"Seeking the Koko' Ta'ay"--Taiwan's Little People, Big Questions [View all]

by Massimo Introvigne | Dec 3, 2025 | Featured China

A book suggests that legends about vanished short-statured beings may have a kernel of truth—and challenge the Han-centered narrative of the history of China.

by Massimo Introvigne



PaSta’ay festival in Miaoli, Taiwan. Credits.

In “Seeking the Koko’ Ta’ay: Investigating the Origins of Little People Myths in Taiwan and Beyond” (Leiden: Brill, 2024), editors Tobie Openshaw and Dean Karalekas have assembled a scholarly constellation that glows with myth, memory, and political defiance. The book is a multidisciplinary inquiry into the recurring legends of short-statured beings—known among the Saisiyat as ta’ay—who once lived in Taiwan, China, and across the Austronesian world. But this is no mere folklore compendium. It’s a challenge to nationalist historiography, a celebration of Indigenous epistemologies, and a subtle act of resistance against the Han-centric narrative of Chinese antiquity.

The book invites readers to treat myths as maps, tracing the contours of cultural memory across Taiwan, China, and the Pacific. The authors argue that the legends of the ta’ay and their counterparts—the veli of Fiji, the MKsingut of Atayal lore, and the misinsigots of Paiwan tradition—may encode real encounters with Negrito populations, the so-called “First Peoples” of the region. These myths, he suggests, are not quaint tales but mnemonic devices, preserving the memory of Paleolithic foragers who once roamed Taiwan’s grassy plains before it became an island—and parts of present-day Mainland China too.

This thesis is politically potent. If Negritos once inhabited Taiwan and parts of southern China, then the Han narrative of uninterrupted civilizational dominance is fractured. The book thus becomes a quiet torpedo aimed at Chinese propaganda, which often erases non-Han histories in favor of a monolithic past.

The book’s first section, “The Science,” includes Paul Jen-kuei Li’s linguistic survey of the myths. Li revisits his earlier work, noting the absence of linguistic evidence to confirm the ta’ay’s existence and the tantalizing possibility that recent archaeological finds, like the Xiaoma Lady, may change that. The Xiaoma Lady, discovered in a cave on Taiwan’s east coast, is a 6,000-year-old skeleton with cranial features and stature reminiscent of Negrito populations.

More:
https://bitterwinter.org/seeking-the-koko-taay-taiwans-little-people-big-questions/