Some people not 100% Han, researcher says

This article was published by the Taiwan Headlines on June 30, 2006. It reports that according to a scientist, Taiwan might not be as ethnically homogenous as many people believe. In fact, more than six million people in Taiwan are not 100-percent Han Chinese.

Lin Ma-li, a blood researcher at Taiwan's Mackay Hospital, announced her recent research findings at the 2006 Science and Technology Expo. Her research analysed one thousand blood samples. Its results showed that 26 percent of these samples, which might represent six million of Taiwan's inhabitants, are not 100-percent Han descendants. Instead, they have traces of Ping Pu Tribe, or Plains Aboriginal, blood.

"In the 17th century, the Chinese imperial government dispatched many men from the Guangdong or Fujian provinces in China to Taiwan to develop the island. While these men were in Taiwan, a large number of them married aboriginal women," Lin said. "So literally, we are one big family and there is no need for all the faction disputes that are happening right now."

Meanwhile, according to Lee Jin-gui, a linguistic researcher at the Academia Sinica, Taiwan has not only the so-called "diversity of ethnicities", but also a rich variety of languages. This is despite the fact that Mandarin is commonly considered as the dominant and the official language of the country.

According to Lee, there are more than 20 types of Austronesian languages spoken in Taiwan by the aboriginal population. He further noted that Austronesian, the biggest and oldest language family across the Pacific and Indian Ocean, covers at least over 1,000 languages or dialects in the South Pacific and Southeast Asian region.

"It is quite amazing that Taiwan, an island that occupies less than three percent of the world's land mass, contains at least 20 of these languages," Lee said.

According to this article, a display on the various ethnicities in Taiwan will be launched at the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall in Taipei City on July 28, 2006, and will run for two months.