The Disappearing Custom of Facial Tattoos

Most people still retain a certain awe for the taboos and totems of indigenous communities. Of the nine indigenous groups in the Taiwan area, the Atayal stand out for their singular practice of tattooing the face. From their point of view, not only do these markings serve as signs of membership in the tribe and symbols of adulthood, they have etched out an impression of an era. The only thing is, within the next decade, this extremely special custom is very likely to disappear.

In Hsiangpi Village, Tai-an Rural Township, Miaoli County, 98-year-old Douyu Bawai, a lady with facial tattoos, is sitting in front of the entrance to her home, basking in the warm sun. Today, in this little mountain village of less than 200 people situated on the border of Miaoli and Taichung counties, there is excitement in the air, because once again visitors have arrived to see this "facial tattoo treasure."

"Auntie, they want to ask you, where did facial tattooing come from?" says her niece, who is usually outside the village for work, but today happens to be back. She serves as interpreter and introduces us to the old lady.

"Oh, I don't know anything about that. When we were little, Mother told us to get tattoos, so we got tattoos! If we didn't get tattoos, we would have been married off to someone in the plains!"

"Tattooing must hurt. How did you survive it?" we continue to ask.

"At that time, the custom was that you had to be tattooed. When it hurt you had to bear with it!"

"I've heard that during that time, the boys had to be able to hunt and the girls had to be able to weave before they could be tattooed. Is that the way it was?" we ask.

"Oh, I really don't know. All I know is that my mother told me to get a tattoo, so I did. Back then, some people couldn't take the pain of tattooing and ran away!"

At this time the photographer gets ready to take pictures, and the reporter hurriedly asks her, "Lately, so many people have come to interview you and take your picture. Does it bother you?"

"When people come to see me, I'm happy. It's very natural!" At this moment, the old lady gets excited and says that she wants to give the reporters Atayal names. "I'll call you Douyu, okay? It means the shoot of a plant, growing upward." She points her finger at a fir tree in the distance. To the man taking pictures, she says, "I'll call you Suiyam, okay? That means a fearless hero. . . . Today you come to see me, and it makes me happy. After you return to Taipei, if someone asks you about the old lady on the mountain, tell that person that she is happy to see you, and she gave you Atayal names as souvenirs. If I can live one or two years longer, we'll have another chance to see each other again." The old lady says that she has a grandson in Taipei.

Douyu Bawai then begins to sing a song in an old Atayal melody: "My grandson is in Taipei. Please tell him to take good care of himself. Please tell him 'I have been to see your yachi [Atayal for "grandma"].' I gave them the Atayal names Douyu and Suiyam as souvenirs. . . ."

Becoming national treasures

In Taiwan at the end of the 1990s, these "facial tattooing treasures" have suddenly become the new darlings of the media. On all kinds of occasions, people can be heard talking about the old people with tattooed faces.

In mid-October, Tai-an Rural Township in Miaoli County, which is Atayal country, held an activity called "Reminiscence of the Past," for all the old people with tattooed faces in the various villages. There were 27 old people who took part in the event, with the support of their families. This activity also attracted more than 1000 spectators from all over the island. To rescue these "national treasures," a large hospital in Miaoli decided to come to their villages to treat them free of charge on a regular basis, and provide them life-long free medical treatment. Ever since then, Tai-an Rural Township, where most of the old Atayal with facial tattoos live, began to grow rapidly in reputation. Many an old Atayal with facial tattoos was put on display for the outside world, and they were often invited to attend activities in many different places. For example, in the latter half of November, a dozen of them were invited to Taipei to take part in an indigenous people's event.

Not only do those with tattoos often personally "perform" in activities, people in the art world treating the theme of facial tattoos have also attracted a lot of attention in Taiwan. In late October, Anli Ginu, an Atayal artist who graduated from the fine art department of Chinese Culture University, exhibited a composite piece called "Facial Tattoos," made up of 135 paintings both large and small of tattooed faces. In December, during the Taipei Film Festival sponsored by the Taipei City Government, Atayal youth Liu Kang-wen from Hsiulin Rural Township in Hualien county won a prize of excellence for his documentary "Grandmother Taluku," about the old tattooed Atayal. Several other photographers, including Chang Yung-chieh, Liu Jen-hsian of Tai-an Rural Township, and Tien Kui-shih of Hualien, have also photographed and collected many pictures about these old folks.

