The Import Networks of Tobacco, Tobacco Pipes, and Glass Bead Ornaments into Taiwan Circa the Seventeenth Century: A New Phase of Exchange

The present study attempts to study tobacco, tobacco pipes, glass, beads, and other foreign materials imported into Taiwan by the Spanish and the Dutch, who had followed the Portuguese in their eastward expansion in Asia in pursuit of secure bases for their activities.The research done on the contemporary archaeological sites and ethnological records indicate that during the period of the incursion of international trade powers in the 16th and 17th centuries, the origin of glass bead objects imported into Taiwan expanded to include those from Europe and Japan. Examination of the records on exchanged goods indicates that beads were the favored foreign objects of Taiwan’s aboriginal peoples, who used local products in exchange for them. In addition, tobacco, tobacco pipes and related goods imported into Taiwan at approximately this time were a completely novel element in Taiwanese material culture, and shoud be understood against the background of Columbus’s expedition to the Americas in the 15th century and the subsequent development of tobacco culture and its international dissemination. The authors of the present study have inferred that the Dutch and Spanish played substantial roles in the import of tobacco and the new custom of using pipes for consumption. Some of these objects, due to their larger numbers, were passed down through the ages and became important cultural relics of the aborigines who owned them, such as the gold beads excavated at the Ch’i-wu-lan site. For some of the imported items for which the supply was subsequently cut off, such as tobacco
pipes, aboriginal peoples gradually turned to making their own pipes from pottery, bamboo, or wood as replacements in order to satisfy their smoking habit. These objects would later become core elements of traditional aborigine cultures that came to be recognized and understood
starting from the Japanese colonial period.