Opening the Mountains

The Mudan Incident of 1874 — in which Japanese forces landed in southern Taiwan on the pretext of punishing an indigenous village for the killing of Ryukyuan sailors — delivered a shock to the Qing court that transcended its immediate military dimension. The real blow was conceptual: when Qing officials attempted to protest the Japanese landing, they found their position undermined by their own previous statements classifying eastern Taiwan as territory beyond effective imperial administration. They had, in effect, conceded their own sovereignty over the areas they now sought to defend. The resulting settlement required the Qing to pay an indemnity to Japan, making clear that the island's internal geography had become an external vulnerability.

The response was the program known as 'opening the mountains and pacifying the savages' — a phrase encoding within its bureaucratic language the twin agenda of infrastructure development and indigenous displacement. Three mountain crossing routes were to be constructed simultaneously, with army units serving as both construction crews and combat forces against indigenous communities that resisted their advance.

Wu Guangliang was given command of the central route, the most ambitious of the three. Starting from Linqipu (today's Jiji in Nantou) in 1875, his force cut a path through the Central Mountain Range to the Hualien coast — more than two hundred li through terrain previously accessible only to those who knew it well. His soldiers felled forest, blasted rock, bridged gorges, and fought repeated engagements with Atayal and Bunun communities who understood that the road was not merely a road but the advance guard of a colonization they had no power to prevent.

Ding Richang approached Taiwan's modernization from a bureaucratic angle. As governor of Fujian with responsibility for Taiwan, he oversaw the extension of the island's first telegraph lines, connecting Tainan and Taipei and making Taiwan one of the earliest parts of China to have electrical communication infrastructure. Xia Xianlun's systematic surveys produced the most accurate maps of Taiwan's terrain that the Qing period generated, giving the administration an actual understanding of the mountain topography that made the road-building campaigns possible to plan and execute.

Lin Chaodong was the warrior face of this late Qing period — a member of one of Taiwan's prominent military families who rose through campaigns against indigenous resistance and the Sino-French War to become the island's most effective native military commander. When the Japanese arrived in 1895, Lin organized one of the more sustained military resistances the situation permitted before eventually withdrawing to mainland China — embodying the contradiction of the late Qing moment: a man of real talent serving an empire that had run out of the will to commit the resources his talent required.