In Chinese, the art of facial tattooing is even described with a special term, "qingmian." Among primitive tribesmen, it is common to tattoo the face or body. According to anthropologists, around 1100 BC, there was a folk custom of tattooing around the mouth in the Yangtze River Basin. Concerning Taiwan natives in the latter part of the seventh century, the Dong Yi Zhuan ("Record of the Barbarians in the East"), a portion of the Sui Shu (History of the Sui Dynasty), records, "Women tattoo their hands with ink in serpentine patterns." The book Taiwan Fu Zhi ("Annals of Taiwan Prefecture"), written by Gao Gongqian during the Kangxi reign of the Qing dynasty, also records, "Taiwan has long been the home of people who tattoo their faces, have black teeth, wear their hair short and tattoo their bodies."

Facial tattooing equals a crime?

Among the nine indigenous tribes of Taiwan, only the Atayal and the Saisiyat have the custom of tattooing their faces. According to the field interviews of cultural writer Ma Teng-yueh, who has traveled extensively writing down the experiences of tattooed tribal elders, the Saisiyat live quite close to the Atayal, and the reason they started tattooing their faces is "the inevitable result of protecting themselves against a stronger enemy." Therefore, in actuality, among all the indigenous peoples, only Atayal have the inherent custom of facial tattooing. That is why the Qing Dynasty documents usually referred to Atayal as "qingmian fan" ("tattoo-faced barbarians").

In ethnic Han Chinese society, tattooing faces has negative associations. According to the Mandarin dictionary published by Mandarin Daily News, the definition of "qingmian" is a form of punishment in ancient China in which words were tattooed on criminals' faces. In Han Chinese culture, tattooing faces was aimed at warning others not to commit the same crimes, which is totally different from the decorative tattooing of Atayal people.

Within the context of Atayal traditional culture, tattooing faces is not only an indication of their ethnicity, it is also a mark of beauty. Lin Yi-he, a cultural worker in the Atayal community of Tai-an Rural Township, contends that because qingmian now carries a derogatory connotation in the Chinese language, it is better to replace it with the neutral term wenmian. His viewpoint also reflects the opinions of many Atayal, and more than a few people prefer to say wenmian instead of qingmian.

The earliest makeup

Among all the nine remaining indigenous peoples, the Atayal are the most widely distributed. Their living space spreads from Jen-ai Rural Township in the mountainous area of Nantou to Hualien and Ilan. The tribesmen are extensively spread in mountains 600 to 2000 meters above sea level. Nowadays their population is about 80,000, making them the second biggest indigenous tribe, next to the Ami.

Why among nine indigenous groups do only the Atayal people have such a conspicuous custom of facial tattooing? And where does this practice come from? These questions still remain unsolved mysteries of anthropological research. But in the myths and legends of the Atayal tribe, there is bountiful scope for imagination about the origin of facial tattooing.

The first legend regarding the origin of facial tattooing is "The Marriage of the Sister and Brother." When heaven and earth first took shape, there were only two people, a sister and a brother. The sister was worried about how to reproduce the human race, so she suggested to her brother that they marry. But the brother rejected his sister's suggestion, believing that a sister and brother could not get married. The sister was forced to devise a scheme to deceive her brother. She told him, "Tomorrow there will be a woman waiting for you at the foot of the mountain. The woman will be your wife. You should have intercourse with her." The brother believed her, and excitedly got ready to meet this woman.

On the following day the sister took some black ashes and wiped her face with them. Then she waited at the foot of the mountain. Not long after, her brother showed up. He didn't recognize her as his sister, so he had intercourse with her, and the human race was able to multiply. From then on, the myth concludes, there was the custom of tattooing faces.

