral).1Groups on the east coast practised matrilineal inheritance. The majorityof Qing writers, however, tended to lump the various indigenous groups together as 'savages', generally characterizing them as gynocentrics who 'valued woman and undervalued man'. The generalization may have arisen from the greater Chinese familiarity with the Siraya, from Chinese sensationalism, or from the Qing habit of establishing the identity of a group by fixing on its unique or strange features. My task here, however, is not to establish the accuracy of Qing descriptions of indigenous Taiwanese society, but rather to analyse their representationalstrategies. Chinese travel writers may have been predisposed to view Taiwan as a gynocentric society in part owing to their familiaritywith tales of Kingdoms of Women (much as Sir Walter Ralegh was predisposed to find the Amazons in South America). Various Chinese geographical works, for example the Song author Zhao Rugua's Zhufanzhi (Recordsof Various Barbarians), locate Kingdoms of Women near Taiwan, Japan, and the
1 See John Shepherd, Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier, 1600-1800 (Stanford, 1993), P- 44.

358

Emmajinhua Teng

Malay archipelago. Such legends must have coloured Chinese travellers' perceptions of indigenous gender roles. Qing representations of the Taiwanese indigenes were also influenced by a tradition of regional stereotyping in both literary and historical materials. By the Tang dynasty, a tradition of feminizing the southern borderlands and masculinizing the northern frontiers had been firmly established in the Chinese literarytradition.The south was associated with sensuality, languor, literary refinement, femininity, and female promiscuity; the north with barrenness, ruggedness, martial valour, and machismo. This divide between hyperfeminized southerners (peoples such as the Miao and the Dai) on the one hand, and hypermasculinized northerners (peoples such as the Mongols and Jurchens) on the other, means that the simple structuralequation male/female paralleling major/minoris untenable. Rather, the Han Chinese configured the 'other' in terms of polarized opposites of sexual excess, centring the Han self as the norm. Newly incorporatedinto the Chinese empire in the seventeenth century, Taiwan seemed to fit neatly into existing images of matriarchal'southern barbarians';in fact, writers often borrowed tropes from earlieraccounts of the Miao, the Lao, and even the people of Thailand to describe the indigenous peoples of Taiwan. The hypersexualization of Taiwan's indigenous women also fits this pattern. The gendering of the south as feminine thus provides an important context within which to read Qing representationsof the 'savagewoman' of Taiwan. * * * Descriptions of uxorilocal marriage and matrilineal descent among the indigenes of Taiwan commonly invoked the notion of inversion. The earliest Chinese account of indigenous marriagecustoms can be found in

ChenDi's Dongfanji:

The girl hears [the suitor's music] and admits him to stay the night. Before daylight he straightawaydeparts, without seeing the girl's parents. From this time on, he must come in the dark and leave with the dawn when the stars are out, for years and months without any change. When a child is born, she for the first time goes to the man's home and [brings him back to her home] to be welcomed as the sonin-law, as [the Chinese] welcome a new bride, and the son-in-law for the first time sees the girl's parents. He then lives in her home and supports her parents for the rest of their lives, while his own parents can no longer regard him as their son. Therefore they are much happier at the birth of a girl than of a boy, in view of the fact that a girl will continue the family line, while a boy is not sufficient to establish the family succession.1
1 Translated in Laurence Thompson, 'The Earliest Chinese Eyewitness Accounts of the Formosan

