Taiwanese Aborigines

Taiwanese aborigines are the indigenous peoples of Taiwan, and their ancestors are believed to have been living on the islands for approximately 8,000 years before major Han immigration began in the 1600s. They are closely related to the Malay peoples of Austronesian descent of the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia. For centuries, the Formosan tribes experienced economic competition and military conflict with a series of conquering peoples, and as a result of these intercultural dynamics, as well as more dispassionate economic processes, many of these tribes have been linguistically and culturally assimilated.