Resplendent in leather head-dresses 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 hand-woven 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.
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.
Aside from Christian missionaries, no foreigners intruded on them until the Japanese colonisation from 1895 to 1945.
The Japanese stopped customs that they considered barbaric, such as the Tsou practice of taking human heads as war trophies. The Mayasvi was itself halted for a about a decade.
Then, when the Chinese Nationalist government fled to Taiwan in 1949 after losing the mainland to the Communists, the Tsou language was smothered. The Nationalists imposed Mandarin Chinese in schools and banned all other languages and dialects.
"People say we are gradually losing our culture but it's actually happening very quickly," said Liao Chin-ying, a Chinese primary school teacher who married into a Tsou family in the neighbouring village of Dabang, next to Tefuye.
She said less than 10 percent of young people can speak Tsou, compared to 90 percent of the elderly. The government now allows schools to teach Tsou once a week, but Liao thinks that is not enough to pull the language back from the brink of extinction.
"If you don't teach the mother tongue, then you lose your culture. Without your mother tongue, your culture becomes fossilised and doesn't truly exist any more," she said.
Liao speaks only Tsou to her 2-year-old daughter but says her little girl insists on replying in Mandarin because the other children in the village do not speak their native tongue.
Christian missionaries are trying to help preserve the Tsou language by using a romanisation system.
"Some of the priests here speak better Tsou than me," said Yangui Iuheacana, a Tsou woman who teaches village children how to spell Tsou words using the alphabet.
"They're helping to put together the first-ever Tsou dictionary and are translating the Bible into Tsou," she said.
It's easy to see why small villages like Tefuye and Dabang, with only about 1,200 residents between them, fear assimilation. Mandarin is essential for anyone seeking further education or work, and for men doing compulsory military service.
Yet Tsou pride in tradition is evident everywhere, from the carefully observed Mayasvi to the scars on Peongsi's arms and legs - the legacy of his numerous tussles with boars, bears, deer, goats and monkeys.
The Tsou still teach their boys how to hunt and farm up in the lush mountains far away from Taipei's bustling streets and the high-tech microchip plants that helped turn the leaf-shaped island into the world's 15th-largest economy.
It used to be that every boy had to spear a boar by himself before being considered a man and allowed to marry. But the government has now restricted hunting grounds, concerned over a dwindling number of indigenous animals in Taiwan.
Taiwan's entry into the World Trade Organisation three years ago also ushered in cheaper food imports, forcing some aboriginal groups to abandon fruit farms and switch to speciality crops like tea or wasabi, or move into the tourism industry.
The more confident and hopeful Tsou speak of government efforts to nurture native cultures, such as designating land for aboriginal use and opening Aboriginal culture museums.
The government also launched an aboriginal television channel on January 1 and gave each Tsou household a free satellite dish. But villagers say there's no reception up in the mountains.
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