Drawing Resistance: Mapping the Entangled Highlands of Taiwan and Thailand
Cetus Chin-Yun Kuo
Special Issue: Plantationocene #5
Editors: Rikey Tenn and Wu Chi-Yu
In 2020, while conducting field research for my film project Cartographer, I found myself deep in the central mountains of Taiwan, an area that remained largely unmapped until the early 20th century. I was drawn by the tensions between state cartography and local epistemologies, as revealed through the layered presences in this terrain: the Truku, whose ancestral ties long predate the map; the Japanese colonials who charted it for empire; the Kuomintang guerrillas from the Golden Triangle resettled here after war; and, more recently, the migrant workers whose presence remains largely undocumented.
Crowning the Central Mountain Range, Cingjing Farm revealed itself in my first glance as a strange geometry of neatly etched fields, parceled into taxable plots. Once known as Drodux, the ancestral land of Seediq communities was seized following the 1930s revolt and renamed Tatsutaka and Miharashi by the Japanese—names that aestheticized surveillance and reflected the area’s new function as artillery outposts. From here, they started military expeditions and later rebranded as a tourist route. The current name, Cingjing, or “reftreshing realm,” was named in the 1960s by Chiang Ching-kuo, a Cold War statesman and heir to Chiang Kai-shek.
According to the Veterans Affairs Council, the mountain farms were established to support the highway’s construction—a U.S.-backed project that stitched military strategy into the island’s spine. The official record is brief: veterans were recruited for mountain farming, then settled here after the road was done. What it omits is everything else.
Overlaying the 1898 and 1906 Japanese colonial maps—foundational to Taiwan’s current land registration system—onto Google Earth satellite images reveals that 32.8% of the island was once classified as terra nullius. © The artist.
When I started conversations with the residents—many of whom were military dependents—I was surprised to discover that their histories did not originate from the more well-known 1949 exodus of mainland Chinese veterans who arrived in Taiwan with the Kuomintang government. Instead, their familial migration stories began far away, in the jungle borderlands of the Golden Triangle.
In 1961, the dissident historian Bo Yang serialized The Alien Realm in a newspaper, introducing the public to the so-called “Lost Army”—a group of Kuomintang holdouts who had refused to surrender after the Communist victory. Originally from Yunnan, these soldiers had fled across the borders into Myanmar, Thailand, and Laos, continuing a guerrilla war that had long since ceased to register on any major geopolitical ledger. Along the way, they married women from Indigenous communities in the hills. That same year, after 12 years of displacement along the Thai-Myanmar-Laos borders and mounting international pressure, part of these forces were evacuated to Taiwan and settled there with logistical support from the United Nations. The landscape I now stood in was the residue of that retreat.
Group photo of veterans and officials from the Veterans Affairs Council and Cingjing Farm in front of the newly built Shouting New Village. © Cingjing Farm.
On a later visit to the farm, I came across a series of photographs depicting second-generation members of the Lost Army returning to the places their fellows had once called “home”. In these images, tea and fruit orchards unfurled in precise rows along mountain ridgelines, and the lingering mist above together conjured a landscape startlingly similar to Cingjing’s alpine landscape. For these descendants, the journey “home” decades after their families’ relocation to Taiwan was no simple homecoming. It meant visiting not only their parents’ birthplaces—scattered across the border villages of China, Thailand, Myanmar, and Laos—but also seeking out the “Chinese villages” still clinging to the frontiers of the Golden Triangle, where those left behind had remained. In finding them, they traced the path not taken, confronting a spectral twin of their own history. What lingered with me was the inexplicable resemblance between the migrant villages of northern Thailand and Cingjing Farm: what histories had conspired to shape these borderlands into such enigmatic reflections of one another, just as their inhabitants are, in fact, estranged siblings?
Vegetable farm built along the hillside at Phatang, a Kuomintang-established village on the Thai-Lao border. © The artist.
Only later did I realize that this sense of resemblance has its conceptual underpinning, grounded in two key scholarly theorizations. In Outcasts of Empire (2017), Paul D. Barclay offers a seminal reading of Japan’s mapping of Taiwan’s mountainous Indigenous territories as a “second-order geobody”—land claimed by the imperial state but governed through exceptional laws that marked it as separate from the rest of Formosa. It is “second-order” because its incorporation was partial, uneven, and structured through difference. Barclay’s intervention draws upon Thongchai Winichakul’s foundational concept of the “geo-body” in Siam Mapped (1994), where he contends that modern cartography did more than reflect political boundaries—it produced them. For the Siamese monarchy, the act of mapmaking was instrumental in imagining numerous semi-autonomous kingdoms into a coherent territorial entity—what would become modern Thailand—long before any actual annexation on the ground took place.
