The Thao
　　According to a survey in 2001, only 283 individuals of the Thao tribe remain today, making the Thao the smallest of Taiwan’s indigenous communities. The Thao (or, Ita-Thao as the Thao call themselves) today are concentrated in only a few communities around Sun Moon Lake in central Taiwan, principally in Toushe and Pu-chi. Before the Qing (Manchu) established their rule over Taiwan in the late 1600s, the Thao lived in the area of Pu-thi. By the close of that century, Thao had already settled Kwang Hua Island in the middle of Sun Moon Lake, living in several village clusters. In 1762, the last remnants of the Thao outside of the Sun Moon Lake area moved there from their homes in Ta-Pu, Chiayi County. By the 1820s, the Thao had abandoned their Kwang Hua Island villages and settled along the banks surrounding the lake instead. They founded settlements in and around the current towns of Yuchih, Maolan, Shuishe, Shi-Yin, Maopu, and Toushe. The influx of Han Chinese settlers that began after the middle of the 19th Century forced Thao to evacuate most of these settlements and reestablish homes elsewhere in the area. The former Thao communities of Yuchih, Maolan, Shuishe, Toushe all became Chinese villages.

　　The Thao live today in the villages of T’ou-she and Pu-chi-she close to Sun Moon Lake, although during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they shifted their locality several times due to the encroachment of Chinese settlers, and again in the Japanese colonial period when a hydroelectric dam was begun at Sun Moon Lake in 1934.

　　For their livelihood the Thao depend mainly on agriculture and fishing. In early times their agriculture was based on burning and tilling hillside plots, but with the influx of Chinese farmers into the Sun Moon Lake area in the early nineteenth century the Thao gradually adopted the cultivation of rice in paddy fields, a technique which they learnt from the Chinese. Their staple crops are rice, millet, sweet potatoes and peanuts, and most households also grow maize, tobacco and ginger. For the Thao fishing has the importance that hunting holds for other aboriginal tribes, and the fish and prawns they catch daily provide them with essential income and an important source of food. In the agricultural slack season they do also hunt for game, and the menfolk all set off into the mountains to go hunting after the hunting ceremony which is held at full moon in July. Hunting also plays an important ritual role after the annual harvest ceremony or new year ceremony. Keeping fowl and livestock is another important supplement to each family’s income.

　　The clan,somewhat larger than a family, is the largest unit of kinship among the Thao. Theirs is a patrillineal society, and their clans are organised on patrilineal lines. When the Thao were flourishing, their clans had specific functions in the tribal politics and economy, as well as in the matter of religious duties. The members of a clan living together in one place would constitute a village, and each village community would include one or two smaller clans attached to it. Since the clan was practically synonymous with the village, the clan chief would also be the local headman. This position was passed on from generation to generation. If some important event occurred in the village over which the headman could not decide on his own, he would summon a meeting of the village council, made up of the heads of each household in the village. The Thao have been acculturated both through their early contact with Chinese settlers and through the Japanese presence at the hydroelectric project at Sun Moon Lake. In addition to this outside influence, their frequent uprooting from place to place due to adverse living and hygiene conditions, together with the recent impact of modern society and the modern economic system, have conspired to shatter completely the original social organisation of the Thao and their headman system. However, they still retain the distinctive characteristic of sharing specific types of work among the clan.

　　In all work such as house building, boat-building, sowing and harvesting, other members of the same clan and their neighbours living nearby will join in to lend a hand. This is regarded as a duty among the Thao and no payment is expected, apart from the householder having to treat his helpers to wine, chicken and prok from his own supply. In the same way, help is similarly extended to any other family that has the same kind of work to be done. Men’s and women’s work is strictly divided, with the menfolk generally doing the rougher and more risky tasks in the fields and mountainsides, while the womenfolk tend to be restricted to more exacting or menial work about the home.

　　The Thao new year festival is held on an impressive scale and reaches its climax at full moon in August, the new year activities having got under way beginning with the hunting ceremony in August. A special feature of the new year festivities is the unique Thao custom of singing to the rhythm of pestles. For this, wooden pestles of various sizes and weights are struck against a large flat stone set into the threshing floor. As they sing in chorus to the melodious changing rhythms beaten out by the pestles, they create music of curious beauty.