The second legend concerning the origin of tattoos is "Shunning Evil Omens." According to this tale, once long ago, many young Atayal girls inexplicably died in rapid succession. This made the Atayal people extremely frightened, but they could not think of any solution. One night, a girl in the village dreamed that an ancestral spirit appeared before her, telling her that if she wanted to avoid dying in the epidemic, she had no choice but to carve lines in her face. The next day, she told everyone in the village the instructions she had heard in her dream. But no one knew how to tattoo. Finally, one clever man used burnt pine wood to draw a pattern on a piece of women's clothing, and taught it to all the women in the village. Then he used a thin needle to tattoo the pattern on their faces, and afterward covered their faces with black soot, so that it would never change color. Bizarrely, after the Atayal women tattooed their faces, the spate of inexplicable deaths ceased. From that time on, the custom of tattooing faces spread throughout the Atayal, and has been passed down to the present.

In addition, today a different legend commonly circulates among the Atayal throughout eastern Taiwan: When people pass away, their spirits walk over a rainbow bridge. The Atayal ancestors wait at the opposite end to welcome their descendants into the spirit world. Tattooed faces are a promise and agreement left by the ancestors, so that their descendants can be recognized and brought into the ancestral fold.

A cultural code passed down

Some people describe facial tattooing as "the Atayal's facial pedigree." The sight of a tattooed face signifies the ancient trademark of the Atayal. What this viewpoint emphasizes is none other than the "ethnic identity" of the Atayal tribe. From investigations by anthropologists, evidence can actually be found to support this view.

According to anthropologists, this people actually belong to an overall tribe known as the Tayal, which can be further divided into the Atayal subtribe and the smaller Sedek subtribe. Below the two subtribes there are 26 different subgroups.

Owing to long-term separation in living environments, the many subtribes and subclans are quite different in terms of habits, language and even ethnic identity. Back in the pre-colonial period, some were even mortal enemies, and mutual head-hunting prevailed.

When Ma Teng-yueh was doing field work, he often showed his interviewees the photos of other old tattooed folks he had taken in other places. One time, Ma showed a photo of an Atayal from the Nan-ao area of Ilan County to an old man from the Sedek subtribe in Hualien. The Sedek man remarked, "This is our enemy."

Nevertheless, in every subtribe or subclan, no matter how separate in geographical environment they are, however great the difference there exists in their languages, or however long they have been separated, the tradition of tattooing faces was once prevalent in all of the nearly 200 Atayal villages in Taiwan, without exception. "Different forms of tattooing were like a code carved on human faces. The code passed down from generation to generation, the self-identification of ethnicity and differentiation from outsiders. This code was very stable, and remained unaltered over several generations," says Ma Teng-yueh.

The tattooist who crossed the Snow Mountains

Facial tattooing is an ancient tradition of the Atayal, and the profession of tattooist was once a highly venerable one in their society. In 1960, anthropologist He Ting-jui published first-hand field notes about the Atayal facial tattooing custom in the article "Survey on the Tattooing Customs of Taiwan's Tribes." He noted that most of the tattooists in the Atayal tribe were women. The profession was passed from mother to daughter. It took a virtuous woman to be a tattooist, and after the tattoo was done, the artist was rewarded with precious gifts. Take the tattooing of an unmarried girl for example: The reward was a blouse embroidered in a relief pattern, and a coat embroidered with a pattern of lines. The manufacture of those clothes would take at least two or three months of hand-weaving.

Ma Teng-yueh's field notes record an unforgettable tattooist, Yayu Ciwas, who originally lived in Taikang Village, Chienshih Rural Township, Hsinchu County. In 1915, she moved south along the Snow Mountain (Hsuehshan) range, passing through several villages in Chienshih Rural Township, Wufeng Rural Township, and around Mt. Tapachien. She then settled down in Miaoli. Today there are quite a lot of old people in Tai-an Rural Township with facial tattoos made by her.