Beyond the conceptual circulation of academic ideas on governance in the histories of Taiwan and Thailand, the communities I trace have themselves moved between these two geobodies—entangling what were once parallel destinies into an intertwined, synchronic evolution of the highland landscapes.
During Qing rule, Taiwan’s inland mountains were marked by Frontier Lines separating Han settlers and Indigenous peoples—an early manifestation of exceptional governance. The official designation Extra-Frontier Border Zone (jiewai bianqu) already inscribed the notion of an externalized periphery into administrative language. Under Japanese colonial rule, these areas were systematically mapped and controlled by military police. After Japan’s retreat, the Kuomintang viewed the mountains as potential communist hideouts and imposed strict surveillance during martial law, limiting access to government-approved personnel. Even today, entry controls and land transaction restrictions tied to Indigenous territories persist. Although the checkpoints are gone and the borders appear erased, their legacy still casts a shadow over the region. In a structurally similar process, the region that once launched the Lost Army—present-day Thailand—was itself being reshaped by modern statecraft, its peripheral landscapes reimagined, absorbed, and subjected to forms of exceptional governance within the cartographic and administrative logic of the nation-state.
Map of Siam by James McCarthy (1900), annotated to show Thailand’s current borders (dark orange) and regions now part of Laos and Malaysia (light orange); this map helped shape Thai nationalist discourse imagining these areas as “lost territories.” The original map included only the light orange outlines. © Osher Map Library Collection.
Following the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India’s completion in 1871, Irish cartographer James McCarthy, who worked under King Rama V from 1881 to 1893, used triangulation to map Siam, producing its first scaled map under the newly established Royal Survey Department. McCarthy’s work took him deep into regions beyond the reach of royal protection, previously charted as terra incognita by other Western cartographers. Beyond his cartographic breakthrough, McCarthy’s personal observations provide the earliest Western accounts of these unmapped territories. His writings notably include detailed records of the Haw wars between the Lao and Chinese Haw Muslims, as well as accounts of highland tribal migrations and trade routes.
Historian O.W. Wolters once characterized the premodern tributary systems of mainland Southeast Asia as mandalas—overlapping concentric circles of power. Prior to cartographic mapping, these mandalas lacked fixed borders, with outer rings often overlapping or leaving certain areas outside direct control. McCarthy’s Siamese map helped impose a more definitive boundary on this fluid political landscape, incorporating regions with contested and shifting control—such as the Left Bank of the Mekong, the southern Indochina Peninsula, and the Shan States along the Burmese border—into a Siamese territorial framework. With this map, Rama V set out to unify Siam, turning fragmented feudal states into a country with clear borders. But control wasn’t immediate. Many remote kingdoms remained contested, and as the wave of communist expansion swept through Indochina, some areas stayed under communist rule until the 1970s.
Meanwhile, Japan’s colonial ambitions in Taiwan took a parallel course. After suppressing early uprisings following the 1895 handover from the Qing, attention turned inward—toward the island’s rugged mountainous spine. In 1897, a 14-soldier expedition ventured into the Central Mountain Range, seeking a route for rail and rule. They vanished without a trace, presumed killed. In response, Japan sealed off the mountains for eight years, banning all trade in salt, iron, and firearms. Over 30% of Taiwan remained uncharted on official maps, marked as a blank zone.
Still from Mt. Tsurugidake (2009), set in 1906 at the start of Japan’s post–Russo-Japanese War expansion, showing army surveys of unexplored areas; that year, Sakuma Samata became Taiwan’s Governor-General and tasked Noro Yasushi with mapping 32.8% of the island’s uncharted areas.
In 1906, under Governor-General Sakuma Samata, Japan appointed Noro Yasushi to resume the stalled surveys. His 1910 expedition to locate the elusive Mount Hehuan—known from Qing-era texts—ended in retreat, defeated by storms, confrontations with Indigenous inhabitants, and deserting guides. But the desire to conquer the interior only deepened. In 1913, despite warnings of incoming weather, Noro led 286 men toward Hehuan’s peak. A blizzard struck. 89 died. It remains the deadliest mountaineering disaster in Taiwan’s history. From today’s vantage, with satellites neatly tracing every contour, the human cost feels surreal. But it reveals the weight of what maps symbolized: power over the unknown.
