Taiwan

• Other Names: 高砂 (Takasago), Formosa
• Chinese/Japanese: 台湾 (Táiwān / Taiwan)

Taiwan is an island located off the east coast of China. Home to numerous aboriginal groups, Taiwan became a base of operations for pirates and smugglers and the Portuguese in the 16th century, and the Dutch East India Company and Ming loyalist rebels in the 17th century, before being conquered by the Qing Dynasty towards the end of that century. The island was annexed by Japan in 1895, and regained its independence in 1945. Since 1949 it has constituted the territory of the Republic of China.

History

Medieval to 19th century

Chinese began settling on Taiwan in the early Ming Dynasty, if not earlier. These small communities consisted chiefly of merchant shippers and the like. In the 16th century, however, Ming policies banning Chinese from trading at Japanese or Southeast Asian ports made most of these previously above-board merchants and traders into illegal smugglers. Taiwan then thus became a haven of smugglers and pirates, along with sites in Kyushu, the Philippines, and elsewhere. These so-called wakô ("Japanese brigands") were mostly Chinese, but included Japanese, Koreans, and Southeast Asians as well, and raided ships and ports all along the Chinese and Korean coasts.

(Portuguese)

In the beginning years of the Edo period, several daimyô launched missions to attempt to establish trade relations with the island. These included a mission led by Arima Harunobu in 1609, and one led by the Ômura clan in 1616. However, all were unsuccessful, in large part because the indigenous peoples had no unified, centralized, or complexly structured government with whom the samurai could negotiate; on some of these missions, the samurai were attacked by the aborigines and suffered casualties.

The Dutch established themselves on Taiwan beginning in 1622, and built the trading post of Fort Zeelandia in 1624 just outside of Anping Harbor (Tainan). The Dutch then came into conflict with Japanese merchants already established on the island, as the two groups competed for control of the island's ports. In 1628, trader Hamada Yahyoee, acting on orders from Nagasaki bugyô Suetsugu Heizô, attacked the Dutch fort and captured the governor, Pieter Nuyts, who had led an unsuccessful mission to Japan the previous year. Nuyts was released soon afterwards, but the Japanese took his son and four others captive, exchanging them later for Nuyts himself, who then remained a hostage in Japan for four years. Events like these produced great difficulties for both the Dutch and Japanese trading communities on Taiwan, but formal relations between the shogunate and VOC were restored in 1632; tensions and conflicts between the Dutch and Japanese on the island dissipated further after the VOC gaining exclusive rights to trade at Nagasaki, and after the Japanese were forbidden to go abroad (or to return to Japan) after 1635.

The Dutch grew powerful on Taiwan, exporting for example as much as 1.85 million taels of silver (527,250 florins) from Japan via Taiwan in 1639 alone. One of the fort's chief individual trading partners was the smuggler/pirate/trader Zheng Zhilong, who traded gold, silks, and other goods to the Dutch in exchange for Japanese silver, but also competed against them. Taiwan also became a major source of sugar in the region at this time.

As the Ming Dynasty fell in the 1640s, many loyalists fled to the south of China, and to Taiwan; after being driven out of mainland China in 1646, they launched numerous raids on the South China coast, and continued to hold out against the Qing until the 1680s. A Qing attempt to blockade Taiwan in 1656 failed; the following year, they implemented a policy known as qianjie, pulling populations away from the south China coast, in order to protect them from raids.

In 1662, led by Zheng Zhilong's son Zheng Chenggong (Coxinga), they took Fort Zeelandia, driving the Dutch from the island. The loyalists sent a number of requests to the Tokugawa shogunate asking for support, but ultimately received none.

Qing forces finally subdued the last of the Ming loyalists in 1683-1684, claiming the island for Chinese territory for the first time in history. Though Qing authority gradually spread across the island, as late as the 1870s, there were still significant areas where the aboriginal peoples were dominant and Qing officials had no effective power or control.

In 1871, a number of Miyako Islanders became shipwrecked on Taiwan, where they encountered and were killed by a group of Taiwanese aborigines. The Meiji government responded with a punitive military expedition, led by Saigô Tsugumichi and launched to punish the aborigines for the murder of Japanese subjects. The fighting lasted less than two months. This invasion spurred considerable tensions, however, between Japan and China, with China rejecting Japan's claims that the Miyako Islanders were Japanese subjects, and asserting its own claims over Taiwan while denying responsibility for the aborigines' actions. Woodblock prints widely circulated in Japan depicting and describing the events of the expedition are considered the first shinbun nishiki-e, or "news prints," informing the public of official contemporary events in a relatively timely and accurate manner. A treaty was signed in October of that year in which China admitted less than total sovereign control over certain areas of southern Taiwan (i.e. areas dominated by aboriginal groups), recognized the Ryukyuan peoples as Japanese subjects, and agreed to pay an indemnity of 500,000 taels to Japan. The tensions still simmered, however, and very nearly came to all-out war before the decade was up, in order to decide more definitively Chinese and Japanese claims to both Taiwan and the Ryûkyû Islands. The issue was complicated by advice from Westerners, Charles DeLong and Charles LeGendre, who suggested to the Japanese that since the Chinese did not exert effective (de facto) control over those sections of Taiwan dominated by the aborigines, that territory was essentially terra nullius, and if Japan were to occupy the territory, under Western/modern international law, it could be rightfully Japan's.

In the end, in 1879, Japan unilaterally annexed the Ryukyus over Beijing's objections, but negotiations between the two sides, facilitated in part by Ulysses S. Grant, prevented the outbreak of further violent conflict.

Japanese Colony (1895-1945)

The colonization of Taiwan has been described by historian Mark Peattie as "an imperial accessory, a laboratory where the 'new boy' among the colonial powers could show off his modernizing skills, not the heart of Japan's strategic concerns." Those concerns lay chiefly in Korea.

The Japanese authorities in Taiwan were headed by a Governor-General, with Kabayama Sukenori being the first to hold the post, assisted by a Chief of Home Affairs.

State Shinto was expanded to Taiwan, with the Grand Shrine of Taiwan being established in 1901.

Scholars such as Torii Ryûzô and Yanagi Sôetsu began to expound on the connections between Taiwan (particularly the aboriginal cultures) and Japan. Yanagi emphasized the connections, his mingei theory suggesting Taiwan, along with Okinawa, Korea, and Hokkaidô, as storehouses of traditional culture, where that which has been lost in the modernization process in mainland Japan can still be seen; meanwhile, however, archaeologists and anthropologists like Torii found that the Okinawans and Ainu had more in common with the Japanese people than with the Taiwanese. Both of these theories, in different ways, were cited in support of Japanese colonial activities, and cultural assimilation policies, throughout the Empire.

References

• Mark Peattie and Ramon Myers (eds.), The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945, Princeton University Press (1984).