Timeline

Land & Ownership

Four centuries of territorial change and belonging

The Dutch Arrival

In the late summer of 1624, several colossal armed merchantmen flying the red, white, and blue tricolor of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) glided gracefully into the shallow, windswept waters of Tayouan, off the southwestern coast of Taiwan. For two grueling years, these fair-haired, flintlock-bearing Western adventurers had been locked in a tense military standoff with the forces of the Ming Dynasty—the precursor to the Qing—from a fortress they had erected on the Penghu Islands. Ultimately, under the crushing tactical pressure and diplomatic orchestration of the massive Ming armies, a tacit trade-off was struck: the Dutch would demolish their citadel on Penghu and retreat to this uncharted, wild island marked on European charts as "Formosa." When the Dutch Governor, Martinus Sonck, first stepped onto this humid, sun-drenched sandbar, his sharp merchant instincts instantly recognized its monumental value. This island was not merely home to tens of thousands of roaming deer; it choked the very throats of the vital sea lanes connecting China, Japan, and the Philippines. The wild winds of the Age of Sail had just struck this beautiful, millennium-slumbering island with unrelenting force.

1662–1683Tungning Dynasty

Koxinga's Kingdom

In May 1661, following the successful landing of Zheng Koxinga’s twenty-five thousand elite troops at the Luermen channels, this emerald island—governed by the Dutch for thirty-eight years—witnessed the dawn of its very first Han Chinese regime. At this historical crossroads, though Fort Zeelandia remained locked in a fierce defense under the Dutch Governor, Frederick Coyett, the Prince of Yanping could not wait to commence his grand nation-building project upon the coastal plains. He decreed that the captured Fort Provintia in Chikan be transformed into the "Chengtian Prefecture," serving as the supreme imperial capital of the Ming Dynasty’s overseas orthodoxy, while establishing Tianxing and Wannian counties to the north and south. In a grand proclamation, Koxinga formally christened the island "Dongdu" (The Eastern Capital of the Ming). This was never meant to be a mere temporary refuge; it was a sovereign kingdom carved out of the wilderness by a desperate warlord whose mainland dreams had fractured, a final, sacred sanctuary for a fallen empire.

Han Settlement

Under Koxinga and Zheng Jing, Taiwan absorbed what was, for its time, a demographic flood. The 25,000 soldiers who crossed with Koxinga in 1661 did not leave; over the following two decades tens of thousands more Fujianese — some driven from the mainland by Qing coastal clearance policies, others drawn by the promise of land — made the eight-hour crossing from Xiamen or Quanzhou in shallow-draft junks. By the time the kingdom fell in 1683, the Han population of Taiwan had grown perhaps tenfold over what the Dutch had counted, and the island's ethnic map had been permanently redrawn.

1683–1895Imperial Frontier

Qing Incorporation

In 1683, Qing admiral Shi Lang defeated the remnants of the Zheng dynasty at the Battle of Penghu, bringing Taiwan under Qing sovereignty for the first time. The annexation was far from inevitable — a fierce debate erupted at the imperial court over whether to retain or abandon this distant island. Minister Shi Lang argued that Taiwan's strategic position made it essential for coastal defense, while others viewed it as a lawless frontier not worth the administrative burden. Emperor Kangxi ultimately sided with retention, incorporating Taiwan as a prefecture of Fujian Province.

Crossing the Black Ditch

In the late seventeenth century along the Fujian and Guangdong coast, deciding whether to cross to Taiwan was a deadly gamble with one’s life as the stake.

The Babao Canal

The broad Changhua plain had deep, rich soil that should by rights have yielded abundant harvests, yet it suffered from one great want: water. Flat and low-lying, the plain saw its rivers flood in the rainy season and run dry in the drought, leaving farmers at the mercy of an unreliable sky. A single dry year could ruin a crop. Until the land could be steadily irrigated it remained a country of parched fields and uncertain harvests, where settlers came and went and villages struggled to take root. In the early eighteenth century, seeing such fertile ground lying idle for lack of water, the wealthy landowner Shi Shi-bang resolved to change all of this, undertaking one of the most ambitious engineering feats of Qing Taiwan: a great canal to draw the waters of the Zhuoshui, the island's mightiest river, out across the plain.

Wu Sha Opens the Kavalan Plain

Beyond the mountains of Taiwan's northeast lay a fertile expanse cradled between the Snow Mountains and the Pacific — the Kavalan plain, today's Yilan. For most of the Qing era this plain lay outside the empire's borders, and Han settlers were expressly forbidden to cross into it. It was the ancestral home of the Kavalan people, who lived by rice farming, fishing, hunting, and trade among the villages scattered across the lowland. Yet on the western coast, only a mountain range away, Han settlement had already saturated the available land, and this rich but unclaimed valley became, in the eyes of adventurers, the most tempting prize of the age.

The Subgroup Feuds

For much of the Qing era, Taiwan was a young society of migrants from every quarter packed in together. They had crossed the treacherous Black Ditch to get there, and on unfamiliar ground they contended fiercely over fields, water and livelihood. Such a society was restless and unsettled, and it earned a grim reputation: "a small revolt every three years, a great upheaval every five."

The Aboriginal Frontier

Throughout the Qing period, the relationship between Han settlers and Taiwan's indigenous peoples was defined by an official boundary — the 'savage boundary' (番界) — a line of earthen mounds, ditches, and guard posts stretching across the island's western foothills. East of this line lay the territories of indigenous communities whom the Qing classified as 'raw savages' (生番), largely beyond imperial control; to the west spread the Han-settled plains, where 'cooked savages' (熟番) — indigenous groups that had adopted Han customs and paid taxes — occupied an increasingly precarious middle ground.

1895–1945Under the Rising Sun

The Treaty of Shimonoseki

On April 17, 1895, the Treaty of Shimonoseki ended the First Sino-Japanese War and ceded Taiwan and the Penghu Islands to Japan in perpetuity. The decision was made without any consultation of Taiwan's inhabitants — their fate was sealed in a conference room in the Japanese port city of Shimonoseki, where Qing envoy Li Hongzhang and Japanese Prime Minister Itō Hirobumi negotiated the terms of China's surrender. For the Qing court, Taiwan was a disposable bargaining chip; for the two million people living on the island, it was a catastrophe.

1945–1949Light & Shadow

Surrender and Takeover

In October 1945, the Nationalist government held a surrender ceremony in Taipei, formally ending Japan's fifty-year colonial rule over Taiwan. However, the joy of "retrocession" was quickly overshadowed by numerous problems during the takeover. Chen Yi's civil-military unified administration, the uneven quality of incoming officials, administrative barriers caused by language differences, and the wholesale transformation of Taiwan's existing institutions rapidly intensified social tensions.

De-Japanization

After taking over Taiwan, the Nationalist government immediately launched comprehensive "de-Japanization" and "re-Sinicization" policies. Japanese was banned in public spaces, Japanese-style place names were replaced with Chinese ones, and school instruction switched from Japanese to Chinese. Social organizations, legal systems, and administrative practices formed during the Japanese era were completely overhauled.

2000–thread.span.presentNew Formosa

Transitional Justice

When martial law was lifted in 1987 and the ban on new political parties and newspapers followed, Taiwan inherited a forty-year backlog of unacknowledged political violence. The February 28 Incident of 1947, in which an uprising against post-war Kuomintang rule was crushed with an estimated ten to twenty thousand dead, had been an unspeakable subject for two generations. Tens of thousands more had been executed, imprisoned, or blacklisted under the White Terror of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, their files sealed and their families silenced. Democratization without reckoning, many argued, would be democratization in name only.