ALISHAN (Taiwan): Resplendent in leather headdresses mounted with eagle feathers and trimmed with bear fur, and wild boar tusks tied with ribbons around their sinewy arms, the warriors surround a squealing mountain pig.

A few swift stabs in the neck and the hog is dead, to be offered to the God of War in the annual Mayasvi ritual — the most sacred ceremony for the aboriginal Tsou people in central Taiwan’s misty Alishan mountains.

Clad in leather and handwoven tribal red, the warriors dip their spears and knives into pig’s blood. In the light rain, they join hands around a smoking woodfire and begin a low, melodious chant to welcome the god to the Mayasvi, or war ceremony.

Once a post-battle thanksgiving, the festival has become a coming-of-age rite for boys and a way for the Tsou tribe to honour and affirm their unique cultural heritage.

“A long time ago when we used to go to battle, we would ask the God of War to help us,” said 34-year-old Voyu Peongsi, descended from a family of tribal chiefs in the small Tsou village of Tefuye, nestled in the foothills of Alishan.

“Today, it allows the younger generation to understand the culture and songs of our ancestors, and express the spirit of our kuba,” he told Reuters.

Peongsi and his fellow villagers spent a month rebuilding the kuba — a large thatched hut raised on cypress logs at the heart of the Mayasvi ceremony. It serves as a sort of village hall for Tsou men on ordinary days.

Women are forbidden to enter the kuba and do not join in the Mayasvi until evil spirits have been banished at the end of the ceremony, and the tribe begins to dance and revel till dawn.

FOREIGN INTRUSIONS: Like many minority groups all over the world, the 6,000-strong Tsou tribe is fighting — some say losing — a battle to preserve its traditional customs in modern Taiwan.

The clansmen were originally coastal dwellers who were forced into the mountains by encroaching Han Chinese settlers from China.

Some Tsou find the debate over whether Taiwan is part of China to be preposterous: if anyone has claims on the island, it is Taiwan’s earliest inhabitants, the 12 remaining aboriginal tribes which now form only two percent of its 23 million people.

Isolated in the mountains, though, the Tsou care little for politics and live mainly from subsistence farming and hunting.—Reuters