An official delegation of more than one hundred Paiwan people from an indigenous village in Pingtung County visited campus wearing traditional attire on October 15, 2016 in order to hold two traditional ceremonies for a Paiwan two-sided carved stone pillar that has been designated a national treasure.

The ceremonies took place in front of the NTU Museum of Anthropology, where the pillar has been housed since the period of Japanese rule in Taiwan, and were attended by Minister of Culture Li-chun Cheng, NTU Vice President for Academic Affairs Hung-Chi Kuo, and faculty members of the College of Liberal Arts.

Led by the village chief, the ceremonies included a traditional masasan siruvetje bonding ceremony and a spirit welcoming ceremony meant to lead the ancestral spirits of the pillar back to their homeland.

The ancestral pillar belonged originally to a Paiwan chieftain's family by the name of Tjaluvuan that had lived in Aluvuan Village in Pingtung County. In 1929, the predecessor of the Department of Anthropology, the Local Ethnology Laboratory of Taihoku Imperial University, collected the pillar from the by-then abandoned village.

At the time, Nenozo Utsurikawa, the founder of the Local Ethnology Laboratory, gained the permission of a female chieftain of the Tjaluvuan family named Djupelan as well as the Japanese imperial government before removing the pillar from the old village for archiving at the university. After that, the people of Aluvuan were to never see their ancestral pillar again and it gradually faded into a lost memory.

Decades later, in preparation for applying to have the cultural relic officially recognized as a national treasure, scholars at the NTU Museum of Anthropology dedicated great time and effort to finding out more about its past. Clues left behind from 1929 enabled the anthropologists to track down the few Paiwan elders who knew of the Tjaluvuan family name and the story of Aluvuan. The scholars also accompanied members of Vungalid Settlement, the village to which the people of Aluvuan relocated, in journeying to the original site of the village.

The museum organized numerous discussion meetings with the Aluvuan people so as to understand their agreement to apply for national treasure status for the pillar as well as their desire to welcome the ancestors enshrined in the pillar back home to their village. The two sides decided that a homecoming ceremony would be held and the villagers would take home a replica of the pillar, while the original stone pillar remained with the museum for preservation.

After the village welcomed the pillar home, they erected it at a festival plaza that was constructed out of building stones from the original Aluvuan village. Following the construction of the new plaza, the head chief decided to recommence the traditional Five Year Festival, which had not been held since it was banned by the Japanese imperial government.