is an island separated from the Chinese mainland by the Taiwan Straits. Geologically and archaeologically, was formerly an integral part of continental . There is no generally accepted theory as to when the separation took place. Some hypothesize a time as remote as 1,800,000 years ago, others one as recent as 10,000 years ago.
A number of archaeologists believe the ancestors of the Taiwanese came from the mainland more than 10,000 years ago. Geologists suggest that some time thereafter, there was a sudden rise in the earth's temperature and the ice sheets around the poles began to melt. This raised the level of the oceans and resulted in inundation of lowland areas, including a strip between and on the southeast coast of the mainland. The aborigines, earliest settlers on the island, probably came via continental .
Political ties between and the mainland may antedate the Chou dynasty (1122-256 B.C.). Troops were sent to by Sun Ch'uan during the Period of the Three Kingdoms (221.D.) and by Emperor Yang (reigned from 605 to 616) of the Sui dynasty. After removal of the Sung capital from in Honan to Hangchow in Chekiang in 1127, a sizable number of mainlanders began to migrate to Penghu (the Pescadores) and in an attempt to escape the attacks of the Juchen (also Nuchen or Jurched) and the Mongols from the north. During the first three decades of the 15th century, Cheng Ho, a eunuch of the Ming court, made seven voyages to the South Seas and visited . After the 16th century, the island became a stopping place for mariners sailing from the East to the .
The Dutch conquered the island in 1624. The Spanish came two years later but were expelled by the Dutch in 1642. After overthrow of the Ming dynasty by the Ch'ing (Manchus) in 1644, Cheng Ch'eng-kung (known in the West as Koxinga) fought on in province in the Ming cause. In 1661, he invaded in the hope of using it as a base for mainland recovery. The Dutch surrendered at near present-day the next year. Tens of thou sands of Ming loyalists then moved to the island. Manchu rule was not established until 1683, when Cheng K'e-shuang, the grandson of Cheng Ch'eng kung, surrendered.
was made a in 1887. Eight years later the island became a spoil of the first Sino-Japanese War. The Treaty of Shimonoseki ceded and to the Japanese, but the population refused to submit and proclaimed the first republic in Asian history. used military force to crush the revolt, then was confronted with 101 other uprisings during an occupation of 50 years.
The Cairo Declaration of November, 1943, stipulated that and Penghu were territories had "stolen" from and assured that they would be restored. The Potsdam Proclamation of July, 1945, then specified that "the terms of the Cairo Declaration shall be carried out." This was accepted by in the instrument of surrender. was returned to the Republic of China in October of that year and Chinese nationality restored to the people.
Article II of the Peace Treaty signed by the Republic of China and in 1952 recognized that under the San Francisco Treaty of 1951, " has renounced all rights, title and claim to and ."
Since 1949, when the National Government was removed to , the island has become the destination of thousands of refugees and defectors from Communism.
In January of 1969, an archaeological survey team of found a Paleolithic culture layer at the of Changpin village in Taitung county of southeastern . The layer of 3 meters, located atop the caves, contained stone tools, bone ware and potteries. These relics are estimated to be more than 10,000 years old. The caves are the oldest dwelling places yet discovered in . According to Dr. Li Chi, director of the Academia Sinica's of and Philology, the relics of the have these characteristics:
1. Morphology of the stone implements shows they are not the products of the early Paleolithic Age (they are not the most primitive stone implements).
2. Stone implements are made from rocks picked up along the nearby seashore. The hardness of the rock suggests the makers of the implements were men of strength.
3. Shapes of the implements resemble those of the Paleolithic Age excavated on the Chinese mainland.
4. Location of the relics suggests that the earliest settlers of lived on the east coast.
Many relics unearthed in before 1969 substantiate the validity of the Pahsien remains. In the spring of 1965, Prof. Chang Kuang-chih of and several other archaeologists excavated painted and black potteries of the prehistoric period near Fengpitou, county, in the southwest. Streaks of these potteries were similar to those of the Neolithic age excavated on the Chinese mainland but simpler than those discovered in the Indochina peninsula and the .
The Neolithic period on the Chinese mainland consists of the three cultural epochs of Yangshao, early Lungshan and later Lungshan. The Yangshao culture, also known as the painted pottery culture, flourished along the midstream of the Yellow River in . The early Lungshan culture was developed about 1000 B.C. and dominated the midstream and downstream areas of the Yellow River, coastal areas and . The decoration of pottery was more advanced than that of the Yangshao period. The Fengpitou painted potteries were remains of the geometric figured pottery culture which had flourished on the southeastern coast of the mainland. Similar potteries were found in Taotzeyuan of Kaohsiung county and Liangwen . It is likely that the Lungshan culture was diffused to by way of .
