Story Thread

Her Story

From Tungning to today — the women who held up half the island.

The People

16 figures · 6 eras · 1601–present

Age of Discovery

Tagawa Matsu1601–1646

Tungning Dynasty

Lady Dong?–1681

Japanese Colonial Period

Mahung Mona1908–1973

Tsai A-hsin1899–1990

Chen Chin1907–1998

Li Xianglan1920–2014

Sayun1921–1938

Yang Chian-ho1921–2011

Post-War & Authoritarian Era

Hsieh Hsueh-hung1901–1970

Jiang Biyu1921–1995

Democratic Transition

Lu Hsiu-lien1944–

Chen Chu1950–

Modern Taiwan

Teresa Teng1953–1995

Chen Shu-chu1950–

Tsai Ing-wen1956–

Audrey Tang1981–

The Banishment of the Inibs

Siraya religion was in the hands of women. The inibs conducted the rites, treated the sick and read what was auspicious, and they also enforced a strict order around childbearing: a woman under thirty-five who conceived had to abort, husbands and wives lived apart after marriage, and only when the man was around forty did they share a house. These were not personal choices. They were a system, and the inibs administered it.

1662–1683Tungning Dynasty

The Tears of Lady Dong

In the deep twilight of an autumn day in 1681, inside the secluded inner chambers of the Anping Royal Palace in Tainan, a white-haired, grief-stricken matriarch wept softly, leaning on her maidservants for support. She was Lady Dong, the Grand Dowager consort of the founding king, Koxinga.

Prince Ningjing's Martyrdom

In the sweltering midsummer of 1683, a suffocating aura of despair hung over the city of Tainan. Ominous news had traveled across the black waters of the strait—the main naval forces of the Zheng regime had been utterly obliterated at the Battle of Penghu, and the twelve-year-old puppet king, Zheng Keshuang, along with his ministers, had already resolved to tender their submission to the Qing Empire.

1895–1945Under the Rising Sun

Kōminka Movement

In 1937, gunfire at the Marco Polo Bridge crossed the Yellow Sea and bore down upon this island. As freighters continued to load Taiwan's rice, sugar, and camphor for the Japanese home islands, and as the canals of the Jianan Plain went on watering a land already colonized for thirty years, atop the newly consecrated grounds of the Taiwan Grand Shrine at Yuanshan in Taipei, a ritual bell rang out through the morning mist, again and again. In that very same hour, inside a century-old temple on the island's western coast, the wooden body of Guanyin was kicked to the earth by the boots of the military police, and fire spread across the mud — this was the "Temple Rectification Movement." Shrine and flame together carved the deepest fissure in Taiwan's colonial history: the Kōminka Movement, a vast imperial project that sought, in less than a decade, to rewrite the soul of an entire generation of Taiwanese.

Wartime Mobilization

When full-scale war with China broke out in 1937, Taiwan's fate was utterly rewritten. No longer merely the colonial agricultural base of the Japanese empire, it was pushed forward as a frontline springboard for the 'southward advance' into Southeast Asia. Beginning with the last military Governor-General, Kobayashi Seizo, who proclaimed the threefold line of 'imperialization, industrialization, and use as a southward base,' the whole island was progressively remade into an indispensable part of the empire's war machine. The eighteenth Governor-General, Hasegawa Kiyoshi, who succeeded him in 1940, was the key figure who drove this line to its extreme. A Japanese navy admiral by background, he governed Taiwan in the crucial years when the Pacific War broke out in full, and in 1941 he founded the Kominhokokai (Imperial Subjects Public Service Association), enrolling the whole island's population from the top down in a service organization that mobilized manpower, materiel, and spiritual energy in support of the front. Compared with his predecessor he took a somewhat more conciliatory cultural stance, courting the Taiwanese gentry under the slogan of 'Japan and Taiwan as one' in an effort to win their full commitment to the war.

1945–1949Light & Shadow

The 27 Brigade

The gunfire of February 28, 1947, spread outward from Taipei, and the fury raced south along the trunk railway; within two days it had reached Taichung. On March 2, residents and students poured into the streets, and the city council convened an emergency citizens' assembly. Onto the platform stepped a woman of forty-six — Hsieh Hsueh-hung. Born into a poor family in Changhua and sold as a child bride, she had taught herself to read and made her way to Shanghai and to the Communist University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow. In 1928 she had helped found the Taiwanese Communist Party, and she had endured repeated imprisonment under the Japanese colonial authorities. In that moment, no one else on the island understood better how to forge a scattered crowd into a force.

1949–1987Silent Island

The Economic Miracle

The land reforms of the 1950s — the 37.5％ rent reduction of 1949 that capped tenant rent at 37.5 percent of the annual main-crop yield, the release of public land originally seized from the Japanese sugar industry to cultivating tenants, and the Land-to-the-Tiller program of 1953 that compulsorily purchased landlord holdings in exchange for government bonds and shares in state enterprises — were among the most profoundly impactful socioeconomic policies in post-war Taiwan. Executed with U.S. technical advice and underwritten by the political reality that the KMT leadership had no local constituency among Taiwan's landowning class, these reforms dismantled the landlord system dating from the Japanese era, redirected agricultural surplus capital toward industrialization, and simultaneously weakened the economic and political power of the native Taiwanese landlord class in a way the regime could never have achieved on the mainland.

The Gaozhong No. 6

In December 1966 the export processing zone at Qianzhen in Kaohsiung began operating. It was the first export processing zone in the world, 68.36 hectares built on Zhongdao beside Kaohsiung harbour. Its factories made electronics, clothing, leather goods and all kinds of small things for export, and they needed large numbers of young, nimble, low-paid workers. Most of those they recruited were women: in the zone's first year, more than seventy percent of the workers who came in were women.

2000–presentNew Formosa

The First Woman President, and an Apology

On January 16, 2016, Tsai Ing-wen was elected president with 6,894,744 votes, 56.12 percent. On the same day the Democratic Progressive Party took sixty-eight seats in the legislature, its first outright majority. Executive and legislative power changed hands together in a single election, something that had not happened since the first direct presidential vote in 1996.

Love Without Distinction

On May 17, 2019, Taiwan's Legislative Yuan passed on its third reading the Enforcement Act of Judicial Yuan Interpretation No. 748, allowing two people of the same sex to establish a permanent union in marriage by law, and Taiwan thereby became the first country in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage.