Taiwan Today

The publication of a new series of Ming and Qing dynasty-era documents is fueling a renewed interest in the study of Taiwan’s history.

Knowledge of local history is somewhat incomplete for many people in Taiwan, as connections with the past have been weakened time and again by changing historical perspectives. During the past century, the island’s students were taught to look at history from Japan’s viewpoint during the era of Japanese colonial rule (1895−1945), and then, following the relocation of the Republic of China (ROC) government from mainland China to Taiwan in 1949, from the Chinese angle, which incorporated events in Taiwan as one of the mainland’s myriad regional histories.

Since the time of the struggle for a more open society in the 1980s, however, the teaching of history in Taiwan has gradually shifted to account for a native perspective, a trend recently given impetus by the publication of a series of documents from the era of Ming and Qing dynasty rule over the island. On the mainland, the Ming dynasty ruled from 1368 to 1644, while the Qing governed from 1644 to 1911. In Taiwan, however, Ming control existed from 1662 to 1683, while the Qing period of governance lasted from 1684—when the island was made a formal province of China—until 1895.

In 1958, the Economic Research Office of the Bank of Taiwan began collecting and cataloging documents from the age of dynastic rule in Taiwan. Headed by Chou Hsien-wen (1908−1989), former dean of the National Taiwan University (NTU) Law School, the office published a number of books on Taiwan’s economy, as well as translations of foreign economics classics. The office’s research also reached back into the past by examining documents that were hundreds of years old.

Chou served as the Economic Research Office’s director for more than two decades. He was a man of many interests, and during this time he also worked as the editor of the Taiwan Literatures Series published by the research office. That series eventually extended to 595 volumes, but work on it halted when Chou retired in 1972.

This landmark collection of historical writings concerning Taiwan includes texts drafted anywhere from more than 1,000 years ago up until the era of Japanese rule, with a major focus on documents from the Ming and Qing dynasties. The Ming records mostly come from the time of Chinese general Zheng Cheng-gong, (1624−1662), popularly known as Koxinga, as well as the rule of his two successors over what was known as the “Kingdom of Tungning.” In Taiwan, Koxinga is most commonly remembered for driving the Dutch from the island in 1662, ending about four decades of Dutch rule. He was also a Ming loyalist in a time when the Qing dynasty was consolidating its rule in China and thus primarily viewed Taiwan as a military base for a planned campaign to restore the Ming emperor to power.

Formal Qing rule began in Taiwan in 1684, a year after the Qing army defeated Ming forces on the island, but came to an end when the Qing ceded Taiwan to Japan after being defeated in the First Sino-Japanese War. The intervening period of Qing rule in Taiwan gave rise to an unprecedented, abundant accumulation of written records, many surviving examples of which are preserved in the Bank of Taiwan’s series.

Comprehensive Collection

For decades, the gathering of government documents, personal essays and poetry found in Chou’s Taiwan Literatures Series has served as the most comprehensive collection of texts for researchers of Taiwan’s history. Despite this significance, however, the series also had a considerable number of limitations. First of all, it appeared at a time when many aspects of Taiwan’s history were considered taboo or irrelevant, as the government then mandated a focus on Chinese history. As a result, the completeness of the series was somewhat compromised, according to Wu Mi-cha, director of National Cheng Kung University’s Department of Taiwanese Literature. For example, the Shuqilin Annals, which were written in 1898 and concern the local history of what is now Zhudong Township in northern Taiwan’s Hsinchu County, were made a part of the Taiwan Literatures Series in 1958, but about 4,000 words were deleted from the original annals because they caused “harm to national interests,” as Chou wrote in the preface to the series.

As Taiwan’s society developed, however, interest arose in local history, and, as Wu points out, many more source materials had been discovered since work on the Taiwan Literatures Series was halted in the early 1970s. “If Taiwan’s history really had secured the status of an academic discipline, then a new database needed to be made available to researchers,” Wu says, adding that such a crucial, colossal task needed to be performed at the central government level. Thus, in 2001, when Wu became vice minister of the Cabinet-level Council for Cultural Affairs (CCA), he was determined to establish more favorable conditions for the study of Taiwan’s history. Not surprisingly, work on adding to, updating and revising the Taiwan Literatures Series began under the CCA shortly after Wu took up his post there. As a result, although the Bank of Taiwan had been the somewhat improbable force behind the original series, the central government stepped in and began—albeit belatedly—working to collect, edit and update the historical source materials.

Work was painstaking and it was not until October 2009 that the National Museum of Taiwan History (NMTH) in Tainan City, which operates under the CCA, announced the completion of a new compilation of Taiwan-related official documents from the Ming and Qing dynasties. The 110-volume Ming and Qing collection was produced in cooperation with the NTU Library and Yuan-Liou Publishing Co., Ltd. and is part of a larger collection that also includes revised local histories such as the Shuqilin Annals, this time with the restoration of the previously deleted 4,000 words, as well as a section containing documents pertaining to private sector transactions such as those involving real estate.

Under Wu’s leadership, the new project enlisted academics in the fields of history and literature at several universities across Taiwan, including NTU and National Chengchi University in Taipei City, Feng Chia University in Taichung City and National Dong Hwa University in Hualien County. The Ming and Qing-era original official documents largely came from the NTU Library, Academia Sinica and the National Palace Museum in Taipei, as well as the First Historical Archives of China in Beijing. Many of these documents had not been made available to the public until the 1960s or even later. The new compilation adds about 100 million Chinese characters to the 48 million characters of the original Taiwan Literatures Series. As a result, Wu says that the work represents a “new horizon” for researchers of Taiwan’s history.