On the eve of almost every such disaster, the pattern repeated. Indigenous guides foresaw the danger—urging delay, refusing to go on—and turned back to shelter in the valleys. They lived. What passed between them and the expedition leaders in those final disputes can only be imagined. But perhaps, in the heat of those disagreements, one question lingered: What exactly do you believe awaits you at the summit? Some of these Indigenous guides may have been hunters, once tracking game through those very ridgelines, or crossing mountains in search of new homelands. They knew the peaks well enough. The summit was windswept, barren, without water or shelter—there was nothing there. For those who lived with the mountains, meaning lay inward: not in domination but in relationship with the land. Climbing to conquer made no sense.
Even back in Japan, such efforts stirred dissent. Critics questioned the enormous cost of expeditions and armed campaigns—funded from the metropole but yielding uncertain gains. While untapped forests and mineral wealth may have existed, the potential rewards remained uncertain. Could such investments ever justify the expense? Was the risk worth the unknown return?
At 61, Sakuma Samata became the oldest person appointed Governor-General of Taiwan—an unusual choice given his lack of administrative experience. His selection rested solely on his command at the Battle of Macacukes against Paiwan Indigenous forces in the 1874 Taiwan expedition. Upon taking office, Sakuma launched a Five-Year Pacification Plan, sending surveyors across Taiwan’s mountainous interior. The plan aimed to reverse a decade of neglect by mounting the island’s largest military campaign to conquer the last unmapped mountain territories.
After three failed surveying attempts on Hehuan Mountain by Noro, the fourth expedition was personally led by Governor Sakuma himself, who succeeded in reaching the summit. A celebratory photograph was taken at the peak, showing Sakuma and military officers raising their glasses. The history of cartography, here, mirrored the history of island conquest. This survey marked the final piece of reconnaissance before Sakuma’s massive military campaign—the Truku War—an effort to pierce through the heart of the mountains.
At 71, Sakuma personally led the offensive despite opposition to the treacherous route. His plan was to enter the mountains from a central township, then cut eastward through Taiwan’s rugged mountain range, descend through the deep river valley of Taroko, and emerge triumphantly at the eastern port of Hualien. Military necessity aside, the mountain crossing marked a performative sweep of sovereignty across a landscape once unmapped and unconquered.
Following the Taroko War, few regions of terra incognita remained on the map. What followed was an era of infrastructural governance, with roads and communication lines as its veins. Hunting trails once dismissed as mere “beast paths” were widened into troop routes, then formalized into police roads that stitched together remote outposts across the highlands. Children from distant villages were enrolled in Indigenous schools. Villagers traded at official trading posts. Scattered communities near watersheds were gradually resettled into colonial nodes centered on police stations. At the terminus near the gorge, a shrine honored Sakuma, who died one year after the campaign.
Yet resistance simmered. In 1931, the Musha Incident erupted—a fierce Indigenous uprising reminding Japanese authorities that as long as mountain communities remained, so did the threat of rebellion. The response was sweeping: deep interior inhabitants—and even those previously relocated—were moved again, this time into newly built villages at foothills beyond Taroko Gorge. These forced relocations severed Indigenous peoples from ancestral lands that had long nurtured their knowledge and cosmologies.
After World War II, when the Kuomintang assumed control of Taiwan, this trail—renovated as a tourist road for the 1935 Taiwan Exposition—was expanded from 1956 to 1960. Funded by U.S. aid following the Korean War, it was rebuilt as the Central Cross-Island Highway, now accessible by automobile. The highway’s construction involved further forced relocations of Indigenous populations, clearing the way for military veterans to be resettled as farmers. Capitalist logics of extraction and production were thus inscribed upon these once-blank highland spaces, obscuring their previously contested pasts.
From Japanese colonial rule through the Cold War, the upheavals in Taiwan’s mountains echoed similar struggles in Thailand’s borderlands. Beginning in the 1970s, Thai border police sought to eradicate communist forces but struggled to assert control over highlands, which were managed by various ethnic minority groups. Meanwhile, remnants of the Kuomintang Lost Army remained stranded in the Golden Triangle for over a decade. The Thai government tolerated their presence, seeing them as a buffer against communist infiltration. Only after the 1982 battles at Khao Kho and Khao Yai—when the insurgency was declared defeated—did the Lost Army lay down arms and receive citizenships.
