Sword

This sword belonged to a man from the Paiwau, one of the indigenous groups on Taiwan, from whom it was acquired by a collector for Umlauff, the major ethnographic trading house in Hamburg. Taiwanese indigenous groups were known and feared for headhunting and this particular sword had evidently been used in such activities. The sword is made of iron while the handle and scabbard are made of wood, which have been coloured black. The latter are richly decorated with carvings depicting human figures, which in turn have been coloured red. Attached to the scabbard there are some feathers and a tuft of human hair, the latter is coloured red. Acquisition Acquired by a local collector Mr. G. Makahara (Nakahara?), who in 1907 visited a number of indigenous groups on Taiwan purchasing objects for the ethnographic trading house Umlauff. Umlauff then published a simple catalogue of collections for sale, then also including objects from a number of other areas in Oceania and Africa. The whole collection was bought by the Museum of Ethnography, Stockholm, where it was accessed in 1909. It contained 149 objects from the indigenous groups of Taiwan. Purchasing objects from trading houses like Umlauff was one way in which ethnographic museums in the West at the turn of the last century could acquire objects from areas with which they did not have direct contacts of their own. Umlauff could sometimes offer more or less complete inventories of the material culture of “attractive” cultures or ethnic groups, even organised as dioramas. In this case an assortment of separate, even unrelated objects was acquired by the Museum of Ethnography, Stockholm.