Wu notes that work on similar compilations has been conducted in Europe and Japan for more than 100 years. The Historiographical Institute at the University of Tokyo, for example, has compiled and published historical source materials concerning Japanese history since the 1880s. “Such work must be done bit by bit on a regular basis by a specialized organization with a stable workforce and budget,” Wu says.

As the CCA project got underway at the beginning of the new century, however, Wu and his team felt a sense of urgency about their work. “We had to move rapidly for fear of possible changes of government policy,” the former CCA vice minister recalls. “We felt we needed to form a strong foundation for the project, so that successive administrations would be more willing to continue it.”

Unfortunately, the publication of the Ming and Qing documents was interrupted in 2005 after Wu left the CCA. As a result of fundraising efforts of the National Cultural Association under the Office of the President, however, the second 
part of the eventual five-part series was published in 2006. In 2007, when the NMTH was formally established with Wu serving as founding director, the museum took over the project.

Shih Wen-cheng, an assistant curator in the NMTH Research Division, points out that the new series of Ming and Qing-era official documents concerning Taiwan form a much-extended—but also quite refined—addition to the Taiwan Literatures Series. In addition to corrections, edits and revisions of the previous series, for example, the new series also offers higher-definition versions of old maps, some of which appear blurry in the original Taiwan Literatures Series.

Shih says the historical documents in the new series are significant because they reveal the principles underlying Ming and Qing governance of peripheral or border areas such as Taiwan. “They’re different from the repeated categories of documents typically found in local histories, which is why they can shed more light on the true intentions of the ruling power,” he says.

Critical Details

Wu points out that the Ming and Qing documents were released not because they inform hot-button issues such as the ROC and mainland China’s competing territorial claims over Taiwan, but instead because they offer more source materials and details critical for the understanding of local events such as the Lin Shuang-wen (1756−1788) Incident, which was one of the major uprisings against Qing rule in Taiwan. “Based on the papers submitted to the central government by Taiwan, which was viewed as a border region,” Wu says, “we can learn about Qing dynasty rule from Taiwan’s point of view.” The information about the dynastic administration of Taiwan, he adds, contributes to a broader knowledge of Qing rule of other border areas such as Mongolia and Xinjiang province in present-day mainland China.

Wu notes that a further benefit of developing a deeper understanding of Ming and Qing rule over Taiwan is that it can shed light on the governance of borderland areas by other empires, thus linking Taiwan’s history to that of similar nations. Although there are significant differences, like Taiwan, New Zealand is also located to the side of a continent, was populated by immigrants and experienced colonial rule. This type of shared experience can help local historians as they participate in international exchanges and yield fresh insights into Taiwan’s history, Wu says.

In a preface to the 2009 series, Chen Chih-nan, a cultural anthropologist and former CCA minister, introduced the Ming and Qing documents as part of Taiwan’s New Knowledge Movement, which seeks to foster both a Taiwanese perspective on world history and a deeper understanding of local history. Wu notes the growing—and now steady—interest in local history by observing that in doctoral programs in the history departments of Taiwan’s universities, about one-third of research projects are devoted to the island. The proportion is even higher in master’s programs. “In addition to its established tradition of the philological study of documents,” Wu says, “Taiwan’s historical research must develop its own views and try to ask questions pertinent to today’s society.”

While there is still a strong tradition of studying Chinese history in Taiwan, its orientation differs from that found in the mainland. “We study Taiwan’s history, but we also study world history as well as Chinese history because they inform Taiwan’s history,” NMTH curator Shih Wen-cheng says.

Anything but Monolithic

Like many academic disciplines, research on Taiwan’s history is fluid and anything but monolithic, with varying approaches competing for recognition. The result is the questioning of widely held historical assumptions, which can lead to a more comprehensive, fuller view of the past. “It’s wrong and outdated to believe in one single objective, transparent history under an omniscient viewpoint,” Wu says. “Different versions of history can coexist and don’t necessarily contradict each other.”

Shih points out that while it is important to have one’s own views of history, such views must be based on source materials. “The government can’t ‘write’ history because it could be rejected by a future government,” Wu says. “What the government can and should do is offer a favorable environment for historical research by building a solid foundation of source materials.” For this reason, the new series of Ming and Qing documents could be one of the most meaningful works that the CCA has ever completed. Wu says he hopes the government will devote more resources to such low-profile, yet fundamentally important tasks in the future.

For its part, Shih says that the NTMH will continue to collect, edit and publish historical source materials written in Chinese as well as foreign languages. “For instance, we’ll try to cover documents from Taiwan’s Dutch and Spanish colonial periods of the 17th century,” he says. This work will be carried out in cooperation with other organizations including Academia Historica, which operates under the Office of the President. In the past, the Historical Research Committee under the now defunct Taiwan Provincial Government also carried out the work of collecting such historical records. The committee was renamed Taiwan Historica and was subsequently made part of Academia Historica in 2002.

It is typical that a foreign power would look at Taiwan’s history from its own point of view, but it is also natural that the increasingly extensive examination of relevant source documents has helped to develop a native interpretation of Taiwan’s history. “There is no standard answer to a historical question,” Shih says, “but rather a philosophy or an attitude shaped by historical consciousness.”

Write to Pat Gao at kotsijin@gmail.com