A BRIEF INTERLUDE ON THE HISTORY OF TAIWAN in keeping with other such interludes on places which maybe aren’t well known to my usual readers, and which will provide helpful context to forthcoming posts on both the CKS and Dutch Tainan.

Disclaimer (because we need to do that these days): a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and this little knowledge is based on some brief English-language online research and impressions from various museums, aboriginal culture parks, and conversations in Taiwan. If you know better on any point please correct me.

Material markers of Taiwanese indigenous culture go back at least 15,000 years, an ethnically and linguistically distinct from with Austronesian language (which probably originated on Taiwan) and while the existence of Taiwan was well known to both Asian and long-distance European mariners, the indigenous kept themselves to themselves and nobody outside Taiwan except some local traders and fishermen really cared about it until the 17th century when the Chinese, Japanese, Spanish and Dutch all became interested more or less simultaneously. Tainan, the oldest non-indigenous settlement and probable origin of  the name “Taiwan”, was founded by the Dutch in the 1620s an area already seeing Japanese and Chinese trade in furs and meat with locals.

The Dutch intended the fortified settlement as a safe base to trade with China and Tokugawa Japan, similar to how the Portuguese used Macau, but in a typical example of Dutch 17th century overreach got carried away and started trying to turn it into a state, encouraging loads of immigration from Chinese refugees from the ongoing Ming-Qing civil war, building schools, translating the Bible into local languages, and massacring anyone who gave them any trouble. Simultaneously, the Spanish built forts in the north near present-day Taipei and Keelung, but the Dutch had beaten them out by 1642. In 1635 the Japanese went full isolationist and took themselves off the table. In 1662 the Dutch were driven out of Taiwan by a fascinating fellow called Koxinga whose historical significance may have been slightly burnished as an icon of Taiwanese nationalism to various different groups.* (I say that having visited a literal shrine to him).

Koxinga, the Japan-born son of pirate admiral Zheng Zhilong (who had occasionally fought both alongside and against the Dutch) was a highly effective warlord who fought for the (Han) Ming dynasty against the (Manchu) Qing dynasty in the vast 17th century Chinese civil war. He at one point looked like he was about to take Nanjing, but ultimately he failed and fell back to Taiwan where he set up Tainan as the capital of his own little Kingdom of Tungning and seems to have gone quite hard on various local reforms and building/expropriation programmes to develop it. However, he died relatively young while preparing to boot the Spanish out of Manila, and his sons and advisors were a bit more low-wattage, so his attempt at setting up a “Zheng dynasty” failed; twenty years after his death, the Zheng navy was wiped out by the Qings and the last Ming pretender killed himself in Tainan.

The Qings then ran Taiwan as an offshore province of China for c.300 years with various waves of colonisation and exploitation, the indigenous people mostly ending up in the mountains. In the late 19th century Taiwan’s economic value (particularly camphor and tropical woods) became more obvious to a globalising and industrialising world and European and Japanese companies got involved in its exploitation. The Qings saw the likely threat from Japan and built railways and modern fortifications, but after losing the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895, were forced to cede Taiwan to Japan.

A short-lived local attempt at an independent Republic of Formosa was crushed by the Japanese who controlled Taiwan for almost exactly 50 years, during which they invested very heavily in it as a resource extraction colony and tourist retreat (their buildings are still everywhere). It was run basically as a corporate colony by Japanese conglomerates backed by military power and was not particularly nice but not, I believe, dramatically worse or better for the locals than the average European or American colony of the period.

In 1945, with the Japanese surrendering to the Americans, the island was ceded to “China”, which was then in a state of civil war between the Nationalists (KMT, led by the loathsome, incompetent and murderous Chiang Kai-Shek) and Communists (CCP, under the loathsome, incompetent and murderous Mao Zedong). The Americans recognised the KMT as the legitimate government, so were given Taiwan. Widespread joy among the Taiwanese (70% of whom at that point could speak Japanese) at being independent and possibly even democratic fell apart upon finding out how corrupt, brutal and inept the KMT were. Popular dislike of KMT rule led to the 228 Incident and an extremely violent crackdown by KMT troops leading to forty years of martial law and right-wing dictatorship.

The CCP won the civil war conclusively and beat the KMT out of mainland China; Chiang scarpered to Taiwan to embezzle American aid money and torture journalists to death, while Mao wrecked Chinese agriculture, industry and material culture and killed millions upon millions of his people. Both the KMT and CCP continue with the pretence that there is only one China, of which they are the legitimate government, and that one day they’ll be reunited. Due to this pretence – and Taiwan badly missing its opportunity to claim independence as a sovereign nation, when doing so would have meant annoying a powerful but poor and friendless People’s Republic of China, rather than the modern PRC which basically is the world’s material economy – Taiwan is now technically a non-country as all the recognition of Who Is China (most importantly the permanent seat on the UN Security Council) moved over to the PRC in the 1970s. Which is why the PRC is now called China while everyone calls Taiwan Taiwan rather than the Republic of China.

In the 80s and 90s, following the death of Chiang Kai-Shek and loosening of martial law and repression under his son, Taiwan saw democratic revolutions and is now a free and democratic country with a tolerant pluralist culture and booming high-tech manufacturing economy (most notably TSMC, which produces the chips inside almost everything.) Its non-country status and the infinitely increased power and ambition of the PRC put its future in question. If China actually invades, it will incur hideous casualties and tank the entire world’s economy to, if it wins, physically occupy a ruined country full of people who hate it and symbolically win an argument from 1927 which it for all practical purposes won in 1949. This is in literally nobody’s interests, but sadly may still happen.

Taiwan 2025
Jiufen and Houtong / Taipei Museums / Taroko Gorge / National Palace, Lungshan Temple / A Brief Interlude on the History of Taiwan / CKS Memorial and Maokong / Dihua Street, Taipei 101 / Anping District and Forts of Tainan / Tainan History / Fenqihu / Alishan

^{* For anyone interested in a Taiwanese nation, he seems to have done a lot to modernise Taiwan into something more sophisticated and country-like rather than a seabase at the edge of an island full of small tribes. For the Japanese, he was an Asian (half-Japanese) man who beat European colonisers militarily and kicked them out of parts of Asia, which was very important to their national myth c.1890-1945, especially around the Russo-Japanese War. For the KMT specifically he represented a heroic remnant of a “legitimate” Chinese government evicted from the mainland to Taiwan by the Manchu upstarts. Tainan has a literal shrine to him.}