Travel Writing about Taiwan

359

This passage clearly represents an interpretationof indigenous customs through the lens of Chinese gender ideology. Chen employs the discourse of inversion by likening the savage bridegroom to the Chinese bride. The phrase 4tobe welcomed as the son-in-law, as [the Chinese] welcome a new bride' sets up the equation: savage man equals Chinese woman. At the end of the description, Chen offers what would become one of the quintessential formulations of gender inversion - an index of the difference between Chinese and savage - that they are happier at the birth of a girl than of a boy. Rather than simply marvellingat inversion in savage society, therefore, Chen points to the reversal of values. As savage women assume the function of continuing the family succession (an all-importantrole in Chinese culture), daughters, and not sons, become the privileged progeny. Moreover, in identifying the inheritance system as the root of the strangegender hierarchy,Chen representsgender inversion as a product of social convention and economic relations. Such an explanation serves at once to distance the savages (they are matrilineal and we are patrilineal) and to normalizethem (they, like us, value the sex which assures the succession of the familyline). Following Chen, discussion of maritalcustoms and their effects on the gender hierarchybecame a standardelement of descriptions of indigenous customs. Yu Yonghe, whose Pihai jiyou is perhaps the most famous Chinese travelogueof Taiwan, gives this account of native courtship: when the girls are grown, theirparents In marriage they have no go-betweens; in havethemlive separately a hut. The youthswho wish to find a mateall come along,playingtheirnose flutesand mouthorgans.When a youthgets the girl to he with her. Afterthey fornicate, with him, he goes in and fornicates harmonize home of his own accord.Aftera long time, the girl picks the one she loves goes is and 'holds hands'with him. The 'hand-holding' to makepublic the private and The commitment. nextday,the girltellsherfamily, invitesthe 'hand-holding' youthto cometo herhome.He knocksout the two top bicuspidsto giveto the girl and she also knocksout two teethto give to the boy. They set a dateto go to the and wife'shouse to marry, for the restof his life he lives at the wife'sresidence. . . afterone or twogenerations are The parents not ableto keeptheirson. Therefore, names.1 haveno family the does not knowhis ancestors; savages thegrandchild Highlighting female agency in mate-selection, Yu paints a vivid picture here of the 'sexual assertiveness'of the savagewoman, an image that would have shocked Chinese readers for whom arrangedmarriagewas the norm. For Yu, gender inversion signalled the disruption of the entire kinship
Aborigines', Monumenta Serica, xxiii (1964), 173-4. 1 Yu Yonghe, Pihai jiyou (Taipei, 1959), p. 35.

360

Emma Jinhua Teng

system, leading the savages to forget their own ancestors. The notion that the indigenes did not recognize their ancestors was another indication of their savagery, of their animal-like existence. For Chinese, ancestorworship was one of the cornerstones of civilization. Other writers decry the 'subordination'of the savage male by uxorilocal marriage practices. The nineteenth-century writer Deng Chuan'an, for example, writes: 'according to savage custom, the men who marry uxorilocally arejust like women who marryvirilocally [in China]. Obedient and dutiful, they do not dare to take their own initiative; they are debased to such a degree.n To such writers, uxorilocal marriagewas not simply different and strange, but contemptible. The equivalence drawn in Chinese eyes between the savage groom and the Chinese bride provided an impetus for the notion of inversion, of a 'mirror world' that reversed the Confucian norm. Although the feminization of the indigenous male in Chinese accounts may have been derived from the structuralsimilaritybetween his roles and the role of the Chinese wife, the feminizationlater implied shared features between the savage male and the civilized female sex. Chinese observers commented that the hairless savage male resembled a Chinese woman with her tweezed brow. Others remarked that the beardless savage male was perhaps a naturaleunuch. In either case, the lack of facialhair signified his minor status. * * * The inversion of gender was also represented in the travel literature by descriptions of the sexual division of labour. Numerous Chinese observers expressed surprise that the indigenous women, and not the men, did the agriculturallabour, a reversal of sex roles interpreted by the Chinese as female 'industriousness' and male 'idleness'. The indigenous male occupation of hunting was not recognized by the Chinese as 'productive'. Chen remarkson the superior work capacity of native women in his Record:'the women are sturdy and active; they work constantly while the men are usually idle.'2 Lin Qianguang paints an even more extreme picture of male sloth: 'All of the tilling is done by the wife; the husband on the other hand stays at home waiting to be fed.'3 The image of the man's childlike dependence on his wife's labour recurs frequently in the literature, providing yet another explanation in Chinese eyes for female dominance in savage society. The traditionalsexual division of labour proved an obstacle for both the
1 DengChuan'an, Huichao(Taipei,1958), 10. Lice p. 2 Thompson,'Earliest Accounts', 175. p. 3 Ibid.,p. 181.

