[yuanzhumin]

Thanks for your interest and your nice comments. This kind of knives are seldomly seen outside museums, even in Taiwan. Outside the island, only few of them have been collected in Japan, mostly ethnology department, and a couple of others may be found in very few places around the world. In more than ten years collecting Taiwan aboriginal stuff, I only saw 2 of these knives, and one of them is mine now and is the one displayed here. The other one was too expensive for me to buy, and it was bought by another private collector I know. In fact, these knives are very, very rare.
If I had to evaluate how rare, I would say there are only a couple of hundreds (around 200 ?) still existing, most of them in museums and ethnology dep., the other still in the hands of their original owners – Paiwan chiefs/witches lineage – or collected by private collectors.

To Nonoy : Scholars don’t know where these knives are coming from. They could have been imported as the Paiwan that used them and the other contemporary aborigines tribes didn’t know how to make iron and bronze till the 20th cent. The second hypothesis is that the bronze knives could have been made before, much earlier by the ancestors of the Paiwan but the knowledge was lost, or by another insular ethnic group that disappeared. The fact is that places were iron was made and bronze casted were found on the island, some of them dating back long long time ago. But what happened after is a mystery ? Another fact is that trade was very well developed few thousand years ago as taiwanese jade was exported all around Asia (spectrographic analysis of jade samples found all around Asia and dating few thousand years ago showed that most of the stones were coming from one place in Taiwan). In fact, this jade industry and exportation is what initiated the migration from the island to give birth to the wide austronesian spread all over south east asia and the Pacific. So it's easy to imagine the other way around, with these knives being imported into the island. Concerning the iron making, the aborigines began to make their own knives in the 1920s, taught by the Japanese that wanted to develop the local economy in the aboriginal villages (the principle is that when the aborigines are busy trading and making money they are not making war, mostly against the colonial power that were the Japanese at that time)

To Kukulza : I think that most of these knives are still in Taiwan, and the ones that left the Paiwan families were sold by the Paiwan themselves --- not looted. Everything coming from the aborigines that you can find today outside the aboriginal villages was given away by the aborigines themselves or stolen by them from their own people to be sold to the outsiders. It’s only recently that some kind of tribal pride has appeared accompanied by a cultural revival and a rediscovery of the traditions. Unfortunately, most of the traditions and heritage have been lost and what is recovered looks often more like a folkloric/touristic thing. In some case, when mixed with politics, it can become some kind of extreme militantism, with a more romantic/utopic than realistic dimension.

To migueldiaz : I don’t know if there is something close in China today, but the fact is that the kind of design on these ceremonial knives are very close to the Dongson civilization of South China and Indochina, and also the Shang and Chou period in antique China.

To fearn : How old are they ? We don’t know, but they are old, very old. It’s very possible that the iron blades have been changed and readjusted to the bronze handle because of the corrosion due to the age.