The traditional ballads (or Koa-a-chheh in Taiwanese) that circulated in Taiwan before twentieth century were mainly published either in Fujian or Shanghai, China. The first Taiwan-based publisher of traditional ballads was Ng Tho Publisher in 1916. Taiwan’s market of traditional ballads was mainly occupied by those published in China until 1932, until the January 28 Incident occurred in Shanghai. Following this Incident, Chinese products were not allowed to be imported to Taiwan, and as a result traditional ballads from China were banned. This factor indirectly contributed to the Taiwanization of traditional ballads in Taiwan.
The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate the process of Taiwanization of Koa-a-chheh published in Taiwan in the Japanese period from 1916 to 1938 using a quantitative perspective. A total of 568 volumes of Koa-a-chheh published in this period were collected and analysed.
The results reveal that those 568 volumes of Koa-a-chheh can be divided into four categories in accordance to their topics. They are: 1) authentic traditional Chinese topics, 2) authentic Taiwanese topics, 3) hybrid of both Taiwanese and Chinese topics, and 4) miscellaneous topics. Those categories account for 49.12%, 29.75%, 10.21% and 10.92%, respectively. Although authentic traditional Chinese topics still occupied the highest percentage, the percentage of authentic Taiwanese topics dramatically increased over the years after 1930. The period from 1916 to 1938 were further divided into early period (1916~1929) and later period (1931~1938) to see the difference of changes. The statistical results have shown that authentic traditional Chinese topics declined from 76.15% (early period) to 42.70% (later period). However, authentic Taiwanese topics increased from 11.93% to 33.99%. Concluding findings show that Koa-a-chheh writing was obviously moving from traditional Chinese topics to more diverse Taiwanese centred topics in the 1930s, and demonstrated an important stage in the Taiwanization of Koa-a-chheh, through the adoption of Han characters in writing.