“The Homeless Coast” The 1877 Cepo’ War

In 1999 Lekal Makor, the head of an Indigenous Amis community in Taiwan, recorded their oral history. He recounted an 1877 ambush by Qing soldiers at a banquet in the Amis village of Cepo’. The events of the massacre in modern day Hualien have been buried for more than a century. The Cepo’ War is a deliberate gap in official historical records; remembered only in the stories told by Indigenous elders. No one is sure where the story began, but it continues to this day. In 2022, the Amis called upon their ancestors to help uncover the truth buried in their village. But some members of the community were unsure about digging up the past…