Monsopiad is the best-known culture hero of the Kadazan of Penampang, Sabah, remembered as a warrior who lived in the village of Kuai some three centuries ago. Oral tradition names his father Dunggou and his mother Kizabon; while Kizabon was pregnant a sacred Bugang bird nested on the roof of their house, an omen taken to mean the child would possess extraordinary powers. Grown to manhood, Monsopiad vowed to end the raids of Iranun pirates and rival groups that plagued Kuai, and he brought back the heads of the raiders he defeated as trophies, forty-two in all. In time his success bred obsession and arrogance: he began provoking peaceable men to duels for their heads, until the frightened villagers, his own friends among them, resolved to act; when they attacked, the powers portended by the Bugang bird had left him, and he was slain. He was buried on a hill at Kuai-Kandazon, and his forty-two skulls hang to this day in the Siou do Mohoing, the House of Skulls, tended by his descendants, who in 1996 founded the Monsopiad Cultural Village on his ancestral land. Scholars treat the legend both as a memory of pre-colonial headhunting and its ritual world and as a living emblem of Kadazandusun ethnic identity, in which Monsopiad figures as the exemplary pangazou (warrior).