Travel Writing about Taiwan

361

Dutch and the Chinese colonizers of Taiwan in their efforts to convert the island into a commercial agriculturaleconomy. In a study of statecrafton the Taiwan frontier,John Shepherd describes the difficulties the Dutch and Chinese faced in convincing indigenous men to give up hunting and take up sedentary agricultureas a primary occupation: 'for them, farming had two majordrawbacks:first, according to the traditionalsexual division of labor, it was women's work; second, it was labor-intensive drudgery.'1 Both the Dutch and the Chinese, therefore,were forced to import Chinese labour in order to sustain commercialagriculturaldevelopment. By the nineteenth century, the dominance of women had become so much a part of the popular imagery of Taiwan that some writers even attributedthe stereotype of the supremely capable wife to the Han Chinese women on the island. * * * The depiction of Taiwan as a matriarchal land can be regarded as the continuation of a long tradition of southern exoticism in classical Chinese literature. The ancient poetic tradition of the Chuci (Songs of the South) established an association between the south, female goddesses, and eroticism that was replayed throughout Chinese literaryhistory. The legend of Xi Shi, a beauty from the southern region of Yue who was used to seduce the king of the rival kingdom of Wu, furtherpromoted these associations. The stereotype of the sensuous south was perhaps most firmly established by the poetic tradition of the Six Dynasties, when iotus-picking songs' (cailian qu) portrayingyoung girls of the southernJiangnanregion came to representthe sensual image of the south and its waterways. Historical and pseudo-historical accounts of non-Han peoples of the southern regions were another source of sexualized stereotypes. Historical works such as the Hanshu (History of the Han), for example, commonly note that in southern regions women customarilybathed naked in streams. The Dai became particularlyfamous for the custom, an image still popular among visitors to the People's Republic today.2 Female dominance, or gender inversion, was another favourite motif of accounts of 'southern barbarians',both in histories and fictional tales. An entry on 'The Lao Women' from the Taiping guangji (AccountsWidely Gatheredin the Taiping Era), for example, in its entirety reads: In the south thereare Lao women.They give birthto childrenand then get up. Their husbandslie in bed. Their diets areexactlythe sameas a nursingmother.
1 Shepherd, Statecraft, p. 366. 2 See Charles McKann, 'The Naxi and the Nationalities Question', in Cultural Encounters on China's Ethnic Frontiers, ed. S. Harrell (Seattle, 1995), p. 45-

362

Emmajinhua Teng

womenin the least.Whenthe womengo into They do not protecttheirpregnant labour,theygive birthon the spot. They do not sufferin the least.They prepare to food andgather firewood usual.It is alsosaidthataccording Yuecustom,if a as wife gives birthto a child, afterthreedays she bathesin the stream.When she returns,she prepares gruelto feed her husband.The husbandbundlesthe infant their in the bedclothesand sits up in bed. They callhim the 'parturient husband', is inversion to sucha degree.1 Ming and Qing gazetteers follow a similar pattern, emphasizing the female dominance and the sexual assertiveness of, for example, Miao women. In a study of Ming and Qing representationsof the Miao, Norma Diamond concludes that 'the Miao album pictures and gazetteertexts highlight wherever possible the occurrence of reversal of proper gender roles: among the Nong Miao men are expected to care for infants, among the BafanMiao women do most of the agriculturalwork, and in several groups men and women join together in farming, raiding the fields of others (presumablyHan settlers) or hunting.'2 Travel accounts of foreign lands to the south of China employed a similar trope. Ma Huan's account of the naval expeditions of the eunuch admiral Zheng He, for example, notes the anomalous gender roles in several South-East Asian and South Asian countries. He writes of Thailand, for instance: 'It is their custom that all affairs are managed by their wives. From the king to the common people, whenever there are matters which require thought and deliberation - punishments light and heavy, trading transactionsgreat and small - they all follow the decisions of their wives, [for] the mental capacity of the wives certainly exceeds that of the men.'3 Ma Huan characterizes Thai women as 'promiscuous', a common stereotype of South-East Asian women in Chinese travel accounts from at least the Yuan dynasty onwards. This feminization of the south was contrasted with the masculinization of the northern frontiersin both literaryand historical sources. These gendered stereotypes were influenced by several factors: the existence of matrilinealcustoms among southern 'barbarians';the association of northern 'barbarians' with warfare;theories of the environmentaldeterminismof human character (the environment of the north being rugged and that of the south being wet and fertile); and the relative strength of the expansionist northern dynasties vis-a-vis the over-refinedand declining southern dynasties during the Six Dynasties era. These stereotypes were further
1 Taiping guangji (Taipei, 1987), p. 3,629. 2 Norma Diamond, 'Defining the Miao: Ming, Qing, and Contemporary Views', in Cultural Encounters, ed. Harrell, p. 103. 3 Ma Huan, Yingya shenglan, trans. J. V. G. Mills, The Overall Survey of the Ocean's Shores (Cambridge, 1970), p. 104.

