*3.2. The Zhulu Tribal Community (Poftonga Veoveo)*

The Zhulu tribal community (hereafter abbreviated as the "tribe" or the "Zhulu", as this is how they refer to themselves) residents are from the eight tribes (within seven villages under the modern administrative boundary) of Ali Mountain within the administrative boundary of Alishan Township—Dabang, Tefuye (is delimited in the Dabang villages' administrative area), Laiji (Figure 2), Leye, Lijia, Shanmei, Xinmei, Chashan. Ninety percent of the residents are Tsou indigenous people and were victims of the Morakot disaster. The impacted people were relocated in permanent housing sites away from their original homes, including the Zhulu—about 20 kilometers away from their homeland in Alishan township (Figure 1). Zhulu is within the administrative boundary of Fanlu Township, Chiayi County. About 80 households currently live in the Zhulu tribe, which is located on the main route (Provincial Highway 18) of the famous Alishan National Scenic Area (ANSA), next to the Chukuo tourist center. Zhulu is a typical relocated site under the governmental-driven permanent housing policy in Taiwan. In addition, the Tsou indigenous population is one of the small ethnic groups; therefore, the culture could have a chance to be rooted out if the relocation policy does not treat the recovery issue well. In addition, among the relocation sites that accommodate Tsou people, the Zhulu community is the one that resides in the most households and covers the largest area.

The Tsou's ancestors used to hunt sika deer in this area, hence the tribal name "Zhu-lu", which means "chasing deer" in Mandarin. Tsou ancestors also used deerskin and deer horn to exchange goods with other ethnic groups. Thus, this resettlement area uses sika deer as the cultural image to represent the Tsou as well as the new-settled tribal community (field note P02). The Zhulu is one of the permanent housing areas built by the Red Cross Society of Taiwan. Construction began in November 2011 and finished in December 2012, with 156 houses built in total.

Before being impacted by the 2009 Morakot, the Tsou tribes were naturally spread around Alishan based on the family and tribal unit. However, the Zhulu was an artificially formed settlement that accommodated those seriously impacted Tsou people after the typhoon Morakot. It was planned to house the impacted Tsou people, no matter their original tribes or family. The master plan is based on census household registration under the modern demographical management to allocate house size. Within the Zhulu residential area, people did not naturally gather to form a neighborhood via tribal or family relationships; people drew lots to decide the location of their new house inside the community.

**Figure 2.** *Pnguu* (Laiji) tribe in Ali mountain.

The residential space is divided into three areas: permanent housing, a cultural art museum, and the tribal market (Figure 3). There is a public activity center and three churches in the permanent housing area. Also, a few residents gathered together to develop the "Zhulu tribal artistic village" by remodeling a garage into a Tsou-art-character workshop. This aims at sustaining residents' livelihoods through running culturally characteristic artistic shops in their homes. This was motivated in part by the halting of construction on the planned cultural art museum due to problems between the local government and the contractor (the estimated finish date is May 2021). The *yokeoasu* tribal market skirts the settlement and opened once the residents moved in. Zhulu people could rent stalls to sell goods and food to earn income. The market also acts as a space for cultural dissemination, staging traditional Tsou dance performances on the weekends to introduce the tribes' origins, Tsou culture, and Tsou greetings to tourists.

**Figure 3.** Environmental arrangement in the Zhulu tribal community.

Tourists visit Zhulu mainly in the Tsou dance performance times (one session in the morning and one in the afternoon) on weekends or holidays. Therefore, most of the tourists' visiting area is limited to the *yokeoasu* tribal market, as tourists can shop, eat and drink, and enjoy performances in the area. Although the "Zhulu tribal artistic village" in the permanent housing area is only a three-minute walk from the tribal market, few tourists go into the artistic village, mainly because tourists have limited access to information about it; in addition, those characteristic Tsou art workshops are scattered over the huge area, so people need to spend time to explore and walk. Quite a lot of the tourists that visit

Zhulu are members of group tours to ANSA. ANSA is one of the most popular tourist attractions in Taiwan; thus, Zhulu, which is located on the main entrance to ANSA, has become a sort of a 'stop-by service area' for those group tourists. For those individual tourists, except for the tribal market on the outskirt of the Zhulu community, they tend to have more interest and sufficient time to walk along the street and visit the entire community, such as the churches, the *kuba* model, and the Tsou-art-character workshops. In addition, tourists can experience Tsou culture through tourism activities such as feeding young sika deer, learning traditional Tsou hunters' archery, making millet mochi (sticky rice cake) and aiyu jelly (made from the seeds of a kind of fig plant), and taste traditional Tsou cuisine.

The Zhulu community established two community activism organizations in 2013: the Zhulu Community Development Association (ZCDA) and the Limited Liability Chiayi County Indigenous Zhulu Community Cooperative (ZCC). The ZCDA's membership consists of all residents and it delegates the charge of community development, while the ZCC organizes tribal tourism, including the operation of the tribal market. The ZCC's economic income is used for community development, which means the two organizations support each other. Furthermore, the government also supports and funds various projects to help with post-disaster development, including cultural inheritance, employment, and tribal empowerment [43] (Table 1).


**Table 1.** Government funded post-disaster development projects in Zhulu.

Although the tribespeople relocated to Zhulu eight years ago, little academic research has been conducted on the site. Most of the published works that mentioned Zhulu focused on the cross-site comparison of reconstruction hardware issues such as relocation site planning and residential satisfaction. For the social issue of recovery in Zhulu, Chang used Zhulu as a case to conduct research on place attachment and identity [44]. He concluded that although people have adapted to the living space and environment in Zhulu, the sense of belonging has not yet fully formed. Therefore, the Zhulu people autonomously use cultural decoration to transform the house into a "permanent" home. As the Zhulu people are aware of the importance of cultural continuity, they thus start to bestow culture to this new place, hoping to gradually turn their new houses into homes.
