Displaced by a typhoon, Taiwan’s Bunun people fear for the future of their culture

Nestled high on a mountain slope in southern Taiwan, Tengjhih was a key settlement of the Bunun Indigenous people. Today, however, little remains but memories of the hamlet. 

Wild grass sprouts around abandoned houses. Stray dogs have made the empty streets their territory. The children’s toys and chairs scattered across the ground hint at a hurried departure.

Bunun leader Dahu Ismahasan is visibly moved as he looks at what is left of his village. 

“When we were children, we played here. We were happy, innocent,” he says. 

But “now the village is destroyed,” says Dahu, who is president of the Bunun tribal council. 

Dahu and fellow villagers had to leave Tengjhih in the wake of Typhoon Morakot, which killed 755 people in 2009 across Taiwan. The deadliest storm in the island’s recorded history brought torrential rainfall, causing floods and landslides primarily in mountainous Indigenous territories.

At the time, Indigenous peoples accounted for only 2.1% of Taiwan’s total population; yet in the aftermath of Morakot, around 70% of areas deemed unsafe by the government were located in Indigenous territories. 

Nobody in Tengjhih died during Morakot, but the typhoon destroyed the only road leading to the hamlet. 

With Tengjhih declared a “high-risk zone”, authorities in 2009 began permanently resettling its 150 residents, mostly in surrounding lower-elevation areas like Kaohsiung, Taiwan’s third-largest city, and Liouguei District, Dahu says. 

Morakot also displaced other highland Indigenous communities such as the Tsou, the Paiwan and the Rukai. Like the Bunun, they were also resettled in lower-altitude areas.

Typhoon season typically runs from July through September in Taiwan. Climate change has led to more destructive levels of rainfall during these months, wreaking havoc on efforts to rebuild and reopen the road to Tengjhih. 

Authorities halted repairs shortly after a typhoon in 2012 washed away a section of the road. Attempts to fix the route faced another setback in 2021, also due to extreme weather.

In 2023, 14 years after Morakot, the road was finally rebuilt. But just a few months later, another typhoon washed it away. Repeated torrential rains, intensified by climate change, saturated the mountain soil, triggering landslides and putting the settlement at risk. In 2025, another typhoon tore away yet another section of the mountainside.

Preserving cultural heritage

Dahu, 60, now lives in Liouguei, but still makes occasional trips to his ancestral home to reconnect with the mountain. 

It is a risky journey. To reach Tengjhih, he has to drive along an alternative mountain road that’s narrow and has no safety barriers.

On the way back, he makes a stop at the neighboring hamlet of Erjituan to visit his 85-year-old mother, Clrenge Ismahasan. Erjituan and Tengjhih are two of the three hamlets that make up Baoshan village, home to the Tengjhih Forest Recreation Area.  

In a school classroom, Clrenge and two other elderly Bunun women sit at a table drawing as they listen to traditional Indigenous songs.

Dahu’s mother, who moved to Erjituan after Morakot, still has vivid memories of the day the typhoon struck. “That day, it was pouring,” she tells Mongabay. “Everything was flooded. We couldn’t get down from the mountain.”

She remembers that in Tengjhih, people grew corn, millet and beans. “The men would go hunting and come back two or three days later.”

When asked what they miss most about their ancestral home, the women all look down at their drawings and give no answers.

“It’s too painful for them,” Dahu says. “They know they will never see the village again in their lifetime.”

For the Bunun people, the connection to ancestors is a pillar of their identity. Dahu, who now lives in Liouguei, says returning to their ancestral land is important, as it allows them to preserve traditional rituals and knowledge, from hunting and gathering to cultural practices and ways of teaching younger generations.

Nearly 20 years after the typhoon, Dahu and other villagers still regularly write to the local government to make their case. They are still hoping — and fighting — to return home. 

“If this village disappears, our people will disappear too,” Dahu says.

Clrenge says she harbors the same wish. “If we can’t return to the village, who is going to pass on these practices?” 

Back in Tengjhih, Saminat Maliklan is one of five residents who still refuse to relocate, choosing to stay in her small wooden house that was spared by the typhoon. 

As she prepares tea made from leaves picked from her garden, she looks at her 11-year-old granddaughter visiting from Kaohsiung, a city around 60 kilometers away. 

