According to Taian township office statistics, with the death of Wu the number of the township’s Atayals with facial tattoos shrank to four, all aged between 85 and 91. Only two years ago there were nine, but the number was going down fast, according to a township official. Just two months before Wu’s death, another face-tattooed Atayal centenarian, Lin Yin-mei, also passed away at the age of 105 in her village in the mountainous Wufeng Township of Hsinchu County.

Before their deaths Wu and Lin, both of whom had their faces tattooed when they were 13 years old, were designated as living national treasures because of the traditional Atayal adornment on their faces. Their passing is an indication that this long-observed tradition of the Atayal tribe is rapidly disappearing and may very soon be a thing of the past.

Facial tattooing

Facial tattooing is a traditional custom among the Atayals, the second largest aboriginal tribal group in Taiwan after the Amis. Their current population is about 80,000, and their tribesmen are extensively spread throughout mountains 600 to 2000 meters above sea level from Jen-ai Rural Township in the mountainous area of Nantou to Hualien and Yilan counties in the east.

The custom of tattooing faces is believed to date back about 1,400 years and was once practiced by several local tribes including the Atayal, Saisiyat, Seediq and Truku. According to cultural writer Ma Teng-yueh, the Saisiyats started tattooing their faces largely as "the inevitable result of protecting themselves against a stronger enemy,” as the tribe live quite close to the stronger Atayals.

Also, the Truku and Seediq were traditionally known as branches of the Atayal, and it was only very recently that they were finally recognized as the 12th and 14th of Taiwan’s fourteen officially recognized indigenous tribes. Thus the pan-Atayals are actually the only tribes among all the indigenous tribes in Taiwan to have carried on the inherent custom of facial tattooing.

Unlike the practice in traditional Han Chinese culture, where facial tattooing has negative associations and is done only on criminals’ faces to serve as a warning telling others not to commit crimes, to the Atayal the practice functions to differentiate ethnicity and it also conveys serious social meanings. It is one of their most important customs and social practices in traditional tribal village life.

The origin of facial tattooing among the Atayal

Where does this facial-tattooing practice come from? Anthropologists tend to believe that the questions can be answered in the myths and legends of the Atayals. The first legend regarding the origin of facial tattooing is the tribe’s equivalent of the Adam and Eve story. The Atayal believe that heaven and earth first took form in a giant rock which girdled the “Papakwaka,” known today as Dabajian Mountain. Two people, a sister and a brother, were born from the rock.

The two lived together for a long time, but as time went by, the sister began to worry about how to reproduce the human race. So she suggested to her brother that they marry. As the move was a clear act of incest, the brother rejected her proposal. The sister was forced to make up a plan to deceive her brother. One day she told him that the next day a woman would be waiting for him at the foot of the mountain. She was to be his wife.

The brother believed her.

On the following day the sister took some black ashes and wiped her face with them, then waited at the foot of the mountain until her brother finally showed up. He failed to recognize her as his sister and the two had sexual relations, and the human race was able to multiply.

From that time on, custom demanded that all women must have a tattoo on their faces before they could marry.

Another story concerning the origin of tattoos is that once upon a time, many young Atayal girls died mysteriously one after another. The Atayal were frightened, as they could not find a way to stop the serial deaths.

One night a girl in the village had a dream in which a deity appeared before her, telling her that if she wanted to avoid dying in the epidemic, she had to tattoo her face. The next day, she told everyone in the village about the heavenly instructions. But no one knew how to tattoo. Finally, one clever man used burnt pine wood to draw a pattern on a piece of women's clothing, and taught it to all the women in the village. Then he used a thin needle to tattoo the pattern onto their faces, covering their faces with black soot afterward so that the colors would not fade.

As the girl had been told in her dream, once the Atayal women began tattooing their faces, the continuous inexplicable deaths ceased. Thus the custom of tattooing faces spread throughout the Atayal, and has been passed down to the present day.

A coming of age ritual

According to anthropological studies, facial tattooing is both an important ceremony in an Atayal’s life and a social requirement that both men and women have to undergo. Traditionally, every Atayal man and woman is supposed to go through this custom between the ages of 5 to 15.

