The Paiwan are one of the indigenous ethnolinguistic minority groups of Taiwan. Their language is a member of the vast Austronesian language family, and belongs to its northernmost and most ancient subgroup.

This volume presents a collection of one hundred texts in the Paiwan language. The first seventy-four texts were collected by two Japanese anthropologists, Naoyoshi Ogawa and Erin Asai, before the Second World War, and the remaining twenty-six were collected by one of the co-authors of this volume, Reverend John Whitehorn, from England, when he was working with the Presbyterian church in the Paiwan area in the early 1950s.

Chapter 1 gives some introductory background to the Paiwan language, and to the text collection. The interlinearised texts are given in Chapter 2, and are followed by a concordance (Chapter 3), which gives all Paiwan morphemes with their glosses and an exhaustive list of references to their location in the texts. Chapter 4 is a reversal or finder list, which gives an alphabetical list in English of all glosses, with their Paiwan forms.

An early sketch grammar of the language by John Whitehorn is also included as an appendix