Did You Know? The Atayal Courted With a Bamboo Mouth Harp

Picture a mountain village in northern Taiwan after dark. A young Atayal man stands outside the house of the woman he likes. He doesn’t knock and he doesn’t call out her name. He lifts a thin strip of bamboo to his lips, tugs a cord, and a soft buzzing melody drifts through the window. If she feels the same way, she answers with a tune of her own.

That strip of bamboo is the lubuw (口簧琴), the Atayal mouth harp. For generations it did the job a text message does now.

How a Bamboo Strip Makes Music

The Atayal lubuw is usually a bamboo body with thin copper or brass reeds set into it. You don’t blow into it. As the Shung Ye Museum of Formosan Aborigines explains, you pull a cord, the reeds vibrate, and the sound resonates inside your mouth. The shape of your mouth sets the pitch, and how fast you pull the cord sets the rhythm. Your own head is the speaker cabinet.

The Atayal are especially known for the multi-reed version. The National Museum of Natural Science’s collection notes say the instrument has many local names, often taken from what its reeds are made of and how many there are. More reeds mean more possible notes, and the Shung Ye notes add that more reeds also make it harder to play well.

More Than a Love Song

Courtship is the famous part. The museum records say unmarried young people would play the lubuw to show interest before saying anything out loud. But it wasn’t only for romance. It was also a staple at feasts and major celebrations, and the Atayal have a jaw harp dance too, where the players move as they play.

You’ll find the instrument well beyond Taiwan. Mouth harps turn up from the Siberian steppe to Pacific islands. In October 2025, researchers from Chung Yuan Christian University went to the 10th International Jew’s Harp Festival at Lake Akan in Hokkaido. There they compared Taiwan’s bamboo harps with the Ainu mukkuri and found the craft techniques strikingly similar. The Atayal aren’t the only harp players in Taiwan either: the same researchers list the Bunun latuk, the Amis datok and the Paiwan barubaru.

The Makers Keeping It Alive

A lubuw is carved by hand, and the people who can make and play one well are treasured. The late Atayal master Cheng Pao-hsiung (鄭保雄) spent his life making and collecting mouth harps. In 2021, Taichung’s Indigenous Peoples Cultural Hall gave him a memorial exhibition. His daughter carries the craft on, and schools in Yilan’s Atayal villages still run lubuw workshops for kids.

Want to See One?

The Shung Ye Museum in Taipei’s Shilin District (across from the National Palace Museum) has an Atayal mouth harp on display on its second floor. It’s open Tuesday to Sunday, 9:00 to 17:00, and closed Mondays, so don’t plan it for today. For the bigger picture, our guide to all 17 of Taiwan’s Indigenous nations is a good place to start. If you’re heading east, the Taroko Gorge guide tells the story of the Truku, the Atayal’s mountain neighbors.

The takeaway: some of Taiwan’s oldest love songs were never sung. They were buzzed on bamboo, and the answer came back the same way.

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