In 1964, members of the Taipei County Archives excavated a bronze arrowhead with two barbs at Pachakan, Pali village, near Tamsui. Considering that arrowheads of Chou times had three barbs, the Pacha heads must have been made before Chou. Metallurgical analysis showed the Pachakan arrowhead was cast by a method prevailing during Ying-Shang times (1766-1122 B.C.).
At Pachakan, archaeologists excavated stone tools identical to those unearthed at Yuanshan of Taipei city. These relics and those of the Ying-Shang times discovered on the mainland belong to the same period. Taking the relics found at Liangwen port, Taotzeyuan and Fengpitou into consideration, it may be concluded that the ancestors of the aborigines came from the Chinese mainland before the beginning of the Christian era.
In 1943, the Japanese historian Kanaseki Takeo made a study of stone knives, stone barbs and painted and black potteries newly excavated in . He concluded that the culture had been influenced by . Another Japanese historian, Kunitada Bunichi, reached a similar conclusion. After analyzing the black potteries and shouldered and stepped stone adzes unearthed in , he said the black pottery culture was an offshoot of that on the mainland.
Shikano Tadao, a Japanese archaeologist, said "Chinese mainland culture constituted the infrastructure of the prehistoric culture of " and the "mainland culture had been diffused to in several waves." He classified 's prehistoric remains in seven categories, each represented by a culture layer:
1. Cord-marked pottery, the oldest and most common in , was brought from .
2. Mesh-marked pottery, found in many parts of the island, came from .
3. Black pottery from the coastal mainland was diffused along the south coast.
4. Stepped stone adzes found on the northwestern coast were from Fulden.
5. Proto-Dong-Son artifacts similar to those found at Dong-Son in .
6. Megaliths of the east coast resembling those of .
7. Philippine iron utensils and ornaments found on the east coast and in the south. scholars estimate iron tools were introduced to between 600 and .D.
History records that has been known to the Chinese for more than 3,000 years. The Shang Shu (Book of History), one of 's oldest books, contains historical documents and speeches dating from the early years of the Chou dynasty. In a chapter entitled "Yu Kung," is said to have had nine political districts. One of these, located on the southeast coast, was called . Under the jurisdiction of Yangchow was the . The book said: "Inhabitants on the island wear hemp clothes decorated with shells and use bamboo tools. The island produces mandarin oranges and pomelos."
Some scholars have interpreted the term "Taoyi" literally-tao for island and yi for barbarians-and concluded that "Taoyi" was a general term applied to "inhabitants on islands along the southeast coast" of the Chinese 'mainland. Of these islands, only is known for production' of mandarin oranges 'and pomelos.
The Shih Chi (Historical Records), written by the great historian Ssu-Ma Ch'ien during the reign of Emperor Wu (140-87 B.C.) of the Han dynasty, mentions the practice of tattooing and the wearing of short hair by the inhabitants of Kiangsu and Chekiang. According to some scholars, these customs were intended to protect fishing peoples against the monsters of the sea. Aborigines of used to tattoo their faces. Those of Malay did not. This suggests that ancestors of the aborigines may have been immigrants from Kiangsu and Chekiang rather than from the , which is often presumed to have been their ancestral home.
These are other cultural similarities between 's earliest settlers and the people of ancient :
1. Housing - Peoples of Chekiang and lived in marshy areas. To protect against flood, they built their houses on stilts. This custom persisted until the period of Three Kingdoms (221.D.). Most aborigines of the high mountains still live in such houses.
2. Marriage - According to the Lin-hai Feng-t'u-chih (Topography of Linhai) compiled by Shen Ying during the 4th century A.D., all married people of Taiwan were missing their two upper front teeth. The same custom was followed in Linhai, which is situated in the eastern part of present-day . The book said that when a girl fell in love with a boy, she would invite him to her house. If her parents agreed to their marriage, the boy would knock out his two upper front teeth as an engagement present. She would do the same in token of her acceptance.
3. Funerals - People of in had a custom called the "cliff funeral." They placed the bodies of their parents in wooden coffins and hung them on a cliff. This practice is still followed by some aborigines of Hsinchu in northern .
4. Headhunting - Until the mid-18th century,· some tribes cut off the heads of fallen enemies as a totem of courage. The heads of strangers were used as sacrifices. This was also a practice of the Liao people of . The Kawua, a tribe of the Liao in province, reportedly still behead strangers.
