- published: 19 Aug 2010
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Hualien County is the largest county in Taiwan and is located on the mountainous eastern coast of Taiwan. It contains the island's largest port. It is the starting point of the Hualien-Taitung Line and the terminal point of North-Link Line of TRA. For the Provincial highway System, Hualien has the connection of Suhua Highway, Huatung Highway, Hualien-Taitung Coast Highway and the Central Cross-Island Highway. Hualien County also contains part of Taroko National Park and Yushan National Park.
The seat of Hualien County is Hualien City.
Hualien was originally called Kilai (奇萊) by the native Austronesian inhabitants of Taiwan. Spanish settlers arrived in 1622 to pan for gold. Picking up the sounds of native words, these settlers called the area "Turumoan" (多羅滿). Han Chinese settlers arrived in 1851. Qing Dynasty record the name of the region as "Huilan" (洄瀾 "eddies") due to the whirling of waters in the delta.
During Taiwan's Japanese colonial period (1985-1945) the island's Japanese governors opted not to transliterate the name "Kilai" as the Japanese pronunciation of the word resembled the Japanese word for "disgusting" (嫌い). The official name became "Karen" (花蓮; かれん). Toward the end of World War II the Governor-General of Taiwan moved many Japanese residents of Taiwan to the area to develop agriculture.
Taiwanese aborigines (Chinese: 原住民; pinyin: yuánzhùmín; Wade–Giles: yüan2-chu4-min2; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: gôan-chū-bîn; literally "original inhabitants") is the term commonly applied in reference to the indigenous peoples of Taiwan. Although Taiwanese indigenous groups hold a variety of creation myths, recent research suggests their ancestors may have been living on the islands for approximately 8,000 years before major Han Chinese immigration began in the 17th century (Blust 1999). Taiwanese aborigines are Austronesian peoples, with linguistic and genetic ties to other Austronesian ethnic groups, such as peoples of the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Madagascar, Polynesia, and Oceania (Hill et al. 2007; Bird, Hope & Taylor 2004). The issue of an ethnic identity unconnected to the Asian mainland has become one thread in the discourse regarding the political status of Taiwan.
For centuries, Taiwan's aboriginal peoples experienced economic competition and military conflict with a series of colonizing peoples. Centralized government policies designed to foster language shift and cultural assimilation, as well as continued contact with the colonizers through trade, intermarriage and other dispassionate intercultural processes, have resulted in varying degrees of language death and loss of original cultural identity. For example, of the approximately 26 known languages of the Taiwanese aborigines (collectively referred to as the Formosan languages), at least ten are extinct, five are moribund (Zeitoun & Yu 2005:167) and several are to some degree endangered. These languages are of unique historical significance, since most historical linguists consider Taiwan to be the original homeland of the Austronesian language family (Blust 1999).