Soon to be adapted into an animated film, Tale of the Inland Sea takes readers back to the year 1624, when a Siraya shaman sees a dire prediction in a villager’s dream – the life they have known for centuries will soon be forever changed by the star-crossed arrival of strangers from the sea.

Known as the “windward” inland sea, this large lagoon and its complex of sandbars, streams and rivers along Taiwan’s southwestern coast are regularly buffeted by strong monsoon winds. This story, set between 1624 and 1662, centers on Saran, a young man from a Siraya village in the lagoon’s northern section. Because of a prophetic warning from their village’s shaman, Saran’s mother has long forbidden her son from going anywhere near the sea. However, everything changes when he and a friend decide to throw worry to the wind and paddle to the lagoon’s outlet on the sea. This is where they first set eyes upon ships with white canvas sails plying steadily toward shore.

These boats carry red-haired men in search of deer pelts along with their Chinese workers. In addition to colorful textiles and shiny glass beads, these “Red-Hairs” bring the bricks they will use to build spacious houses along the coast at a place they call “Tayouan”. Saran, now his village’s best hunter, finds the red-hairs offering increasingly less for his pelts. Serendipity then makes Saran a pelt trade intermediary, which brings him face to face with the actual avaricious aims of these interlopers. As he watches his homeland being slowly and dolefully transformed, he wonders – is this the disaster foreseen by the shaman so many years ago?

Published in 1995, this is the first work of Taiwan historical fiction to feature ethnic Siraya as main characters as well as to extensively incorporate Siraya-language words into the narrative. The author takes a realistic approach to weaving this compelling tale set four centuries ago and to conveying the pressures put upon the native Siraya by Dutch rule and Chinese settlement.