Tang Jingsong, born in 1841 in Guanyang, Guangxi, was a late-Qing Chinese scholar-official who served as the last governor of Taiwan under Qing rule. He passed the highest imperial examination in 1865 and entered the Hanlin Academy as a junior compiler, building his early career on classical scholarship. During the Sino-French War he volunteered for service in Vietnam, where he persuaded the Black Flag Army under Liu Yongfu to fight alongside Qing forces against the French in Tonkin, earning rapid promotion. He was appointed Provincial Administration Commissioner of Taiwan in 1891 and acting Governor of Taiwan Province in 1894, becoming the final Qing civil official to head the island. After the Qing defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895 the Treaty of Shimonoseki ceded Taiwan to Japan, and Taiwanese gentry proclaimed the so-called Republic of Formosa, electing Tang its first President under the reign title Yongqing in a bid to invite foreign intervention. The new regime sought diplomatic recognition and military support from European powers — particularly Britain and France — but received no substantive backing and remained internationally unrecognized. When the Japanese Imperial Guards Division landed at Aodi and the northern defenses collapsed, Tang abandoned his post on the eve of the fall of Taipei and fled by German merchant steamer from Tamsui to Xiamen. His departure precipitated the immediate collapse of northern resistance, while in the south Liu Yongfu sustained the war effort for several more months. After returning to mainland China he retired to his home in Guilin and died there in 1903. His career arched from late-Qing literati prestige and decorated service against the French to the contested final act of his flight from Taipei, an episode widely regarded in Taiwanese historiography as one of the most controversial moments of the 1895 transition.

• 1895 Proclaimed President of the Republic of Formosa

• 1895 Fled to Xiamen on the eve of the fall of Taipei