While Yayu and her whole family were moving about, every time they passed through a village, she performed tattooing services for the youth in that village. What's interesting is that her form of tattooing was not modeled on the patterns of her own particular group, but rather showed respect for the local traditions, based on their own unique patterns. Even her own daughter-in-law was no exception. "From this we can ascertain that in Atayal groups the forms of facial tattooing carry a strong meaning of ethnic differentiation and even clan customs. No one can randomly change it," says Ma.

Coming-of-age rite

Facial tattooing not only carries the function of differentiating ethnicity, it also conveys a serious social meaning in the traditional tribal-village life of the Atayal people.

One photo taken in 1926 shows an Atayal tattoo artist tattooing a woman's face. The Atayal woman wrapped up in linen is lying on the ground with her eyes tightly closed, and her teeth clenched tightly together, as if she is enduring immense pain. The tattoo-faced tattooist is squatting, thumping with a hammer-like tool on the face of the woman.

Atayal Wu Mei-lan, a civil servant in Tai-an Rural Township, says that she has heard many an old person talking about their experience of facial tattooing. The impression she has is one of "pain, so painful that you'd rather die," completely contrary to the romantic notion which some people associate with it.

To go through this kind of pain, one still had to comply with certain conditions. After a boy came of age and had gone headhunt-ing, he could then be tattooed under his lips as the mark of coming-of-age, and as a way of lauding his bravery. After a girl became fully mature and she passed tests to prove she could weave and cultivate, she could have her face tattooed, to show entry into womanhood. Whether male or female, only after they were tattooed on the face could they get married.

Usually, when their children reached the age to have their faces tattooed, parents would determine the exact date through dream-interpretation, then they would invite a tattooist. Before the actual tattooing, they had to perform "bird divination," by listening to a bird's singing and observing the direction in which it flew to determine whether the moment was auspicious or ill-omened. The method of facial tattooing was to press linen threads into the charcoal ashes and draw the pattern on the cheeks. Then over the pattern, they laid iron needles spread apart like the bristles of a toothbrush, and pounded them with a hammer. The needle tips were made to pierce through the skin, and the process was repeated two or three times on every spot. Then they sprinkled the wounds with charcoal ashes to make the black color settle in.

The males' patterns were simpler, done only on the forehead and under the lips, and therefore took less time. They usually took no more than one morning. The women's more complicated lattice patterns, however, took from dawn to dusk, usually over ten hours.

After tattooing, women's faces would remain swollen for about ten to twenty days, and they couldn't swallow any food. They could only drink water or congee. To prevent the wounds from becoming infected, women who had been freshly tattooed were forbidden to go out. They could see no one except their family members. In about half a month, when the wounds had healed and scabbed over, a face with deep blue or black patterns appeared in front of everyone, to accompany her for all her life.

The process of facial tattooing among the Atayal served the function of a rite of passage. After such a severe test, a new stage of life began for an individual.

Facial tattooing was not only the most important ceremony in an Atayal's life, it was also an important social requirement. Within their system of ancestor worship, facial tattooing also was connected to the auspicious or evil fate of the whole village. Anthropologist He Ting-jui's survey points out that the Atayal thought that if they did not do this, their ancestors' spirits would bring down punishment upon them, and that people would often get sick or die within their village. If a man married an untattooed woman, she would not only be unable to bear children, the whole family would face catastrophe.

No tattoo, no womanhood

Nowadays, when people inquire of the Atayal why they had their faces tattooed, the most common answer is, "We had to do it; otherwise, no one would marry us." Or they quote the frightening words that the seniors of the tribe said to them: "If you don't do it, you'll marry a man from the flatlands." In the era when ethnic Chinese and indigenous people still did not interact, living away from home was probably the most unbearable thing for them.

In a time not too long ago, facial tattooing indeed represented the common esthetic experience of the Atayal, particularly for women. In the words of Biliah Baiho, an elderly Atayal gent of Shuilungshan Village in Tai-an Rural Township, any woman that did not get tattooed "didn't count as a real woman."