As armies need guns and guns need money, opium became the de facto currency in these mountains, turning Mae Salong—the Lost Army’s stronghold—into one of Southeast Asia’s largest heroin refineries by 1971, according to CIA reports. Around that time, the Royal Project was launched to alleviate poverty among hill tribes and eradicate opium cultivation by introducing high-value crops. Mae Salong was renamed Santikhiri, or “Hill of Peace.” Though presented as a humanitarian effort, the project also served to extend control—over communist fighters, ethnic minorities, and the Kuomintang soldiers alike.
Following the battles of Khao Kho and Khao Yai, King Bhumibol of Thailand visits wounded Kuomintang soldiers. The photo was reproduced from the Martyr Shrine in Phatang.
Unsurprisingly, like the U.S.-backed Central Cross-Island Highway in Taiwan, the Royal Project in Thailand was supported by American anti-communist aid. Taiwan ranked as the second-largest foreign aid after the U.S., much of it funneled into programs that, under the guise of refugee and veteran support, served as extensions of the Kuomintang’s propaganda initiatives. These organizations introduced Taiwan’s high-altitude agricultural techniques to northern Thailand’s hills, advancing both agricultural diplomacy and sustaining displaced Kuomintang livelihoods. Highland fruit and tea cultivation were transplanted alongside the infrastructure—roads, electricity, and cultivation technologies.
In Taiwan and Thailand alike, American aid became a financial engine helped drive local government policies that marginalized highland communities—disparagingly labeled “mountain fella” (shanbao) in Taiwan and “hill tribe” (chao khao) in Thailand—by portraying their traditional economic practices, such as swidden agriculture, as technically and culturally backward, reinforcing stereotypes as social problems and justifying state intervention.
The most iconic image of the Royal Project: King Bhumibol, undeterred by hardship, rides on horseback into remote mountain areas lacking paved roads to visit impoverished highland villagers who cultivated opium.
Challenging the allure of a state-centered mentality—one that obscures histories of resistance and facilitates the full incorporation of land and people into modern territorial regimes—scholars have reframed the highlands of Taiwan and Southeast Asia as active terrains of strategic autonomy. In Southeast Asia, James C. Scott famously reconceptualizes hill tribes as strategic actors who deliberately retreated into mountainous regions—what he calls “Zomia”—to evade state control and preserve autonomy. In Taiwan, scholars like Chih-Ming Ka have used colonial land records of state-classified Indigenous groups to investigate cases where communities retreated to the mountains to resist dispossession and assimilation (The Aborigine Landlord, 2001). Complementing this, Tien-fu Shih challenges enduring settler stereotypes of Indigenous society by demonstrating how coercive state policies—such as taxation and forced labor—pushed these groups from the plains into the highlands (The Regional Society of Qing Taiwan, 2001).
When I first visited Cingjing Farm in 2020, the last Lost Army veteran had passed. Left behind were the women they married during their years in the Golden Triangle: Indigenous to the region, and now the final living storytellers. In their eighties, they are addressed fondly in Yunnan dialect by the village’s younger generations. Yet the histories they recount differ strikingly from the narratives portrayed in media and documentaries about the Lost Army. In their version, they are not the last torchbearers of Chinese culture in exile: national borders were scarcely present, and the concept of nation barely existed in their minds. Constant relocation between the mountains—driven by shifting cultivation, gathering, and trade—was an ordinary part of life, as familiar as the sounds traveling across the border river that formed their daily soundscape.
In a classroom at the Phatang Home School, a teacher uses textbooks from Taiwan to teach traditional Chinese characters.
The women married to Lost Army husbands came from diverse ethnic groups, each speaking different languages; yet they shared a common tongue from their childhood trading days—the Tai language. However, their children mostly communicate in the Yunnan dialect, a Chinese dialect spoken by their fathers. Although their birthplaces appear close to one another on a map’s aerial view, the mountainous terrain and natural barriers separate these locations. The regions now politically divided into Myanmar, Thailand, China, and Laos have, over the past sixty years, undergone continuous shifts through various forms of resistance and changing relations with ruling powers—dynamics that persist to this day.
In 2024, after knowing these aunties for four years, I finally set foot on the “blurry-border” lands they spoke of and met the other half of their story: those who didn’t leave with the guerrillas and ultimately settled in Thailand. Interestingly, in these Chinese villages, large commemorative monuments such as the Martyrs’ Shrine and Chinese schools displaying the flag of the Republic of China alongside portraits of Sun Yat-sen and the Thai king stand as symbols easily recognized by outsiders. Yet, the villagers’ daily lives are woven with Thai, Burmese, Tai, and various minority languages. Although most third-generation Lost Army descendants attended Mandarin schools funded by Taiwan, their fluency in Mandarin has faded after studying at Thai universities.
