A few days ago I stumbled onto something interesting.
There’s this conversation happening online about how young people feel lonely these days. Everything is online, nothing offline. No real communities anymore.
And it got me thinking in a different direction.
Look, loneliness isn’t a new problem. Hundreds of years ago, people felt it too. They just called it something else. When you’re displaced, when you migrate to somewhere foreign with no relatives, no neighbors—that’s basically “social anxiety” by today’s standards.
I was recently digging through the Revised Taiwan Provincial Chronicles, specifically the section on customs and rituals. And I found some genuinely fascinating stuff.
These archives aren’t recording “superstition” in any simple sense. What I read there was more like a complete algorithm for “how to keep strangers alive on foreign soil.”
Let me explain what I mean.
Taiwan’s kind of special.
During the Ming and Qing dynasties, massive waves of migrants came over from Fujian and Guangdong. Most of them came alone. They weren’t just dealing with an unfamiliar environment—they were facing epidemics, gang fights, natural disasters, and extremely high mortality rates.
Think about it. A person with no relatives, no family network, trying to survive in this kind of setting. What did they have?
Rituals. Customs. The things that look like superstition but are actually “social glue.”
The Seasonal Festivals section records Taiwan’s annual rhythm. From the “Opening of the Year” on New Year’s Day to the “Farewell to the Old Year” on Lunar New Year’s Eve, every month had its specific ceremonial activities.
On the surface, these rituals look like worshipping gods. But actually?
Let me be real with you—they’re more like “scheduled group dinners” and “collective therapy sessions.”
The Dragon Boat Festival falls in the fifth lunar month, traditionally called “toxic month.” The archives record all kinds of “warding off evil” methods. Collecting mugwort and calamus, hanging noon-time talismans, drinking noon-time water. You probably think this is superstition, right? But think about it—in an era without running water or any concept of sanitation, rules like “don’t do construction in the fifth month” and “take herb baths” were actually some form of public health education.
The genius part? Wrapping this knowledge in “divine commandments.” Benefits? Low implementation cost. No government campaigns needed, no experts required. Common people spread it and followed it on their own.
There’s a term for this in sociology, I can’t remember exactly, but you get what I’m saying.
Then there’s the “theft customs” during Lantern Festival.
The archives record sayings like “steal green onions, marry a good husband.” The idea was, on Lantern Festival night, you could steal someone else’s green onions, and if you did, you’d find a good husband. There were also things like “steal radish, give birth to a boy.”
You know what this really is? “Collective stress relief.”
All year you live by the rules. Then comes Lantern Festival, and there’s this one “small collective transgression” that’s socially acceptable. Steal a green onion, pick some vegetables—no one’s actually calling the cops. This “safety valve” mechanism let people release pressure. Year after year, social tensions got消化掉.
You telling me the people who designed this weren’t smart?
Speaking of which, let me tell you something heavier.
The Ghost Festival, Zhongyuan.
If you grew up in Taiwan, you know how important the Ghost Festival is. But you might not know that, in the past, the Pu-du wasn’t done in a single day.
The archives divide it into “street Pu-du,” “market Pu-du,” “guild Pu-du,” “temple Pu-du”—several types. In Lukang, there was even a month-long rotation. The folk song goes “First day, release water lanterns; second day, Pu at Wanggong Temple; third day, Pu at Xuantan…” You do the math on how long this stretches.
Why rotate?
Resource allocation was a huge problem. A village, a street—resources are finite. If you try to host everything in one day, you can’t afford it, and even if you could, guests couldn’t possibly eat it all. But if you rotate, today this street hosts, tomorrow the next one. Every community gets a chance to be the host, and every community gets a chance to be the guest.
This pattern, in sociological terms, might be called “accumulating social capital.”
Here’s how I understand it: today I treat you to dinner, tomorrow you treat me to a show—this back-and-forth brings us closer. Blood relations are naturally given, but “geographical community” is different. It needs maintenance, needs events to prop it up. Pu-du was that event.
And think about it more—in an era of frequent clan warfare, getting people from different groups to sit down and eat together was no small feat. Pu-du provided an opportunity for a “sacred truce.” During the festival days, everyone放下恩怨, let’s finish the ghost worship first.
This isn’t sweeping things under the rug. It’s trading time through rituals.
Beyond festivals, there are more everyday things I found really interesting.
Take naming, for instance.
The archives record many “unsavory” childhood nicknames. A-zhu (Pig), Zhu-shi (Pig Dung), Wang-shi (meaning “just raise it however”)… Your first reaction to these names is probably “why give a kid such ugly names?”