Although nowadays when many old folks talk about their tattooed faces, perhaps under the influence of the times, they say they are not good-looking. Some even describe themselves as "ugly as devils." Yet when they talk about their tattooed faces in their youth, they will say, "The facial patterns were really very beautiful, much better looking than our daughter's or granddaughter's makeup." The old folks are even meticulous about the patterns and colors of their tattoos. One old lady from Hualien is always full of regret that she had the charcoal ashes washed away from the wounds before the tattooing process was completed, so her patterns are light-gray instead of bright black.

For a man, the Atayal's facial tattooing was inseparable from their custom of headhunting. A village's being able to compete with other villages and the natural environment depended on the strength and perpetuation of this fighting power. However, along with the changing times, the headhunting culture of the indigenous people was forbidden. Naturally, the facial tattooing custom closely related to headhunt-ing faced a similar demise.

The first to attempt banning facial tattoos were the Japanese colonialists. The Japanese issued a decree outlawing facial tattoos in the early years of the Taisho era (which began in 1912), but in fact prior to this they had forbidden the practice in every Atayal village which came under their control. Not only did the Japanese disallow tattooing in Atayal villages, they did not permit tattooing tools to be kept, and in "savage-children education institutes," they taught the Atayal that "facial tattoos are a symbol of backwardness." They even threatened that if any student went off on their own and received facial tattoos, they would be forbidden from attending classes.

Nevertheless, the Atayal did not succumb. Many people were taken by their parents deep into the mountains to be tattooed in secret. The preconditions for having tattoos were gradually relaxed. Males no longer had to have hunted a human head, and females no longer had to be able to weave. The age at which facial tattooing occurred was also moved forward; many children and adolescents had facial tattoos early, according to their parents' wishes. Many of the octogenarian Atayal with facial tattoos today received their tribal markings when they were banned under the Japanese.

In unpublished interview transcripts, Ma Teng-yueh records that Baliagi Nogan, who lives in Jen-ai Rural Township in Nantou County, says that when she was a teenager, her fellow tribe members were fighting the Japanese, and they had to move all the time. Her father was deeply afraid they might lose the struggle, and she would never have the chance to have her face tattooed. Therefore, in the process of their constant moving and fighting, her father asked somebody to give her a tattoo. With a face full of infected wounds, she went with her tribesmen as they constantly moved from hiding place to hiding place. "When the lines of tattoos were tainted with the blood spilled fighting foreign rulers, tattoos gained an extra level of meaning," Ma Teng-yueh remarks with emotion.

Christianization

Ma Teng-yueh believes that from the Japanese perspective, being able to forbid facial tattooing was a symbol of their ability to control the Atayal people. For this reason, making a record of the Atayal living today who received facial tattoos during that era can help us understand what villages were controlled by the Japanese in what areas during what periods of time. This is an extremely valuable resource in the study of Taiwan's indigenous people.

Not only did the Japanese forbid the Atayal from having their faces tattooed, they often forced those who already had tattoos to cut them off. The technique for tattoo removal was to clamp the tattooed skin with pincers and cut it off with a scalpel, then to suture the wound. This kind of operation was often undertaken without anesthesia, and those who received it had to undergo an immense amount of pain. Today, when one visits Atayal villages, one occasionally meets old people who once had tattoos but have had them cut off and for this reason are marred with scars. The reason is invariably that the Japanese ordered it done. Many of these cases occurred during World War II, when many indigenous people were forced to join the Japanese army to increase the number of troops. Cutting off facial tattoos became more frequently required in order to make the Atayal men "look more like Japanese," says Atayal Lijiang Laituan of Shihlin Village in Tai-an Rural Township, recalling his father's words.

In 1919, there was a serious drought and influenza epidemic in the mountainous regions of Taiwan. Many Atayal thought it was the punishment of angry ancestral spirits. Some villages began to revive their tradition of tattooing. After the Wushe Incident in 1930, still others also began to revive the custom. Nevertheless, as the times continued to change, this revival was merely the tradition's last gasp.

The final blow to facial tattooing was probably the introduction of Christianity, which began during the Taisho period, and spread widely around 1950. The entrance of monotheism into the villages completely broke down the Atayal's polytheistic faith and the system of ancestor worship. This led to the total abandonment of even secretive facial tattooing practices.