Before they can earn a tattoo on their faces, however, each man has to show that he can be successful in hunting, including headhunting. For the Atayal women, they must master the all-important skill of weaving. Those without facial tattoos are not allowed to get married, an indication of the importance of the practice.

It is hard to imagine, however, how painful the experience of facial tattooing must have been, especially in ancient times without sufficient medical attention. In the words of many old persons talking about the experience, the joint impression is nothing other than "pain, so painful that you'd rather die."

At the same time, the painful process serves as a rite of passage, since if you can survive such a severe test you are qualified to enter into manhood and womanhood and begin a new stage of life.

The process of facial tattooing

When an Atayal reaches the age for having their faces tattooed, their parents determine the exact date for the procedure through dream interpretations by a shaman. They then invite a tattooist to accomplish the task. In the Atayal tribe, the tattooists were all women. The profession was passed from mother to daughter and was considered a sacred job. Only a virtuous woman could be a tattooist

Before the actual tattooing take place, the tattooist would first ask the one about to get tattoo if he or she was a virgin. If the subject lied about it, he or she would be cursed and the tattoo would become festered and infected. The method used in facial tattooing was to press linen threads into the charcoal ashes of burned pine trees, then draw a pattern on the cheeks.

They then laid a bundle of iron needles on the pattern and pounded them with a wooden hammer called an "adut" in the Atayal language. The needle tips pierced the skin, a process which was repeated two or three times at every spot. Then the wounds were sprinkled with charcoal ashes to make the black color settle in.

This painful process usually took more than ten hours, from dawn to dusk, to finish the complicated lattice patterns of a woman’s tattoo. The patterns for males were simpler, covering only the forehead and under the lips, and therefore took less time. After the tattoo was done, the artist was rewarded with precious gifts.

For the first 10 to 20 days after tattooing the woman's face would remain swollen and she would have difficulty swallowing food. She could only drink water or porridge through a wooden straw. Until the wounds were healed, those who had been freshly tattooed were forbidden to go out to prevent the wounds from infection, and no one except family members could visit them. If everything went well, in about half a month, when the wounds had healed and scabbed over, deep blue or black patterns appeared on the initiate’s face, a mark that would accompany him or her to the graveyard.

The demise and rebirth of the facial tattoo tradition

This one and most important Atayal tradition was banned, however, after the Japanese arrived to govern the island. Not only did the Japanese forbid the Atayal from having their faces tattooed, they often forced those who already had tattoos to undergo a painful tattoo removal process.

Though the Kuomintang government did not ban facial tattooing after the departure of the Japanese, the ancient practice had already gradually begun to fade away following the introduction of Christianity, which began during the Japanese occupation and continued to spread widely among the tribes during the 1950s. The entrance of monotheism into the villages completely broke down the Atayal's polytheistic faith and the system of ancestor worship.

This led to the total abandonment of facial tattooing for a long period of time. And in recent years, as shown in the example of the two centenarians Wu and Lin, the passing of many elderly Atayals with face tattoos could literally be the death knell for the thousand-year-old practice.

It seems now to be only a matter of time before the ancient tradition just dies away. And yet there is a new generation of Atayals who are striving to preserve the long-kept tradition of their tribe. In January 2008, a young Atayal couple, Shayun Foudu and her husband, underwent the full facial tattooing tradition, making them the first two to observe the almost-extinct Atayal custom in nearly a century.

The 33-year-old woman, Shayun Foudu, had the shape of a large "V" tattooed on her face in a ceremony at a tourist resort in Taroko National Park in Hualien County. "Facial tattooing is an old cultural tradition of the Atayal tribe. I feel very proud to have a tattoo on my face," she told reporters.

Foudu said that traditionally, when a young Atayal man married his young bride, the man would also have his face tattooed as a propitious sign of the couple's wish for a long-lasting marriage. Foudu, a native of Fuhsing Township, Taoyuan County, said that she and her Atayal husband both have facial tattoos and are proud to "finally have done something" to help preserve an Atayal tradition.

The tattoo artist used modern tattooing techniques to put the pigments on Foudu's face, a procedure which took two hours. In the old days, tattooing was done with needles, with ashes applied to the wounds in a long and painful process.
Foudu said she hopes that their action will help society to adopt a more open mind about facial tattoos.