Mark Murphy
Image Credit No Known Restrictions: From the Carpenter Collection at the Library of Congress
Sometimes the vocabulary of geopolitics renders the island of Taiwan as an abstraction. But an island is not an abstraction. It is a body: ridged with mountains that arose out of the collision of tectonic plates, veined with rivers, scarred by earthquake and typhoon, inhabited by peoples whose own bodies carry the sedimented memory of everything that has happened there. To think about healing in Taiwan — the healing of cultural trauma, the work of a society learning to metabolise its own history — is to think about the relation between two maps: the map of the land and the map of the body. Neither can be redrawn without the other.
A Palimpsest of Occupations
Taiwan’s history reads like a geological core sample. At the base lie the Austronesian peoples, whose ancestors settled the island thousands of years before any written record, and whose languages radiated outward across the Pacific — so that Taiwan is, in a real sense, the ancestral hearth of half an ocean’s worth of cultures. Above that stratum: the Dutch and Spanish trading forts of the seventeenth century, then the Zheng regime, then two centuries of Qing administration that pushed indigenous communities steadily up into the mountains. Then fifty years of Japanese colonial rule, which built railways and schools and sugar mills while conducting punitive campaigns into the highlands. Then 1945, and the arrival of the Chinese Nationalist government — greeted at first as liberation and revealed within eighteen months as something else.
On 28 February 1947, the beating of a widow selling contraband cigarettes in Taipei ignited an island-wide uprising, which the Nationalist state answered with massacre. The 228 Incident, as it came to be called with terrible bureaucratic flatness, killed thousands — many of them the island’s educated elite, doctors and lawyers and teachers deliberately hunted down. Two years later came martial law, and with it the White Terror: thirty-eight years of surveillance, disappearance, imprisonment, and execution, the longest period of martial law any society had then endured. For four decades it was not merely dangerous to speak of these things; it was dangerous to be known to remember them. The trauma was not only inflicted — it was silenced, driven underground. And this is an important point, because trauma that cannot be spoken does not disappear. It relocates. It moves elsewhere in the body. It becomes somatic, and it becomes generational.
The Body as Archive
Psychotherapy in the last several decades has rediscovered what contemplative traditions never forgot: that the body keeps its own records. What cannot be symbolised is held in muscle and viscera, in patterns of breath and posture, in the startle response of a grandmother who will not say why she startles. Cultural trauma works the same way at scale. A society that has muddled access to its own history develops a kind of collective proprioceptive distortion — it no longer knows quite where its limbs are, what belongs to it, what its own name is. Taiwan’s long crisis of identity, endlessly discussed in political-science registers, is at root this kind of somatic disorientation: the confusion of a body told for generations that it was really some other body, that its map was a province of a larger map, that its memories were seditious.
The Lacanian insight here is that trauma is precisely what falls outside inscription on the map — the Real that resists the signifier — and that healing is not the erasure of the wound but its inscription on maps: the slow, painful work of bringing what happened into the shared symbolic order where it can finally be mourned rather than merely repeated. This is why the lifting of martial law in 1987 was only the beginning of healing. Just as healing in the body – as acupuncture systems show – comes by knowing its subtleties, the same applies to the land as body and our relation to it.
Transitional Justice as Symbolisation
And Taiwan, remarkably, has done a great deal of this inscription. The 228 Peace Memorial Park in Taipei, established in the 1990s, transformed the very ground of the uprising into a site of public mourning. Presidential apologies were issued — first for 228, later, in 2016, to the indigenous peoples for four centuries of dispossession, the first apology of its kind by a head of state in Asia. A Transitional Justice Commission was established in 2018 to open the files of the security state, exonerate the convicted, remove the symbols of authoritarianism, and locate the political imagination of the victims within the national story. The old military detention centre at Jingmei and the prison on Green Island — where political prisoners were held offshore, exiled within their own country — became human rights memorial parks, places where schoolchildren now walk through the cells.