Some aborigines came from the and Malay during the reign of T’ai Tsung (627-649), second emperor of the T'ang dynasty: At that time, there were floods in the . Many inhabitants sought to save themselves by putting to sea on bamboo rafts, some of which drifted to the southern coast of . According to the T'ai-wan Hsiao-chih (Brief Annals of Taiwan) compiled by Kung Ch'ai in the mid-19th century, a sixth of the aboriginal languages of Taiwan are from the Malay peninsula and a tenth from Luzon of the Philippines.
Taiwan has been known by several names-Taoyi before the Han dynasty (206 B.C..D.), Tung-k'ung during the Han, Yichow during the period of Three Kingdoms (221.D.) and Liuch'iu (also spelled Liukiu or Loochoo) during the Tang through the Sung (618-1280). In the subsequent Yuan (Mongol) dynasty (1280-1368), it was also called Liuch'iu but written in different characters.
Later historical records show that Liuch'iu was a collective name for the present-day Ryukyus (which in Mandarin is still called Liuch'iu) and and neighboring islets. In 1372 the Ming court sent an emissary to and conferred upon its chieftain the title of "Liuch'iu King," making him a hereditary vassal of the Chinese Empire. For some time thereafter, the name Liuch'iu was limited to Okinawa and the adjacent group of islands, while the name Hsiao Liuch'iu (Little Liuch'iu) was given to , which actually is far larger than all the islands of the group put together. This belittling of a larger island was probably due to 's lesser development at the time. Even today, an islet off 's southwest coast near is called Hsiao Liuch'iu.
It was during the reign of Emperor Shen Tsung (1573-1619) of the Ming that the officially acquired its modern name. Other names of the last few centuries include Chilung Shan, T'aiyuan, Tawan, Tayuan, Peikang and Tungfan. The Western name, (meaning "beautiful"), was given by Portuguese sailors as they coasted along its shores in 1583. The Dutch provided such variants as Tayovan, Tayan, Tayoun, Tyovan and Tavan.
Cheng Ch'eng-kung accepted the surrender of Dutch forces- at Fort Providentia in Tainan on February 1, 1662 (File photo)
became an objective of Japanese aggression as early as the mid-16th century. During the last years of Emperor Shih Tsung (reigned from 1522 to 1566) of the Ming, Japanese pirates (known as Wako in and Wo-k'ou in ) pillaged ports and many aborigines were compelled to move into the mountains. In 1592, when Shogun Toyotomi Hideyoshi sent an army of some 160,000 to as the first step in his plan to conquer the Asian continent, the Ming court began strengthening fortifications at . In the following year, Toyotomi Hideyoshi's emissary to Luzon, Harada Magoshichi, invaded on his way to the . An army of Shimazu Iehisa, the lord of in southern Kyushu, took the Liuch'iu king prisoner and attacked in 1609. Another assault came six years later, this time by Shogun Tokugawa Hidetada. All attempts ended in failure. Nevertheless, they served to inspire Japanese aggression against in the 19th century.
The Dutch were the first Western invaders of . They came to in 1603 to seek trade but were rejected. In 1622, when their proposal again was rejected, the Dutch sent 17 warships to seize , where 600 fishing boats were captured. Two years later, they moved on to southwestern and built at Anping in suburban . Maarten Sonk was appointed governor-general and commander of the 2,800 garrison troops. The number of Chinese settlers in then was estimated at 30,000. To consolidate their occupation, the Dutch built fortresses and churches, monopolized foreign trade, imposed heavy taxes and recruited farmers from the Chinese mainland.
In 1626, a Spanish expeditionary force from Luzon landed at and subsequently occupied Tamsui, Yilan and Hsinchu in the north. The Spanish were driven out by the Dutch in 1642.
The Dutch held until 1661, when Cheng Ch'eng-kung invaded the island from on the southeast coast of the mainland. During their occupation of nearly four decades, the Dutch met with a number of Chinese revolts. The most famous was that of Kuo Huai-yi (known as Fayet or Buwet among the Dutch), once a subordinate of Cheng Ch'eng-kung's father.
According to Kuo's original plan, the revolt was to take place on the 15th night of the 8th moon, 1652, while leading Dutch officials and merchants were attending a Mid-Autumn Festival party at his residence. This plot was leaked to the Dutch. So Kuo and his men attacked on the 5th night of the 8th moon. Although they outnumbered the Dutch, the Chinese were defeated in three days because they lacked discipline and had inferior weapons. More than 6,000 Chinese were killed, including Kuo Huai-yi.
Cheng Ch'eng-kung is one of the great names of . He was born in 1624 at Hirado in northern . His father, Cheng Chili-lung, was a Chinese seafarer. His mother was the daughter of Weng Yi-huang, a Fulden merchant, and a Japanese woman of the Tagawa family. Until the age of 7, Ch'eng-kung lived with the Tagawas at Hirado and rarely saw his father. When Chih-lung became an admiral in command of coast guard forces, Ch'eng-kung was taken to Chuanchow in for schooling.
