Taiwan as a Province

In 1885, in the wake of the Sino-French War — during which French forces blockaded and bombarded Keelung and briefly occupied northern Taiwan — the Qing court recognized the island's strategic importance and elevated it from a prefecture of Fujian to a full province. Liu Mingchuan, the military commander who had successfully defended Taiwan against the French, was appointed as its first governor.

Liu launched the most ambitious modernization program in Taiwan's history to that point. He oversaw the construction of Taiwan's first railway line, connecting Keelung to Taipei and later extending toward Hsinchu. He installed telegraph lines linking the island to the mainland via undersea cables, established a modern postal system, and introduced electric street lighting to Taipei — making it one of the earliest electrified cities in East Asia. He conducted a comprehensive land survey to reform taxation, expanded camphor and tea production to boost revenue, and attempted to extend government authority into indigenous territories. These reforms, though visionary, generated fierce resistance from entrenched local interests and strained the provincial treasury.

Liu's successor, Shao Youlian, scaled back many of these initiatives, citing unsustainable costs. The railway remained incomplete, the land survey unfinished, and modernization stalled. Less than a decade later, China's humiliating defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War led to the Treaty of Shimonoseki (1895), which ceded Taiwan and the Penghu Islands to Japan in perpetuity — ending two centuries of Qing rule and opening a radically different chapter in the island's history.