At a local tea plantation, advertising banners feature women in traditional Akha and Lahu attire picking tea—inviting tourists to dress up and pose for photographs.
According to the principal of the village’s Mandarin school, the students most eager to learn Mandarin today tend to be from minority groups, many without direct family ties to the Lost Army community. Take Adit (pseudonym), whom I met at the Royal Project Farm. He’s from an ethnic minority and learned Mandarin at school, just enough to get by.
Adit used to work in a jewelry shop in Bangkok, where his limited Mandarin skills gave him a surprising edge with the many Chinese tourists—he actually outsold his coworkers who didn’t speak the language. A few years back, he had to return home to look after his elderly mother. That meant his income took a big hit. But fate led him to a new role at the Royal Project Farm. Now, he spends his days traveling to nearby farming villages, talking with farmers, and reporting on what they’re planting and how much. Before he explained all this to me in Mandarin, Adit politely checked with the farm manager—an educated, city-born Thai man. Adit considers himself lucky to have been offered the position after returning home. The pay doesn’t match what he earned in Bangkok’s jewelry business, but it offers something more valuable—balance between work and family. Pointing to the mountains, he described how, in certain seasons, he hops on his motorbike and makes his rounds, checking which villages plan to sell seedlings to the Royal Project and estimating their harvest yields. Later, he led me to the workers’ dormitory behind the farm, where he casually chatted with other resting employees in a mix of languages and introduced me to a few migrant workers from Myanmar.
Sis Ing, a second-generation descendant of the Lost Army, owns Mae Salong’s most celebrated tea plantation. When I first inquired about her family’s history of displacement, she revealed a flicker of impatience, as if weary of recounting the same stories. “If you want to know about the past, just visit the Martyr Shrine and see the photos,” she said. This guarded attitude is common among many Lost Army descendants in the region.
Inside the well-known Tea Plantation 101 shop in Mae Salong, a photograph displays a woman in a qipao demonstrating traditional tea-brewing techniques.
Rather than dwelling on history, Sis Ing is focused on sustaining her tea plantation amid a waning enthusiasm for “tea from Taiwan” grown in Mae Salong. She spoke proudly of once telling a visiting Thai princess how she had “smuggled tea seedlings from Taiwan,” nurturing the mother plants that now flourish across every tea garden in the area. Yet, both tea cultivation and the homestay business—the twin pillars of Mae Salong’s economy—are now facing significant challenges. Drawing inspiration from a recent business exchange trip to Kunming, Sis Ing envisions a new direction: transforming Mae Salong’s plantations into immersive tea culture destinations. Her plan integrates tea picking, tasting sessions, tea-infused cuisine, and garden lodging into a cohesive, engaging experience for visitors.
As she shared her vision, my gaze drifted to a framed instructional video on the wall. It featured a woman clad in a Chinese gown, styled with early Republican-era curls, demonstrating the steps of Chinese tea appreciation, accompanied by English subtitles explaining each gesture. Meanwhile, her niece fluently narrated the Kuomintang’s settlement history to a group of Chinese tourists, who listened attentively while sipping tea served in the style of a traditional ceremony. When the Chinese visitors departed, a Thai family arrived, and Sis Ing switched swiftly to Thai, enthusiastically guiding them through the plantation. She pointed out photos of Lahu women in traditional ethnic dress harvesting tea leaves, then led the family to a shop corner adorned with vibrant minority costumes and elaborate headdresses, inviting them to dress up and capture memories amidst the tea gardens.
It struck me then: labels like Lost Army or hill tribes have become marketable symbols—signposts for outsiders to grasp. In these layered tales of identity, the ability to shift between multiple roles has become a strategy for survival. Even now, with borders reinforced by checkpoints and patrolled by the police, people in these border zones seemed to echo the activities of their ancestors, weaving through the cracks of state structures, navigating overlapping imaginaries of languages, identities, and places.
As Thongchai Winichakul describes in Siam Mapped, premodern Indochina was not enclosed by fixed borders, but shaped by radiating fields of power—like candlelight cast from a supreme overlord. The small tributary states, or muang, did not belong to a single sovereign, but existed in overlapping zones where multiple candles cast their light. It is within these interstitial spaces that people moved—then and now—navigating among competing systems and shifting authorities. Their movements trace quiet lines of resistance through the flickering glow of entangled dominions.