Transitional justice in Taiwan has been contested, partisan and incomplete. The commission itself was wound down amid controversy; perpetrators were named far more rarely than victims were compensated; and the deepest wounds — the indigenous ones — remain the least addressed. But the structural achievement is real, and it is best understood not only in the language of policy but in the language of therapy. What Taiwan has been doing is converting acting-out into working-through: taking a history that could only repeat itself as symptom — as silence, as denial, as the frozen politics of the martial-law decades — and giving it words, monuments, dates in the calendar, places on the map. A memorial is a signifier planted in the earth, like an acupuncture needle. It says: here, this happened, and we know it happened.
Counter-Mapping: The Land Speaks Back
The map itself, though, was one of the instruments of the wound, and so the map must be part of the cure. Qing surveys drew a boundary line beyond which the ‘raw savages’ of the mountains were placed outside civilisation; Japanese cartographers mapped the highlands as a prelude to subduing them; the Nationalist state re-named streets across the island for the cities of a mainland most Taiwanese had never seen, so that people walked every day through a phantom geography of somewhere else — a map of loss imposed on the map of home.
Against this, one of the most quietly radical practices in contemporary Taiwan is indigenous counter-mapping. Under the framework of the Indigenous Peoples Basic Law, communities have undertaken surveys of their traditional territories — walking the old hunting grounds with elders, recording the true names of rivers and ridgelines, plotting sacred sites and abandoned village terraces onto maps that are then asserted against the cadastral grid of the state. The map is the trace of an embodied practice, a score for future walking.
Here place and body reveal themselves as a single system. Trauma severed the connection — removal from land, prohibition of language, the reclassification of homeland as state forest — and healing proceeds by walking the connection back into existence, step by step, name by name.
Pilgrimage: Healing at Walking Pace
If counter-mapping is the political form of this practice, pilgrimage is its devotional form, and Taiwan possesses one of the great walking cultures of the modern world. Every spring, the Dajia Mazu pilgrimage sets out from Zhenlan Temple in Taichung: nine days, some three hundred and forty kilometres through the towns and rice fields of the western plain, hundreds of thousands joining the route — kneeling on the asphalt so that the goddess may pass over their bodies, fed and tended by strangers in every village. In recent years it has been rivalled by the Baishatun Mazu pilgrimage, which in 2026 drew a record 460,000 devotees — and which has no fixed route: the way is decided as it is walked, the palanquin’s swaying read as the will of the goddess. A map improvised across the land, year by year — the surveyor’s grid turned inside out. Both pilgrimages survived the martial-law decades, folk religion proving too capillary, too rooted in ten thousand local temples, for the state to fully police.
Consider what the pilgrimage actually does, phenomenologically. It takes the map of the island and converts it into duration and effort. It binds body to place by inscribing shared ordeal and with it, the possibility of healing. Pilgrimage is the antithesis of dissociation. It is nine days of being unavoidably, exhaustingly present, in company, on home ground, moving toward a shrine.
The Fault Line and the Vigil
Taiwan sits on a fault line, and its people know in their bodies what it means for the ground itself to convulse — the earthquake of 21 September 1999 killed thousands and left a ruptured school preserved at Wufeng as a museum, the buckled running track and collapsed classrooms held in permanent witness. There is something exemplary in that choice: not to clear the rubble and rebuild over it, but to keep the wound visible. It is the geological version of what the society has attempted with its political wounds, and it suggests the deeper truth that Taiwan’s various healings share. The island cannot make the fault line go away. The past cannot be made not to have happened. What can be done — all that can ever be done — is to bring the rupture into the symbolic order: to map it, name it, memorialise it, walk it, and thereby transform it from a repetition that seizes the body unawares into a story the body can carry.
This is why Taiwan is important for thinking about cultural trauma and healing. Trauma, after all, is a dismemberment: it severs limb from body, name from place, generation from generation, until a people no longer knows the shape of its own flesh. What the map offers — the memorial marked, the territory walked, the river re-named — is the possibility of ‘re-membering’ in the oldest sense: not merely recalling the past but putting the members back on the body, joint by joint, place by place, until the island can feel itself whole again.
Mark Gerard Murphy is an academic and lecturer in theology and philosophy and also a practitioner of martial arts. He is the author of several academic books and articles.