To preserve her culture, Saminat, a Bunun cultural guide, teaches traditional songs and the Bunun language to children in the community.

“I pass on everyday Bunun practices to my granddaughter: carrying wood, pulling weeds, planting things,” she says. “And when it comes to language, I try as much as possible to speak with her in our mother tongue.”

Fading connection

Traditionally, young Bunun people would leave the mountains to study at secondary schools and universities in the lowlands, then return to the village to settle down and start families. However, they no longer have that choice.

“Today, when they come back, there is no village and no work,” says 55-year-old Saminat.

Instead, they are uprooted from their ancestral land, she adds: “They have to adapt to an unfamiliar environment, and their ties with elders gradually fade. Our rituals and ceremonies are disappearing.” 

Tengjhih’s economy mainly relied on tourism and agriculture. Morakot and successive typhoons have not only destroyed the access road but also forced the government to indefinitely close the surrounding Tengjhih forest area, which supported livelihoods.

For people like Bi’ Ismahasan, who grows tea and coffee in a settlement near Tengjhih and runs a small business catering to tourists, these sources of income are no longer viable.

“When a major typhoon hits us, I have no income for the entire year,” says the 70-year-old woman. “In 2026, I lost my entire harvest. Every year is worse than the previous one.

“I lost all the customers who used to come to visit Tengjhih. Today, I survive on government assistance.”

Her children and grandchildren all now live in Kaohsiung.

“In the cities, young people from the same communities form associations and organize cultural activities so they don’t forget our seasonal rituals,” Bi’ tells Mongabay. “But deep down, I’m afraid that the emotional connection will slowly fade.” 

There are also worries of spiritual disconnect. “Our children will no longer be able to bury us in the mountains,” Dahu says. “And our souls will not be able to return to our ancestral land. We will be condemned to wander far away. It’s truly pitiful, isn’t it?”

No prior consultation

In 2005, four years before Morakot, Taiwan passed the Indigenous Peoples Basic Law, of which Article 21 explicitly establishes the principle of “free, prior and informed consent” (FPIC) for Indigenous tribes. It stipulates that the government must consult with tribes and obtain their consent before carrying out development projects on Indigenous lands.

“But in the case of the Bunun, the relocation of the villages was decided without prior consultation,” says Tunkan Tansikian, a Bunun and an Indigenous rights and policy scholar at National Dong Hwa University. “This naturally led to a loss of trust in the government.”  

A report published in April 2022 by Taiwan’s Control Yuan, the government’s audit office, recommended incorporating Indigenous perspectives and traditional knowledge into the reassessment of sites at risk from natural disasters. The government responded with reforms, which the Control Yuan summarized in a report in May 2026. However, the document does not list all at-risk settlements and does not name Tengjhih.

Indigenous communities have heavily criticized the Morakot resettlement program. Families receive ownership of the apartments they are given, according to news reports, but not of the land on which the buildings stand. As a result, they cannot sell, expand or rebuild their homes.

“The purpose of the resettlement program was to persuade residents to abandon their mountain villages, which were considered dangerous, in order to reduce safety risks,” Tunkan says. 

“For Indigenous peoples, however, land is a core part of their culture, rather than being treated as a tradable and easily relinquished commodity, as mainstream society does.”

The Taoyuan District Office, which oversees Tengjhih, has ruled out allowing the Bunun to resettle in their ancestral home. 

“The site is not suitable for habitation due to landslides, and the option under consideration would be to let residents build a temporary shelter there for short stays, without settling permanently,” it tells Mongabay. 

Dahu disagrees, saying that authorities have cited no in-depth geotechnical study to justify their refusal, instead simply invoking the risk of landslides.

After years of campaigning, he eventually secured the construction of an alternative road that would provide, at least, access to the settlement. It is scheduled to open in January 2027, he says. Despite the hope it has brought, continued climate instability makes its opening uncertain.

“We still have hope,” Dahu says. “The wind and rain won’t last forever. One day, the road will be better, and the lives of the people here will be better too. We keep that hope in our prayers.”

Banner image: Taiwan’s Bunun leader Dahu Ismahasan stands with the damaged road to Tengjhih in the background on Aug. 6, 2026. Image by Aylin Ho for Mongabay.

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