Travel Writing about Taiwan

363

developed in Tang literary treatments of the northern frontiers and the southern borderlands.The emasculationof the southern male was in part a result of the general feminization of the region. The feminization of southern peoples and the masculinization of northern peoples served to centre the ideal Han self of the 'centralplains' as a normativeidentity. The feminizationof the indigenes of Taiwan should thus be seen as part of a pattern not only of 'feminizing the Other' but also of regional stereotyping within the Chinese literary tradition. In describing the Taiwan indigenes as matriarchal,travellerswere likely to have been influenced by their familiaritywith images of female dominance in the south. Indeed, travel writers frequently compared the 'savages' of Taiwan with the southern Man 'barbarians'or to 'the people of Wu and Yue' in southern China. This is not surprising, given the fact that the Chinese ethnonyms for southern peoples, such as 'Miao', 'Lao', and 'Man', although perhaps originallyreferringto specific ethnic groups, came to be commonly used to referto 'southern barbarians'in general. Thus, characteristicsattributedto one group could be transposed to other groups to create a general stereotype. A number of Qing writers drew parallelsbetween the customs of the savagesfrom Taiwan and other South-EastAsian peoples. The image of Taiwan as part of the sensual southland was promoted by descriptions of female bathers, sexual habits, and feminine beauty. Yu, for example, frequently includes notes in his travelogue about the physical appearance (and sexual attractiveness) of the women he meets. His diary entry for one day includes the note, 'of the savage women that we saw, many were fair-skinned and beautiful.'1On another day he notes: 'there were also three young girls working with mortar and pestle. One of them was ratherattractive.They appeared in front of outsiders naked, but their composure was dignified.'2 Although there is frequent reference in the literature to both male and female nudity (nakedness in general being a sign of improprietyand thus culturalinferiority), only the savage woman's lack of shame is commented upon. One of the chief markers of proper femininity in Chinese culture being the shrouding of the body, the savage woman's lack of modesty regarding her body must have appeared to Chinese observers as particularlystrangeand offensive. Partly for this reason, travel writers expressed great interest in the bathing habits of indigene women, noting in particularthe frequency and openness of the practice. Censor Lui-shi-qi, a Manchu official who travelled to Taiwan in the mid-eighteenth century, devoted an entry in his account to 'Bathing in the Stream'. His description eroticizes the act of
1 Yu,Pihaijiyou,p. 19.