In 1644, when Ch'eng-kung was a student at the at Nanking, the bandit Li Tzu-ch'eng rebelled against the Ming court and occupied , the capital. The Ming Emperor Ch'ung Cheng hanged himself on a hill near the . In the following year, Cheng Chih-lung and his brother Cheng Hung-k'uei made Prince T'ang the new Ming emperor (Lung Wu). In 1646, with a large part of the Middle Kingdom occupied by the Manchus, Chih-lung and his son Ch'eng-kung were received in audience by the Emperor Lung Wu at Foochow, . Moved by Ch'eng-kung's plans for national recovery, the emperor said: "I regret that I have no daughter to be your wife. In appreciation of your loyalty, I appoint you Deputy Commander of the Royal Guards and grant you the Imperial surname of ." So it is that Cheng Ch'eng-kung has been popularly known as the Kuo-hsing Yeh (Lord of the Imperial Surname) among the Chinese. The Dutch derived "Koxinga" from the Arnoy dialect of Kok-seng Ya.
Several months after the audience, the Emperor Lung Wu was taken prisoner by the Manchus. Chih-lung fled to Anping. Realizing that the greater part of the Ming fleet was still at large and commanded by Cheng Chih-lung, the Manchus tried to lure him into surrender by offering the governorship of Fukien and . Chih-lung was interested but Ch'eng-kung warned his father not to be deceived by the Manchus. Chih-lung was not convinced and sailed to , where he met an emissary of the Manchus. The admiral-pirate father subsequently was imprisoned in as a hostage for his son.
Following the defection of his father, Ch'eng-kung began his national recovery movement with an army of fewer than 100 men. Arnoy and Kinmen () were his bases. As the size of his forces grew, he recovered offshore islands and coastal cities one after another.
In 1659, Cheng Ch'eng-kung led an army of a campaign against . He failed only because some of his men were secretly in league with the Manchus. Two years later Yung Li, the last monarch of the Ming, was captured by the Manchus on the Yunnan-Burma border. Cheng Ch'eng-kung decided to liberate from the Dutch and use the island as his base for national recovery.
In March of 1661, Cheng's army of 25,000 occupied and then moved on Anping. The Dutch garrison was small - only some 2,000 troops. However, it took Cheng Ch'eng-kung nine months to compel their surrender. The Dutch had better weapons and were in command of the local situation after 38 years of colonization. Formal capitulation was on February 1, 1662, at , now the Historical Museum of Tainan city. Cheng Ch'eng-kung's son, Cheng Ching, remained at Arnoy in command of garrison troops.
After the departure of the Dutch, who were permitted to leave in peace, Cheng Ch'eng-kung distributed land to farmers without charge. Free land attracted a sizable number of mainland immigrants via . Seeking to develop the island's economy, Cheng Ch'eng-kung employed Vittorio Ricci, an Italian friar he had known at Arnoy, as adviser. Ricci taught irrigation and was sent to the as a special envoy to promote trade.
After the death of Cheng Ch'eng-kung in May of 1662, the Ch'ing court made several attempts to persuade Cheng Ching, who was still in Arnoy, to surrender. Cheng Ching turned a deaf ear. But in September of 1663, he had to evacuate in the face of a joint attack by the Manchus and Dutch. He returned to . Ten years later, in 1673, he made a comeback at , where mainland remnants of the Ming revolted against the Manchus. His troops remained on the mainland until 1679, occupying several coastal cities in . Cheng Ching died in in 1681. Two years later, the Ch'ing government took advantage of internal struggle among the Chengs to conquer and made it a .
became an objective of Japanese aggression in 1871, when a Ryukyuan ship with 66 persons aboard drifted into near Hengchun, the southern tip of the island. Aborigines of the Mutan (Botan in Japanese documents) community mistook the shipwrecked personnel as invaders and killed 54. The remaining 12 were sent back to the Ryukyus by way of . Taking advantage of this incident, made the king of Liuch'iu a lord of and sent an expeditionary force of 3,600 to . Japanese troops withdrew seven months later at the instigation of Western powers. The dispute was settled in October of 1874 with compensation of 100,000 taels of silver to the bereaved Japanese families and 400,000 taels to the Japanese government for construction of roads and erection' of buildings by the expeditionary force.
Toward the end of 1883, and came to blows over and . Governor Liu Ming-ch'uan of Fukien province was instructed to strengthen the defense establishments of . In July of the following year, he came to with an army of 20,000.
