This article aims at sketching Yami culture as a whole, presenting a theory of Yami cultural structure, and exploring its social and material conditions. Through anthropological fieldwork in Lanyu, I argue that all the observed and recorded, seemingly contradictory characteristics among the locals, such as their generosity, self-care, activeness, conservatism, etc., are various facets of the ideal image of ‘tao’(person) in Yami culture. Such an ideal sprouts from the notion ‘all men are created labouring’ and grows under the principle ‘more pains, more gains’. For the Yami, people survive because they work, and it is optimistically believed that the harder they work, the more they obtain. Moreover, what accumulates along with labour is not only wealth but everything: people also learn more skills for living, have more stories to tell, produce more food to share and win more respect from their fellows. Poor harvest, bad fishing luck or other occasional misfortunes never negate this long-term trend in a person's life course. Eventually people reach their peak of life as they age and become rarakeh (elders_. What rarakeh own - large houses and thriving crops, comprehensive erudition and numerous offspring-prove their lifelong efforts and justify their highly esteemed status in the community. In short, a person's value is proportional to their age, which is culturally equal to their labor time. The ideal image of tao is the destination of Yami people's life journey on 'the Road to Perfection' that links life, labour, wealth, power and knowledge. Furthermore, I argue that‘the Road to Perfection’is by no means a rootless imagination among the Yami but is founded upon some solid facts that people experience and comprehend in their daily lives. The natural environment of Lanyu and, for the sake of subsistence, the locals' collective responses to it, including their reliance on human strength and individual means of production, their gendered division of labor, their planting agriculture and supportive but notable offshore fishing practices, etc., commonly shape this cultural ideal and make it a realizable one particularly on Lanyu, the Yami's‘affluent island.’In this sense, the ideal image of tao may evolve correspondingly when Yami people experience the world and the life differently. In the context of globalisation, the Yami have made many efforts, which largely follow their traditional ways and usually lack efficiency and efficacy, to adapt themselves to a modernized lifestyle and livelihood. Accordingly, some external observers over-optimistically claim that‘the Yami are still there, and they are still Yami’, and Yami culture not only survives from the tidal wave of globalization but successfully absorbs foreign elements for its own good. However, such an opinion is based on a mere illusion created by ethnographic phenomena similar to the past but with a different structure underneath, which can be distinguished only by a more sophisticated analysis of the relations and contacts between persons and things. The analytical framework presented in this article, as I hope, can be helpful to develop an integrative understanding of the past and present ethnographic phenomena in Lanyu.