2 Ibid., pp. 18-19.

364

Emmajinhua Teng

bathing by linking it with play, flirtation, and voyeurism. The objectification of women is particularlyapparentin Qing ethnographic illustrations in which they are often depicted in festivaldress or bare-breasted. The image of Taiwan as a land of exotic sensuality was most influenced by descriptions of native courtship and marriagepractices. A favourite in the literaturewas an anecdote about youths winning the favours of young girls based on their ability to harmonizewith them on the mouth organ: 'to harmonize' being a pun on 'to couple'. For a Chinese audience, such stories, reminiscent of poetic motifs in the ancient Shijing, conjured up images of a primitive, idyllic past. At the same time, the notion that the savages lacked an understanding of sexual propriety signalled their uncivilized status. Chinese observers also took the lack of both segregation of the sexes and proscriptions against physical contact as marks of sexual impropriety among the savages.1 However, travel writers who disparaged the savage practice of men and women sitting together 'mixed' or 'without order', often themselves indulged in voyeurism and other behaviour taboo in their own society. Lui-shi-qi, for example, made this note under the heading of 'Suckling the Child': 'the savages have no taboos against contact between male and female. When the savage woman nurses her child, those who see will play and tease from the side. She will be very pleased, thinking that people adore her child. Even if one touches her breast she will not prevent it.'2 Contrasting the savage woman's body with the Chinese female body, which ideally remained out of sight, beyond touch, added titillation to ethnographic description. It bolstered the image of Taiwan as a fantasy island where Chinese men had free licence with the indigenous women. * * * The image of Chinese men in unrestricted sexual intercourse with savage women was used in travel writing to buttress the self-image of the colonizer. Inter-ethnic marriage or sexual relationships served in numerous narrativesas a means of representing the ethnic hierarchy of the colonial society, the unequal status of Chinese and indigene. Yu, for example, observes of the Chinese men on the island, that 'they take the barbarian women as their wives and concubines. Whateveris demanded of them they must comply with; if they make a mistake they must take a flogging. And yet the barbariansdo not hate them greatly.'3Yu attributes the availability of indigenous women to ethnic privilege:
1 The Chinese taboo against physical contact between the sexes was expressed in the Confucian precept 'in giving and receiving men and women do not touch [hands].' 2 Liu-shi-qi, Fanshe caifeng tukao (Taipei, 1961), p. 7. 3 Thompson, 'Earliest Accounts', p. 196.

Travel Writing about Taiwan

365

with them[thewomen],theydo not get Shouldthe [Chinese]gueststakeliberties withhis wife,is verypleased, angry.A husband,seeinga guestbecomingintimate saying that his wife is reallycharming,and that thereforeChinese like her ... with [a savage's However,shouldone of theirown peoplefornicate wife], thenhe and searchout the adulterer, shoothimdead.Buthe will takehis bow andarrows, his willnot hold it against wife.1 For a Qing audience, such stories portray the indigenes as subordinate to the Chinese, supplying women and labour without animosity, and confirm its own superior status. The story is, of course, a reflection of Chinese desires rather than conditions in Taiwan: the passage had been lifted by Yu from an account of Thailand in the Mingshi. In such narratives, the savagewoman is reduced to an object in a contest for power. Other travel writers who contradict Yu's depiction of the 'willing natives' record conflicts between Han settlers and the local populace over sexual advances from Chinese. Indeed, as rates of intermarriageincreased under the Qing, owing to an unfavourable sex ratio among the Han settlers, the colonial administrationbegan to fear ethnic conflict:2aftera revolt in Taiwan, it prohibited intermarriagein 1737. In this case, the state chose to protect the interests of the indigenes against those of the Han settlers. There were no social prohibitions against intermarriage.According to Shepherd, 'the Chinese perceived no racialdivide between Han and aborigines that would impede the ability of aborigines to acquire Chinese status characteristicsor deny legitimacy to mixed marriagesand their offspring.'3 In fact, intermarriage was supported by some officials who advocated assimilation, even after the initial prohibition of 1737. One nineteenthcentury official explained: 'with marriageand social intercourse, there will be no separationbetween the savages and the people. If the officials do not segregate them as a different race (zhong), then after some time they will naturallyassimilate(hua).MAs wives, indigenous women were regarded as If, key vehicles for transculturation.5 as Melissa Brown argues, under the 'intermarriage was the primary mechanism for introducing and Qing spreading Chinese values and practices into Aborigine communities,'6 it may also have been an important mechanism for introducing indigenous practices into Chinese communities.
1 Thompson, 'Earliest Accounts', pp. 192-3. 2 Brown notes that specific rates of intermarriage cannot be estimated: Melissa Brown, wOnBecoming Chinese', in Negotiating Ethnicities in China and Taiwan, ed. M. Brown (Berkeley, 1996), p. 52. 3 Shepherd, Statecraft, p. 379. 4Jiang Shiche, Taiyou riji (Taipei, 1957), P- 46. 5 The term 'transculturation'was coined by Fernando Ortiz in the 1940s. Pratt defines it thus: ethnographers have used this term to describe how subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture': Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p. 6. 6 Brown, 'Becoming Chinese', p. 45.

