The Last Generation of Gentry

The final two decades of Qing rule in Taiwan — the period between the inauguration of Liu Mingchuan's modernization program in the mid-1880s and the island's transfer to Japan in 1895 — were in some respects the most active period in the history of the Taiwanese gentry class. The construction projects of the late Qing era — the first railway, the telegraph system, the new stone walls of Taipei, the government schools — required capital and social organization that the state could not supply entirely from its own resources. What filled the gap was the wealth, the local networks, and the organizational capacity of the island's established merchant-gentry families.

Hong Tengyun exemplified the merchant-gentry who made this moment possible. He had built his fortune in the tea trade — northern Taiwan's most important export industry in the late nineteenth century — and used that wealth to ascend from merchant to recognized gentry status through large donations to official purposes. His most consequential contribution was financial: he provided substantial private funding for the construction of Taipei's stone city walls and the official buildings of the new provincial capital. His name was inscribed on commemorative monuments, and the city whose physical form his money had helped create became the center of the briefly existing Republic of Formosa in 1895 — a republic that lasted eleven days before Japanese forces arrived.

Xu Zonggan was the Qing official who did most to nurture the literary and scholarly culture of mid-nineteenth-century Taiwan. Serving as circuit intendant during a period when the island's examination culture was beginning to produce a locally-rooted intelligentsia, he invested in the quality of existing academies and made deliberate efforts to identify and support talented individuals who might otherwise have lacked the access to instruction needed to advance. His patronage of Chen Weiying — who became one of the most significant poet-teachers of the late Qing period — was typical of his approach: finding people whose potential was visible but whose circumstances were limiting, and removing the limitation.

Wu Luanqi's story brings this history to its close. In the summer of 1895, when news of the Treaty of Shimonoseki reached the central plains, Wu — serving in a middle-ranking administrative position in Taichung — became one of the organizers of the armed resistance that the central Taiwan gentry attempted to mount against the Japanese advance. He helped recruit local militia, coordinated supply lines, and maintained communications during the weeks when the outcome was still theoretically uncertain. The resistance failed — as it was always going to fail against a modern military force with better weapons and unlimited political backing. But the gentry who led it left behind a record of choice: when the empire abandoned the island, they decided, however briefly and however hopelessly, to stay and fight for it themselves.