UK UNIVERSITY RETURNS WARRIOR SKULLS TO TAIWAN’S INDIGENOUS PAIWAN PEOPLE

“This repatriation is a culmination of international cooperation between the University and the Taiwanese community,” Professor Tom Gillingwater, chief of anatomy at the university, said in a statement.

A shaman of the Taiwan’s Paiwan people (front) gives a blessing and gratitude to University of Edinburgh’s Chair of Anatomy Tom Gillingwater (second left) and Anatomical Museum Curator Malcolm MacCallum (left) during a ritual ceremony on Friday. CNA photo Nov. 3, 2023

“We are committed to addressing our colonial legacy and this repatriation is the latest action we have taken in line with our longstanding policy of returning items to appropriate representatives of the cultures from which they were taken,” he said.

The skulls were returned to representatives of Taiwan’s Council of Indigenous People and the head of Mudan township – a community in southern Taiwan close to where the warriors were killed in 1874.

The four Paiwan warriors were the victims of a Japanese punitive expedition to Taiwan carried out in retaliation for the massacre of 54 shipwrecked sailors from the Ryukyu Islands ­in 1871.

Known as the “Mudan Incident,” the conflict helped kick-start Japan’s colonial ambitions towards Taiwan, which it would annex from China’s crumbling Qing dynasty 20 years later.

The skulls were transported as trophies to Japan by an American military adviser, and then transferred through two other owners before they were given to the university in 1907.

Edinburgh “holds one of the largest and most historically significant collection of ancestral remains, notably skulls,” according to the university.

The Paiwan are Taiwan’s second-largest Indigenous community with a population of just over 102,000 people in 2020, according to government figures.