President 
Lai Ching-te on August 31 received the crew of a plank canoe built by Lanyu's six villages and paddled 23 hours to the Philippines' Batanes, the first such voyage in 300 years. Tao paddlers took the canoe, named the Ovayan Golden Friendship, 178 kilometres along their ancestors' sea route, Liberty Times reported. Receiving the crew at the Presidential Office, Lai said Taiwan is an important homeland of the Austronesian peoples.
The project was the first time Taiwan had completed a cross-border voyage using Indigenous traditional seafaring techniques, Lai said in remarks carried by Taiwan's Central News Agency (CNA). Boatbuilders from the six villages used 27 kinds of wood, and 60 paddlers took turns to complete the crossing. He likened the canoe to Taiwan: each wood has its own properties and a place where it fits best, and all must be tightly joined and hold one another up to withstand the Kuroshio current, wind and waves. Facing strong winds and high seas, the crew looked after one another, arrived safely and extended a friendship between the two places that spans 300 years, he said.
Lai recalled telling allies at a Pacific culture banquet on June 5 that his trips to the Marshall Islands, Tuvalu and Palau had shown him the courage of Austronesian ancestors who crossed the open ocean to build a diverse maritime civilisation. Ten days after that banquet, the fleet set off from Lanyu for Batan Island. He said he was moved by a highlight video of the voyage, which began with the six villages building the canoe together and, after a traditional boat-tossing ceremony, took 23 hours of paddling to reach Batan. Recalling his first visit to Lanyu six years ago, when Hongtou village hosted him at its millet harvest festival, he said reading the wind, currents, stars and seasons was great wisdom handed down by the ancestors.
The ancestors' routes show that "we are children of the ocean, and Taiwan can connect with the whole world through the ocean," Lai said, calling for Indigenous languages to be spoken, songs sung and boatbuilding skills learned so that tradition becomes a force carrying Taiwan into the world. Paddlers, boatbuilders and elders staged cultural demonstrations inside the Presidential Office, including a boat-tossing, CNA reported.
Figures referenced: Lai Ching-te. — JudgeMarket.
