The Deer That Built an Empire

If a modern person could travel back to seventeenth-century Taiwan, the most astonishing sight would not be Fort Zeelandia, nor the Dutch merchants, nor even the Indigenous villages scattered across the plains.

It would be the deer.

Endless deer.

From present-day Tainan stretching all the way to the plains of Changhua, the western half of Taiwan was once covered in vast grasslands. Before the morning mist fully lifted, thousands upon thousands of Formosan sika deer would emerge from the fields. They ran, grazed, and drank in herds so large they seemed like a moving brown sea flowing across the land.

To the Siraya people of the time, deer were part of everyday life.

Their meat provided food.

Their antlers became tools.

Their hides were used for trade.

When hunting season arrived, warriors would enter the grasslands armed with spears and bows. They knew the migration routes of the herds. They knew where to set traps. For centuries, this rhythm had remained unchanged.

Until the Dutch arrived.

After the Dutch East India Company established Fort Zeelandia in 1624, they quickly discovered an unexpected opportunity.

The Japanese were willing to pay silver for deer hides.

And not just a little.

In the early Edo period, deer leather was in high demand. Samurai used it in armor and weapon fittings. Craftsmen used it to polish blades. Wealthy merchants treated it as a valuable luxury good. As demand surged, Dutch traders realized something remarkable: the deer roaming Taiwan’s plains were not just wildlife.

They were mobile wealth.

And so, a hunting boom began.

The Dutch transformed deer hide production into a fully commercialized industry.

They exchanged iron tools, textiles, and imported goods for deer skins. Indigenous communities increasingly joined the trade network. Hunting was no longer just about survival—it became an economic activity tied to global demand.

More hunters entered the plains.

Fewer deer remained.

At the height of the trade, more than one hundred thousand deer hides were exported from Fort Zeelandia each year.

Warehouses filled with dried skins.

Workers packed shipments day and night.

Ships departed Taiwan one after another.

The hides were sent to Nagasaki in Japan, exchanged for vast quantities of silver. That silver then flowed into Chinese markets, purchasing silk, porcelain, and tea. In this way, a single deer hide connected Taiwan, Japan, China, and Europe—forming a trade network that spanned the entire East Asian world.

Fort Zeelandia prospered.

The Dutch East India Company’s ledgers recorded rising profits year after year.

And Taiwan, for the first time, was fully integrated into a global economic system.

But prosperity often carries its own shadow.

Deer are not infinite.

As hunting intensified, the once-teeming herds of the plains began to shrink. Hunters who once encountered hundreds of deer in a single day now had to travel for hours to find even a trace.

By the mid-seventeenth century, the warning signs were unmistakable.

Deer populations collapsed.

Hunting grounds expanded deeper inland.

Conflicts broke out between villages competing for diminishing resources.

Yet few were willing to stop.

The profits were too great.

Almost everyone believed the grasslands would never run out of deer.

They were wrong.

When Koxinga arrived in Taiwan in 1661, the great herds had already begun to vanish from the western plains. Soon after, waves of Han settlers transformed the landscape. Forests were cleared. Grasslands became farmland. The ecological foundation that had sustained the deer collapsed entirely.

The animals that once defined the economy of a colonial era slowly disappeared from Taiwan’s western plains.

Today, walking across the Chianan Plain, one sees rice fields, highways, and cities.

Few remember that four centuries ago, this same land was a vast natural pasture filled with wildlife.

The deer that once moved like living tides across the morning mist did more than feed Indigenous communities. They fueled a global trade empire, enriched the Dutch East India Company, and placed Taiwan at the center of East Asian commerce.

In that era, the most valuable resource on the island was not gold.

Not silver.

But a herd of deer running freely across an open land.