[Background Blog] Tegu

It is always interesting to discover how the mythology behind different cultures can sometimes share many similarities. For example, there’s could be a giant animal surrounding or holding up the entire world, like Jörmungandr in Norse mythology, or Bahamut in Arabian legends. In Taiwanese folklore, there is also a giant bull living under the ground and whenever the bull turns over, it will cause earthquakes. The bull from this folklore is called Tegu, i.e. “earth bull” in Hokkien.

Compared to Namazu, the giant catfish who causes earthquakes in Japanese mythology, Tegu is little-known outside Taiwan. Just like many tales, the origin of the story of earthquakes and the bull is no longer known to us. Some said it’s an aboriginal folktale, while others say it originated from the Han immigrants to the island. According to the official record of the Japanese colonial government, the rumors about someone finding a giant ox tail near the cracks caused by the 1906 Meishan earthquake swept through the island days after the disaster, and the myth of Tegu began to gain its popularity.

Although the study on Taiwanese folklore is always an unpopular field, related studies still pointed out that Tegu may be a combination of Han tradition and aboriginal mythology, just like many other local stories in Taiwan, the island combining multiple amazing cultures. In ancient Chinese historical records, a phenomenon called “white fur of the land” is frequently mentioned after earthquakes. Some modern study believes those are thin ice tubes sublimated from the vapor escaped from underground through the cracks caused by earthquakes, and it is speculated that Han people from mainland combined the saying of “fur” with aboriginal mythology that there’s a giant animal underneath the ground, then created the story of Tegu the bull.

In ancient China, killing a bull can be treated as a serious crime since bulls were valuable productivity tools as farm cattle. In Taiwan, the rareness of cattle bulls remains until the early modern age due to the limited farmland available. The rather distinguished status of bulls in domestic animals somehow made them more popular in different mythologies, but the reason people chose an animal living so close to humans to describe earthquakes remains unknown. Maybe it somehow reflects the powerless of humans facing the disaster, as people understand that there is no way to escape from the fury of nature, so they rather choose to believe the disaster is caused by a meek herbivore who unleashes their full strength at a whim.

So how does the tale of Tegu relate to our story? Now that may be too much for today’s blog, but we’ll be sure to let you know one day.

You know.

Studio Klondike