But think about the logic.
Medical conditions were poor back then. Child mortality was high. How do you keep your kids alive? Besides actual medicine, you need some psychological “camouflage.” “The God of Death is coming to collect souls, but looks at this name—too ugly, doesn’t want it.” Logically speaking, of course this doesn’t hold up. But emotionally, it gave parents something they could do, some initiative they could take.
Then there’s adoption.
Early migrants came to Taiwan alone, with no family to rely on. How do you survive old age? How do you pass on your lineage? Adoption became a common choice. The archives say Taiwan’s adoption rates were way higher than in mainland China.
There was also the “child bride” system, the “song-zuo-dui” arrangement.
These systems are definitely problematic by today’s standards—I’ll get to that later. But put them back in their historical context: they solved real problems. Labor shortages. No one to care for you in old age. Marriage costs too high.
A healthy adult woman, taking care of the elderly. A child bride, marrying your son when she grows up, saving the cost of bride price and wedding. This algorithm was a rational choice in a resource-scarce society.
On cultural fusion, I want to make a special point.
Many people think Taiwan’s Han Chinese customs were directly transplanted from mainland China. But the archives tell a more complicated story.
Take the famous Dajia straw mats. Today people think it’s authentic “Chinese culture.” But trace the origins, and you find that during the Yongzheng era, Han settlers learned it from the local Pingpu tribes. The indigenous people were already weaving sedge mats. The Han people learned after they arrived.
Similar examples abound.
Fifty years of Japanese colonial rule left their marks too. The word “tatami” is still used. Raw fish slicing habits remained. “A-ba-sang” (Obasan) is actually borrowed from Japanese.
Taiwan’s customs were never “pure.” They were hybrid from the start. Indigenous, Dutch, Spanish, mainland Chinese, Japanese—one layer on top of another, finally becoming what you see today.
This characteristic, rather than representing “cultural impurity,” shows stronger adaptability.
I stopped here and thought about a question.
Are these ancient customs meaningful to people today?
My honest feeling is yes, and more meaningful than we think.
The first meaning is “rhythm.”
A big problem with modern urban life is everyone’s schedule is completely different. You do 996, I do 965, someone else might be freelance. Timetables don’t match, meeting up is hard.
But traditional festivals weren’t like that. They forcibly created a shared time when everyone could rest together. Spring Festival, Dragon Boat Festival, Mid-Autumn Festival—the whole society collectively paused, everyone doing the same thing. This “shared presence” experience is the foundation of community identity.
When you go home for Spring Festival and eat at the same table with relatives you only see a few times a year—that experience itself strengthens the recognition of “we’re family.”
The second meaning is “safety valve.”
The “theft customs” I mentioned earlier are essentially a designed “small rebellion.” Rules are heavy all year, but at specific times, there’s this small exit allowing you to release a little. This design remains meaningful today.
Why are modern people so anxious? Partly because “more and more rules, but fewer and fewer exits.” You need a moment when you can “slightly deviate”—doesn’t need to be big, just small is enough.
The third meaning, I think, is the attitude of “not abandoning anyone.”
There’s a special phenomenon in Taiwan called “You-ying-gong” worship. You-ying-gong is worshipped as the “unclaimed lonely ghosts”—those who died with no descendants, who died on the roadside with no one to collect their bodies. Traditional society would pool money to build You-ying-gong temples and regularly worship them.
The logic behind this? No one should be forgotten.
Even a wandering outsider who died unrecognized, even in the underworld they shouldn’t become hungry ghosts—they need someone to care. This care for marginalized groups, in today’s social welfare system, has a continuous spiritual lineage.
I’ve said a lot, but I want to be clear—I’m not saying we should go back, copy all these rituals.
Some things really don’t fit anymore. The child bride system is exploitation in today’s context. “Parents’ word is final” marriage is侵犯人权 today. I want to be straight about this.
But strip away those specific systems, what’s the underlying logic?
How to keep strangers alive on foreign soil. How to maintain stability in communities with extremely scarce resources. How to ensure abandoned people aren’t forgotten.
We’re still facing these problems today.
So, is reading these archives useful? I genuinely think so. It provides a perspective for thinking about problems, not a set of solutions you can directly copy.
That’s the piece for today.
Dug through the customs section of the Revised Taiwan Provincial Chronicles, talked about how Taiwan’s migrant society used rituals to build community. Not saying you should copy any of this directly—just found this algorithm for “keeping strangers alive on foreign soil” pretty interesting, wanted to document it.
If you found something useful here, smash that share button. See you next time.