366

Emmajinhua * * *

Teng

As few Han women married indigenous men until the late Qing,1 few such marriages are mentioned in the Qing travel literature other than the fascinating legend of Baozhu, a Han Chinese courtesan who became the female chieftain of an indigenous tribe. One nineteenth-century traveller, Ding Shaoyi, reconstructs the identity of this mysterious figure by entwining two items of local lore, one about a female chieftain and the other about the Chinese consort of an indigenous ruler: Prefect Deng Chuan'an of Fuliang says in his Lice Huichao: 'During the Jiaqing period, the female chieftain [tuguan] Baozhu bedecked herself like a Chinese noble lady. In her administration,she followed the law. Someone sent the officials an official communication [stating that her tribe] followed the law obediently and respectfully, not killing people, and not rebelling. Even though this place is beyond the pale, how is it any different from the interior [China]? Legend has it that during the Zhu Yigui rebellion, the chief of the Beinanmi, Wenji, guided troops to capture the bandits. The general rewarded him with the hat, robe, and shoes of the sixth rank, and extended the position of native chieftain to his son ... Then he called himself the king of the Beinanmi. He decided to obtain a beauty for his consort. There was a courtesan in Taiwan city who heard of this with delight and volunteered to go. The savages value women to begin with, and since the chieftain got a courtesan, he doted on her to the extreme, doing whatever she commanded. Then they got rid of their old customs, and were civilized with the rites and laws of China. Therefore, the seventy-odd villages of the Beinanmi are the most orderly, and their customs have long been different from those of the other savages. "Baozhu" is not like a savage woman's name. Perhaps this so-called female chieftain is afterall a courtesan?'2 The equivalence between these two figures, Baozhu and the Han courtesan, is based on one coincidence - the woman's role in prompting the assimilation of her tribe to Chinese culture - and on the liminality of both: a savage who resembles a Chinese and a Chinese who resembles a savage. Ding thus speculates that they must be the same person. By crossing ethnic boundaries to live among savages, the figure of 'Baozhu' was able to take advantage of both the gender inversion in savage society and the superior status given to her by her ethnicity: she placed herself in a position in which both her femininity and her Chineseness were valued. The story demonstrates, therefore, how in certain cases ethnicity may bring privilege, while in other cases, gender may bring it. In rising from being a prostitute to become a chieftain, Baozhu crossed not only ethnic boundaries but also status lines, 'bedecking herself like a
1 Brown, 'Becoming Chinese', p. 52. 2 Ding Shaoyi, Dongying zhilue (Taipei,

1957), p. 78.

Travel Writing about Taiwan

367

Chinese noble lady'. Baozhu's identity remained on the boundary between the savage and the civilized, the lowly and the noble, and the matriarchal and the patriarchal. Baozhu derived her power from her ambiguous status: the figure serves as a metaphor for the unique culture produced in the 'contact zone' of the frontier.1By 'giving up' her Chineseness, Baozhu induces the savages to 'give up' their savagery. By straddling the insider/outsider opposition and by becoming a 'hybrid', Baozhu in effect obliterates this opposition. As Deng Chuan'anphrases it: 'Even though this place is beyond the pale, how is it any differentfrom the interior [China]?' In being placed at the point of cultural transference,on the cusp between different ethnicities and different gender ideologies, the figure of Baozhu illustrates how ethnicity and gender combine variously in the constitution of power. * * * Gender inversion was also employed as a rhetoricaldevice, often in a selfreflexive critique of Chinese mores. The device is generally linked to the mode of primitivism, in which the 'less civilized' Other is seen as a repository of values associated with a more virtuous, simple past. The status of the foreign woman as Other made her a figure upon which not only undesirable, but also idealized, traits could be projected. As an idealized Other, the foreign woman serves as a foil against which to contrast the flaws of Chinese womanhood. The technique is employed in a Qing vernacular story about a merchant's travelsto Vietnam. Entitled Zou Annan yuma huan xingrong (On a Journey to Vietnam a Jade Horse Miniature is Exchangedfor Crimson Velvet,c. 1661), the story uses the exotic setting to teach a moral lesson about the laxity of contemporary Chinese women. Two of the central devices employed to establish the foreignness of Vietnam are the familiar tropes of gender inversion and hypersexualization, in particularthe violation of Chinese norms of gender segregation. However, a satirical twist to the rhetoric shifts the story into the mode of self-reflexive critique. While proclaiming Vietnamese women to be both inferior and lax in public, the narratorreveals his true object of criticism to be Chinese womanhood. A description of the public bathing habits of Vietnamese women becomes an opportunity to deride Chinese women for their hypocrisy. He declares: for women]areno comparison our Chinesewomen,who close [The Vietnamese the door so tightlywhen theytakea baththatno breezegets throughandyet still insistthatthe maidstandoutsidethewindowforfearthatsomeonewillpeep in on them. I thinkthatthese women'sfalsepretensesare really just a big show.Just
1 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p. 6.