The French attacked in early August. Their objectives presumably were gold and coal mines in the vicinity. In the ensuing nine months, they gained footholds north of but were repulsed in March of 1885 and turned to . Vice Admiral Courbet, commander of the invading forces, died there shortly after occupation of the isles. Tales of the times say he was killed by the garrison troops. Peace was negotiated. The French withdrew in the summer of l885.
As a result of the confrontation with the French, the Manchus came to recognize the strategic importance of and in 1887 made it a province with Liu Ming-ch'uan as governor. From the beginning of the Dutch colonization period in 1624, the capital of had been at . With as the relay station, a southern capital expedited communication with the mainland.
But the new governor was interested in developing 's economy. As he saw it, the administrative center should be moved north. Production of tea, camphor, sulfur, coal and gold were centered in the area and exports moved out of the ports of and Tamsui. The first Taiwan Provincial Government was set up at the site of the present-day .
and went to war in the summer of 1894. In April of the following year, the two countries signed a treaty of peace at Shimonosoki under which and Penghu were ceded to . The Chinese people of were unwilling to become Japanese citizens and proclaimed the establishment of a on May 23. T'ang Ching-sung, former governor of , was elected president. After inauguration, he dispatched a message to viceroys and governors throughout the Chinese Empire asserting that the of "recognizes the suzerainty of the Emperor of China and stands in the relation of a tributary state to ."
The establishment of the republic meant war with . To consolidate defenses, the island was divided into northern, central and southern areas with Yang Ch'i-chen, Ch'iu Feng-chia and Liu Yung-fu as respective commanders. A week after the declaration of independence, a Japanese occupation army landed at Aoti southeast of .
The of came to an end June 6 with the, Japanese capture of . President T'ang Ching-sung fled to aboard a German ship. Admiral Sukenori Kabayama, the newly appointed governor-general, entered June 14 and was sworn in three days later. The whole island was "pacified" late in October after Commanders Ch'iu Feng-chia and Liu Yung-fu had gone to the mainland.
Rikichi Ando, last Japanese Governor General of Taiwan, signed the instruments of surrender to the Republic of China at the Taipei City Hall October 25, 1945. This date is now observed nationally as Taiwan's Retrocession Day (File photo)
Nevertheless, anti-Japanese revolts did not cease until the end of World War II and the retrocession of to in 1945. The biggest rebellion was initiated by Lo Fu-hsing of Miaoli, an immigrant from . In 1905, Lo returned to the mainland where he was acquainted, with Ch'iu Feng-chia, who had become education commissioner of , and other leaders of the Revolutionary Party (predecessor of the Kuomintang). He was involved in the Huang Hua Kang (Yellow Flower Mound) campaign of March 29 and the Wuchang uprising of October 10, 1911. After the establishment of the Republic of China in 1912, he returned to with 20,000 mainland followers in an effort to overthrow the Japanese. By the end of 1912, the number of his local supporters exceeded 95,000. Revolts erupted in Miaoli, , Nantou and . Lo Fu-hsing was arrested at Tamsui on December 18, 1913. On February 29, 1914, Lo and 19 others were sentenced to death and 285 to imprisonment.
Before outbreak of the Pacific War, thousands of Taiwan-born students and intellectuals went to the mainland to join the National Revolution and to work for recovery of from the Japanese. Their wishes were affirmed first in a joint communique issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the United States, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek of the Republic of China and Prime Minister Winston C. Churchill of Great Britain at Cairo on November 26, 1943:
"It is their (the United States, China and Great Britain) purpose that Japan be stripped of all the islands in the Pacific which she has seized or occupied since the beginning of the First World War in 1914, and has stolen from the Chinese, such as ... Formosa ... shall be restored to the Republic of China."
Then, on July 26, 1945, the heads of the three governments reaffirmed in Paragraph 8 of the Potsdam Proclamation that: "The terms of the Cairo Declaration shall be carried out."
The Instrument of Surrender signed by and the Allied Powers on September 2 of that year stipulated that:
"The Japanese Government and the Japanese Imperial General Headquarters hereby accept the provisions set forth in the declaration issued by the Heads of Government of the , and on July 26, 1945, at ."
Four days later, the first national flag of the Republic of China was raised atop the former Japanese Governor-General's Office (now the Presidential Office). Capitulation ceremonies at the on October 25 ended half a century of colonial rule and restored freedom to .
Editor's note: This article is largely based on T’ai-wan Li-shih Kai-yao (An Outline of Taiwan History) by Prof. Chiang Chun-chang, a leading historian-geographer of the Republic of China. Romanization of Chinese and Japanese personal names is in the natural order of family name followed by given names.