Southern Taiwan Culture & Language

Southern culture is the oldest Han culture on the island layered over indigenous foundations, and its most visible expression is religious.

Temple culture

Tainan has more temples than any city in Taiwan, and they are working institutions. Jiajiang troupes — young men in elaborate face paint representing infernal generals who clear the way before a deity — perform at processions in a form that is part dance, part martial art and genuinely unsettling to watch. Spirit mediums, divination blocks and firecrackers are ordinary parts of a temple day.

Koxinga and the founding myth

The Koxinga Shrine in Tainan, built in the Qing period and rebuilt by the Japanese, reflects how each successive government has wanted to claim him: Ming loyalist, Chinese hero, or local founder, depending on who was doing the commemorating.

Paiwan and Rukai

The southern mountain peoples build in stacked slate, carve house lintels and posts with ancestral figures and the hundred-pace viper, and produce glass beadwork whose individual bead patterns carry specific meanings and are inherited. They also have a hereditary aristocracy, unusual among Taiwan’s indigenous groups.

Puppetry and opera

Budaixi glove puppetry has deep southern roots, and Taiwanese opera is performed at temple fairs on temporary stages.

The Siraya

The plain around Tainan was Siraya country, and the Dutch left the language written down in a romanised script used for land deeds — the so-called Sinckan manuscripts, which continued to be written for more than a century after the Dutch had gone. The Siraya were long classed as assimilated and their language as extinct, but a revival movement has been reconstructing it from those documents, and the community won formal recognition after a long legal fight.

Sugar and salt

The old refineries and salt fields have been turned into museums and cultural parks, and they explain the landscape.

Mandarin is official and universal, written in traditional characters.

Taiwanese Hokkien is spoken here more widely and more comfortably than anywhere else on the island — in markets, temples and among all generations, not only the elderly. Using a word or two of it is received with real warmth in the south.

Paiwan and Rukai are spoken in the southern mountain communities, and Hakka in parts of Pingtung.

English is less common than in Taipei. Hotels and the main sites manage; market stalls and older shopkeepers generally do not, and a translation app is worth having.

Useful: Mandarin ni hao and xie xie; Taiwanese gau-cha for good morning and to-sia for thank you, which in Tainan will get you a smile and possibly a free extra portion.