368

Emmajinhua Teng

in or lookat ourwomenof the South,alldaytheygo touring the mountains by the in waters,visitingtemples,leaningon gatesandstanding doorways, goingto plays or societies;they let the public see theirpowderedfaces. And yet they want to criticize the shortcomingsof men! Commentingand laughingat the looks of But passersby, theydon'tknowhow to cherishthe 'face'of the family. if thebreeze so muchas liftsup theirskirtsto reveal bit of leg, or if theyarefeedinga babyand a their breast is exposed, or if they are going to the toilet and their 'thing' is exposed,theymakea hundredgesturesto coverthisandconcealthat,andput on airsof distress.They don'tknowthat'face'and the body areone: if theywantto if cherishthe body theyshouldcherish'face'; theywantto concealthe body, they shouldcoverthe 'face'.The ancientssaid it well:'if the fenceis secure,the dogs won't get in.' If outsidershad not seen your face, how would they thinkof violatingyourbody?1 Although the Vietnamese are portrayed as less civilized on account of their failure to segregate the sexes, the criticism is aimed at the moral degeneracy of Chinese women seen in their transgressions of gender norms. The structure of the story allows the author simultaneously to indulge in exotic fantasyand to advocate greaterconservatismin gender roles. In his Taiwan Memoranda,Wu Ziguang employs a similarlyself-reflexive critique, idealizing the indigenous women of Taiwan as paragons of ancient simplicity and virtue. He writes: The rest of their clothing is all frugaland plain . . . and they have a profound of of Moreover, understanding the proprieties antiquity. theydon'tuse cosmetics, like the lady of Guo [YangGuifei'ssister] who fearedbeing stainedwith just colour. They don't paint their eyebrows:even if they had the brush of Zhang are Changtheywouldn'tuse it.2Their manners farsuperiorin virtueto those of Chinesewomen.3 Wu claims here that the savages have maintained the proprieties of Chinese women, while Chinese women conversely have become degenerate and frivolous. Rather than seeing an inversion of gender in the foreign culture, Wu projects a hyper-realizationof Chinese gender ideals. The idealizationof the foreign woman as a foil to contemporaryChinese womanhood may have expressed an anxiety concerning the new social roles for women emerging during the late Ming and Qing.4 Confucian ideals no longer upheld by Chinese women were projected onto foreign women. A particularlypoignant example appears in the famous account of
1 Zhuoyuanting zhuren, 'Zou Annan yuma huan xingrong', in Zhaoshi bei (Shanghai, 1956), pp. 61-2. 2 Zhang Chang was a native of Pingyang during the Han dynasty who became governor of Chang'an under Xuandi. He was famous for having painted his wife's eyebrows.

