As a matter of fact, the only people ever dominant in Formosa who seem to have treated the aborigines with either kindness or equity were the Dutch during their thirty-seven years’ over-lordship in the seventeenth century. The story of this period of just and kindly rule in their island has been handed down among the aborigines from parent to child and still remains a tradition among them--one of a Golden Age long past; just how long of course they have no idea, but in the time of “many grandfathers back.” There is a tradition that the Dutch even taught the aborigines to read, and also to write their own dialect--this in the “sign-marks of the gods” (Roman script). Old documents written by their ancestors are said to have existed among them even a generation ago. These are reported to have been confiscated by the Japanese, as part of a systematic and far-reaching attempt to eradicate the memory of any culture other than Japanese. Whether or not this story of the confiscation of old documents be true I do not know, but certainly during my two years’ residence in Formosa I was not able to find a single document of this sort among the aborigines. Only the memory of past culture given by “fair gods who came over the sea in white-winged boats”--or, as some of the tribes have it, “came up out of the sea”--remains. It seems that there exists among some of the tribes a belief that a reincarnation of a former “Great White Chief”--presumably Father Candidius, a Dutch priest, who devoted his life to the care, spiritual and temporal, of the aboriginal people--will return and help them throw off the yoke of their Chinese and Japanese conquerors.[47] Hence the welcome which a fair-haired, blue-eyed person receives from them, and the reverence with which he--or she--is treated: their appreciation of such a one being in rather marked contrast with the point of view of both Chinese and Japanese, who speak of a fair-haired--or even brown-haired--blue-eyed man or woman as a “red-haired, green-eyed barbarian.” FOOTNOTES: [42] One of the distinguishing characteristics of the Hakkas is that the women never “bind” their feet; whereas the feet of all the other Chinese-Formosan women are “bound,” i.e. crippled and distorted. This “sin of omission” on the part of the Hakkas seems to have something to do with the contempt in which they are held by the other Chinese, both in Formosa and on the mainland. [43] The _Encyclopædia Britannica_, 11th edition, gives the aboriginal population of Formosa as 104,334. This is probably a fairly correct estimate, although the Japanese claim that 120,000 is more nearly correct, they wishing to give the impression that the aboriginal population is increasing, rather than diminishing.