Taiwanese indigenous peoples (formerly Formosan aborigines) number about 571,816 or 2.42% of the island's population. Recent research suggests their ancestors have been living on Taiwan for approximately 6,500 years. Today there are sixteen officially recognized ethnolinguistic groups of the Austronesian Language Family in Taiwan. Taiwan is the origin of the oceanic Austronesian expansion whose descendant groups today include the majority of the ethnic groups of the Philippines, Micronesia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, East Timor, Madagascar, and Polynesia. For centuries, Taiwan's indigenous inhabitants experienced economic competition and military conflict with a series of colonizing newcomers.
Aiyu 愛玉 (ài yù) Ficus pumila var. awkeotsang is a member of the fig family and a variety of Ficus pumila. The fruit seed is harvested to make aiyu jelly.
Homes have a regular appearance after being rebuilt after Typhoon Morakot 八八水災 in August of 2009.
The tamarillo 樹番茄 (shù fān qié) Solanum betaceum is a shrub in the flowering plant family Solanaceae (nightshades 茄科) that bears the tamarillo an egg-shaped edible fruit.
There are around 6,000 Tsou, approximately 1.19% of Taiwan's total Indigenous population, making them the seventh-largest indigenous group on the island. Their rich oral histories describe migrations of each ancient clans' ancestors into the area between Yushan 玉山 and the Chianan Plain 嘉南平原. Originally, each clan had its own settlement, with the first multi-clan town, Tfuya 特富野, forming around approximately 1600 CE. The earliest written record of the Tsou dates from the Dutch occupation, which describes the multi-clan settlement Tfuya 特富野 as having approximately 300 people in 1647. The Tsou are distributed across the mountainous area of Chiayi County’s 嘉義縣 Alishan 阿里山 Rural Township, with most of their settlements concentrated at the upper reaches of the Tsengwen 曾文溪 and Chuoshui 濁水溪 Rivers. In the east, in the lower-lying regions of Mount Jade 玉山, their territory borders on that of the Bunun tribe, while their neighbors to the west (the Chianan Plain) are the Han Chinese, and those to the south the Rukai people. Very small numbers of the Tsou are also distributed over Kaohsiung and Nantou County, where they have mostly mixed with the Bunun.
Tour to support training of Tsou area and culture guides sponsored by Alishan National Scenic Area Administration Tourism Bureau 交通部觀光局阿里山國家風景管理處