Nowadays, nearly 100 old folks with facial tattoos survive, spread all over the Atayal villages of Taiwan. They are the last group of people to bear witness to the deep cultural tradition of the Atayal. They are mostly over 80 years old. Some are even nearly 100 years old. They live in remote mountain villages, and they usually speak no Taiwanese or Mandarin, only Atayal. Along with the evolution of time, the untoward condition of indigenous society has made many of these "facial tattoo treasures" lose the shelter of their younger relatives, due to alcoholism and other problems. Among the medical records of the tattooed old folks of Tai-an Rural Township, quite a few have an impoverished family and live long-term in unhygienic environments. A couple even live alone. Although most of them are taken care of by their relatives, chronic diseases of old age constitute a heavy burden on their children.

Who has seen a tattooed face?

In Atayal culture, facial tattooing was once a symbol of bravery and capability. In the history of the Atayal's struggle against outsiders, these tattoos were once dyed with blood and carved out with the touching stories of the times. Now, with the passing of generations, the elders have gradually withered away. Nevertheless, after nearly 50 years of living in obscurity, the remaining 100 old Atayal who carry the millennia-old marks of their culture have suddenly become the targets of cameras.

At the "Reminiscence of the Past" event held at Wenshui Elementary School, nearly 30 Atayal elders dressed in traditional costumes sat in front of the podium in one row. From ten in the morning to ten at night, hundreds of photographers took their pictures. The clicking of flashbulbs never ceased, as the elderly folk kept changing their poses. One month later, a dozen of the tattooed old folks from Tai-an Rural Township were invited to Taipei. In the midst of a cold, drizzly rain, they took part in an outdoor concert at night. The biggest feeling many of these old Atayal have about all these big events is: "I'm tired."

p.40

The ancestral homeland of the tattooed Atayal, Tai-an Rural Township in Miaoli County, still maintains the tradition of slash-and-burn mountainside agriculture.

p.41

Distribution of the Atayal Tribe

Miaoli

Nantou

Ilan

Hualien

(drawing by Lee Su-ling)

p.43

Of Taiwan's nine indigenous groups, the Atayal are the most gifted in embroidery. Their multicolored head gear most powerfully attracts the eye.

p.44

This picture was taken in 1925. At the time, the Japanese colonial authorities had

already issued a decree outlawing facial tattoos, but many people secretly had their faces tattooed anyway. (rephotographed from Portraits of Indigenous People)

Only after a traditional Atayal girl became fully mature and she passed tests to prove she could weave and cultivate, could she have her face tattooed. (rephotographed from Portraits of Indigenous People)

p.46

"Smoking while you plant puts you in high spirits," this old Atayal lady observes.

p.47

This old tribal chieftain, already fallen ill, recalls the brave hunting exploits of his youth, looking as vigorous as he once was. Large boutique-style photographs like the one by the side of his bed are a common sight in the tribal villages, taken by various local photography associations.

p.48

This old lady gets up at the break of dawn, and with a beloved mutt in tow goes up into the mountains to pick herbs.

Of Taiwan's nine indigenous groups, the Atayal are the most gifted in embroidery. Their multicolored head gear most power fully attracts the eye.

Only after a traditional Atayal girl became fully mature and she passed tests to prove she could weave and cultivate, could she have her face tattooed. （rephotographed from Portraits of Indigenous People）

Only after a traditional Atayal girl became fully mature and she passed tests to prove she could weave and cultivate, could she have her face tattooed. （rephotographed from Portraits of Indigenous People）

"Smoking while you plant puts you in high spirits," this old Atayal lady observes.

This old tribal chieftain, already fallen ill, recalls the brave hunting exploits of his youth, looking as vigorous as he once was. Large boutique-style photographs like the one by the side of his bed are a common sight in the tribal villages, taken by various local photography associations.

This old lady gets up at the break of dawn, and with a beloved mutt in tow goes up into the mountains to pick herbs.