Last September, Taiwan lost one of its most original and influential historians with the passing of Tsao Yung-ho (曹永和, 1920–2014). Tsao became renowned during his life as a leading researcher of 17th century Dutch and Spanish colonial rule of Taiwan, and for cultivating younger historians and promoting international academic cooperation. He worked in the library of National Taiwan University (NTU) for much of his life. This workplace fed his voracious appetite for reading and gave him access to materials in other languages, helping him achieve fluency in Dutch and English and a working familiarity with German, Latin and French. He conducted historical research in all of these languages as well as in Japanese, which was one of his native tongues. Republic of China President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) praised these achievements and more in a eulogy for the historian. Tsao was also the first and only person without a university degree to be awarded the rank of academician by Academia Sinica, Taiwan’s foremost research institute. Moreover, in 1999 he personally funded the establishment of the Tsao Yung-ho Foundation of Culture and Education in Taipei to encourage research into the history of East Asian maritime activities and the island of Taiwan. Tsao’s three sons also belong to the foundation, and many of the younger trustees are his former students.
Tsao grew up in Taipei City during Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945). In 1939, he graduated from Taihoku Prefectural Second Middle School, which is now Taipei Municipal Chenggong Senior High School. After failing his college entrance exam, he found work in a farmers’ association. In 1947, he changed paths and started working in the NTU library, where he remained for nearly four decades. In 1984, a year before he retired as an NTU librarian, Tsao was recruited as an adjunct research fellow in maritime history by today’s Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences at Academia Sinica, through which he acquired professorial status, which allowed him to teach in NTU’s Department of History.
Working in the library was a turning point in Tsao’s life, notes Chan Su-chuan (詹素娟), a researcher at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Taiwan History (ITH) and a trustee of the Tsao foundation. “In the library, he was able to read innumerable books on a wide range of subjects,” Chan says. This broad accumulation of knowledge, she contends, led to Tsao developing a long-term view of Taiwan’s history that takes into account the effects of social structures and the island’s role in maritime trade in East Asia. He presented his views of “Taiwan island history” in an interview transcribed by Chan and a colleague that was published in a June 1990 article in the Newsletter of Taiwan History Field Research. In 2010, the ITH published a book containing transcripts of a number of interviews that Chan and two other Tsao pupils had with their mentor.
In the preface to the 2010 publication, ITH researcher Hsu Hsueh-chi (許雪姬) enumerates Tsao’s major achievements, including his grasp of foreign languages, his teaching at NTU from 1984 to 2010, which fostered a Tsao school of historians, and his efforts to help found the ITH. The institute was initially formed as a preparatory office in 1993 before being formally established as the ITH in 2004. During that decade, Taiwanese society became more interested in the culture and history of the island, and Tsao’s views concerning historical research on Taiwan began to take root among scholars. “Instead of subordinating Taiwan’s history to a Chinese or Japanese framework, his approach centers on the island of Taiwan so as to build a distinct discipline of historical studies that has structural integrity, totality and global relevance,” Hsu explains. “This line of thinking has gone a long way toward establishing a new perspective on Taiwan’s history.”
A poster for an international forum on the maritime history of East Asia and Taiwan that was held in Taipei in 2010 to celebrate Tsao’s 90th birthday (Photo courtesy of Tsao Yung-ho Foundation of Culture and Education)
Taiwan-Centric Approach
With the 1987 lifting of martial law and subsequent localization movement in Taiwan, Tsao’s research focus shifted from Han immigrants to the activities of all ethnic groups on the island. “Former studies of Taiwan history placed too much emphasis on the views and political changes of the Han people without revealing the island of Taiwan as an independent stage of history,” he says in one of the 2010 interviews. Taking history as a result of the interweaving of people, place and time, Tsao says that greater attention should be paid to Taiwan’s geographic features and regional significance as well as to all the people that “lived in and maintained relationships with Taiwan.” In the interviews, he says that ideas about Taiwan’s history should stand apart from politicized historical interpretations, and that they should “lay the foundation for developing a maritime cultural perspective of the island.”
Tsao was partly inspired by the French Annales School, which sees history through the lens of a region’s social structures over long stretches of time. Another major source of similar insights came from Japanese professors who remained in Taiwan after 1945 as teachers at NTU, or from research results he discovered in the school’s library. He attended the classes of Rokuro Kuwata (1894–1987), who specialized in the history of maritime transport routes in Southeast Asia, and read papers on Southeast Asian history by Seiichi Iwao (1900–1988). The young librarian also sought Iwao’s feedback on his writings about Taiwan’s history.
From May 1965 to April 1966, Tsao conducted research at the Toyo Bunko, an Asian studies research library in Tokyo. This was made possible by a fellowship grant from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) under the Major Project on Mutual Appreciation of Eastern and Western Cultural Values, a 10-year program launched by the United Nations agency in the late 1950s. Tsao’s involvement in the fellowship was in large part due to Iwao, who was overseeing the UNESCO project. The Japanese academic was a professor at Hosei University in Tokyo at the time, and went to the Toyo Bunko every week to teach Dutch to his Taiwanese pupil. “My 1965 journey to Toyo Bunko had a deep, far-reaching effect on my academic career,” Tsao says in the interview record.
In 1978, he was invited to Leiden University in the Netherlands to assist in the editing and compiling of a collection entitled De Dagregisters van het Kasteel Zeelandia, or The Daily Registers of Fort Zeelandia. These documents are part of the files from the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, VOC) stored at the National Archives of the Netherlands in The Hague. From the late 1620s to 1662, the VOC administered Taiwan and oversaw trade affairs in the South China Sea from Fort Zeelandia, remnants of which still stand today in Anping District of southern Taiwan’s Tainan City. The Taiwan-related VOC files, which contain innumerable details about the Dutch settlement, were the first instance of systematic documentation in the island’s history and provide invaluable materials for historical research.
Similar efforts to publish documents concerning the history of Taiwan and East Asian seafaring activities have been carried out through help from the Tsao foundation. For example, Tsao Chang-ping (曹昌平), the youngest of Tsao Yung-ho’s three sons, notes that since the early 2000s the foundation has funded a joint project by Leiden University and Xiamen University in mainland China to publish a series of VOC records about overseas Chinese communities in the VOC’s Asian colonial headquarters of Batavia, today’s Jakarta, Indonesia. Other Taiwan studies programs at home and abroad that regularly receive funding from the foundation include those of the Eastern Taiwan Studies Association, based in southeastern Taiwan’s Taitung City, and the Taiwan Research Programme at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The latter grew out of the London Taiwan Seminar, which was launched in 2000, and conducts comparative studies on Taiwan and other places such as Hong Kong and Ireland, Tsao Chang-ping says.
“We’re seeking to develop a global view of Taiwan’s history,” he says regarding the legacy of his father’s interpretation of historical events, which recognizes that different groups of people lived in Taiwan through different periods, and which identifies a distinct summation of Taiwan’s place in the annals of time.
Write to Pat Gao at cjkao@mofa.gov.tw