3 Wu Ziguang,Taiwan jtshi (Taipei,1959),p. 31.

4 See Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Womenand Culture in Seventeenth-CenturyChina (Stanford, 1994).

Travel Writing about Taiwan

369

the Qing massacreat Yangzhou, Yangzhoushiriji. A Manchu soldier says to a Chinese woman who is offeringherself to the invaders:'when we campaigned in Korea [1627, *636-7], we captured women by the tens of thousands, and not one lost her chastity. How is it that wonderful China has become so shameless?'1The lack of commitment to Confucian demands for female chastity is read as a symptom of the degeneration of Chinese society as a whole, an accusation used as a justification for the Manchu conquest. In all of these examples of cultural critique, the association of particularsex roles with 'civilization'and 'barbarism'is turned on its head so that the 'civilized' tradesplaces with the 'barbaric'. The most famous Qing example of this type of gender play is Li Ruzhen's celebrated novel, Jinghua yuan. In this work, Li creates a number of fantasticallylearned foreign female characterswhose understanding of the Confucian classics far surpasses that of the average Chinese male. Throughout the novel, the talented women are given an aura of glamour, and it is implied that China would be well served by the development of such talents among the female population. Li also employs gender inversion in the Kingdom of Women episode of the novel, to satirize, and thereby denaturalize, Chinese sex roles. In particular, he calls into question practices such as footbinding. Through both satire and Utopian vision, Li presents an idealized model of accomplished (albeit still Confucian) femininity,embodied in the women of fabulous countries. Whether through the idealizationof the foreign woman, or through gender inversion, gender serves as a ready vehicle for the expression of ethnic alterityin Qing travelaccounts. The linkage between gender and ethnicity is particularlystrong because the differencebuilt into gender can be readily converted into the difference of the foreign and vice versa. In Qing ethnographic writing, Woman becomes a stand-in for the Other; the strangeness of the 'savage'woman of Taiwan represents the strangeness of her culture. The figure of the indigenous woman also mediates between colonizer and colonized, expressing relationsof desire, domination, and exchange. The multiplicity of gendered images also demonstrates that the links between gender and ethnicity are not based on a direct metaphoric equivalence between Chinese/savage and male/female. This is particularly true within the colonial or transculturalcontext, where gender is already racialized, or ethnicized, and thus destabilized. Accordingly, while feminization may be a form of denigration, not all women are denigrated. Moreover, although the discourse of gender was central to the construction of ethnic differencein Qing travelwriting, the discourse could also be used as
1 Voicesfrom the Ming-Qing Cataclysm: China in Tigers' Jaws, ed. and trans. Lynn Struve (New Haven, 1993), p. 37.

370

Emmajinhua Teng

a vehicle for criticism of Chinese society. Qing representationsof 'savage' gender relations thus cannot be read as a reliableguide to indigenous life. * * * The figure of the indigenous 'mountain woman' (shandi funii) has continued to play a special role in modern Taiwan, being used to represent in many ways the 'face' of indigenous culture to outside observers. The discourse of hypersexualization is still being employed, with serious consequences for indigenous women; namely, their commodification in the tourism and sex industries. Photographs of indigenous women in traditional costume grace government tourist brochures; costumed women are availablefor photo-ops with Chinese and Western tourists at all the major sightseeing areas;and, of course, no tour of Wulai or Taroko Gorge would be complete without a show of dancing 'mountain'girls. Large numbers of indigenous women are also engaged in prostitution and indigenous girls are disproportionately represented in illegal child prostitution. Though poverty is one driving force behind this phenomenon, the stereotypes of the 'drunken native' and the 'easy woman' are used to justify the 'natural' suitability of indigenous women for bar-hostess and other nightclub work. The legacy of Qing expansionism can thus be felt not only in the arena of Chinese territorialclaims, but also in that of discourse and representation. The continuities between Qing and modern discourse are aptly demonstrated in a Taiwanese media article from the 1960s entitled 'Aboriginal Women of the Province [Taiwan] March toward the Realm of Civilization', which touts the achievements of the Kuomintang in modernizing indigenous lifestyles.1The author, Yang Baiyuan, not only employs many of the old tropes of gender inversion, but also argues that owing to the vital role played by women in matrilineal indigenous societies, government efforts at 'civilizing' the indigenes should be directed primarilyat women. Once again, indigenous women are expected to serve as vehicles for the transmissionof Chinese culture. In the Qing, as well, colonial officials viewed the 'righting' of gender inversion as a central task of the civilizing mission. If the savages were ever to take their place in a civilized empire, their women would first have to take their proper role. Once women were women, and men were men, the savageswould not be quite so savage anymore. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

1 Yang Baiyuan, 'Jinruwenming lingyu de

bensheng shandi funu', Taiwan wenxian, xix (1968), 163-9.