How Taiwan Became Chinese: Dutch, Spanish, and Han Colonization in the Seventeenth Century

by Tonio Andrade

At the beginning of the 1600s, Taiwan was a sylvan backwater, sparsely inhabited by headhunters and visited mainly by pirates and fishermen. By the end of the century it was home to more than a hundred thousand Chinese colonists, who grew rice and sugar for export on world markets. This book examines this remarkable transformation. Drawing primarily on Dutch, Spanish, and Chinese sources, it argues that, paradoxically, it was Europeans who started the large scale Chinese colonization of the island: the Spanish, who had a base on northern Taiwan from 1626 to 1642, and, more importantly, the Dutch, who had a colony from 1623 to 1662. The latter enticed people from the coastal province of Fujian to Taiwan with offers of free land, freedom from taxes, and economic subventions, creating a Chinese colony under European rule.

Taiwan was thus the site of a colonial conjuncture, a system that the author calls co-colonization. The Dutch relied closely on Chinese colonists for food, entrepreneurship, translation, labor, and administrative help. Chinese colonists relied upon the Dutch for protection from the headhunting aborigines and, sometimes, from other Chinese groups, such as the pirates who ranged the China Seas.

In its analysis the book sheds light on one of the most important questions of global history: how do we understand the great colonial movements that have shaped our modern world? By examining Dutch, Spanish, and Han colonization in one island, it offers a compelling answer: Europeans managed to establish colonies throughout the globe not primarily because of technological superiority but because their states sponsored overseas colonialism whereas Asian states, in general, did not. Indeed, when Asian states did, European colonies were vulnerable, and the book ends with the capture of Taiwan by a Chinese army, led by a Chinese warlord named Zheng Chenggong.

Genres: History, China, Nonfiction

324 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2008

Reviews

[Chloe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Exceptionally well-written and fairly readable for such a densely academic text! I wish the author was able to share more about aboriginal and Chinese responses to the 17th century colonization of Taiwan, but the vast majority of his sources (and maybe some of the only surviving sources from that time period and place) seem to have been from the Dutch, so it makes sense that so much of the book focuses on their point of view.

I feel like I learned a lot more about what societies in Taiwan in the 1600s looked like and operated, and it was much easier to follow along to this book than some of the other academic histories of Taiwan that I've read.

[Andre · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a really good book, definitely to be recommended. It already started well when it brought it up that it is really odd that colonialism usually only means having overseas colonies.
It is also always fascinating to read about Japanese trade and all during the time of exclusion, the trade that still happened as well as how banning Europeans was more about controlling shogunates than the Europeans themselves. The whole introduction chapter was fine and I hoped that the book could keep it up. Granted, I didn't think this was about the first decades of colonization on Taiwan, but I wanted to see what would come out of it.
Apparently headhunting was quite important for the sex-segregated society of the Sirayan men and I doubt that they would have had their first children at 42, that seems awfully late, that might have been the ideal but it surely happened before. And what the book presented really doesn't sound as if the Dutch could just waltz in and establish a colony on Taiwan, they were thrown in right into the aboriginal (and often violent) politics (and man 1-2000 people is a big village), they had to deal with chinese officials and priates, conquistadores and samurai. Granted, the dutch really did have a lucky streak there. If the shogun hadn't forbidden japanese overseas trade etc. the japanese traders probably would have been another significant factor in the region and maybe they would have colonized Taiwan centuries earlier than what actually happened. Despite that, the Dutch really set themselves into a hornets nest when coming to Taiwan. these constant aboriginal alliances sound like a nightmare.
Reading about these early days of the spanish post in Northern Taiwan and the lack of evidence of chinese traders there (the formosans preferred to trade among each other there apparently) reminds me of the silver from the american colonies that the spanish traded with the chinese back then. Interesting to read the role of missionaries and why aboriginal villages would want one in their midst, it meant spanish protection and naturally that is a good incentive in the volatile aboriginal politics were apparently appearing weak was inviting attacks. However, Spanish Taiwan didn't last long. I guess if they had done similar things to the Dutch, maybe the history of Taiwan would have been different and there would have been more spanish traces in the country now. However, they didn't manage to make it financially viable.
The Dutch company considered chinese as citizens and aboriginals as vassals. I would have assumed that the latter status would be the worse one, but looks like it protects aboriginal lands, the company cannot sell any of it to chinese colonists. And the chinese colonization was due to the Dutch providing security for investment. Makes sense. And naturally there was the claim of prior chinese colonization but that was dismissed.
The pachten system by the Dutch had so much influence it entered the Taiwanese language as the term pak and even stayed in use for a while after the Dutch left. And the aboriginals were so pro-Dutch because, while the Dutch made the policy, the actual exploitation of areas, hunting ground etc. was done by the Chinese colonists and the Dutch made a constant effort to impress the natives.
In time there was a chinese rebellion, a strange star or light in the sky, a plague, a huge earthquake and now locusts, no wonder that those Dutch in May 1654 believed that it was God's wrath punishing them. Naturally penance did them no good.
That was a good ending for a book. The author made a good point about colonization in Asia relying so much on local help and the experience of the New World being an exception and not the rule.

[Rob Hocking · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the third book by Tonio Andrade that I have read, and is also the first book that he wrote after finishing his PhD. The younger version of Tonio Andrade was more willing to talk about his personal life in the introductions of his books, and so I learnt that he also lived in Taiwan for a time and attended the same Chinese language program as I did at 師大. I know that as late as 2006 he was still in Taiwan, because he writes about protesting together with local Taiwanese against the Anti-Secession law which China had recently passed (the law says, effectively, that if Taiwan ever declares independence, China must invade):

Article eight deals with non-peaceful action, and is the article which has caused the most controversy and attention. It states that the State shall use non-peaceful and other necessary means under these alternative conditions:
1. if "Taiwan independence" forces, under whatever name and method, accomplish the fact of Taiwan's separation from China,
2. or if a major event occurs which would lead to Taiwan's separation from China,
3. or if all possibility of peaceful unification is lost.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Se...

Besides this book, I have also read Tonio Andrade's "Gunpowder Age" - which gives a theory as to why guns, despite being invented in China, only evolved into powerful cannons after being imported into the West (short version - Chinese walls were too thick for anyone to even consider trying to blow a hole in one with a gun. European walls, by contrast, were thin and brittle enough that someone thought to themselves "you know - I bet if we made these guns a bit bigger, we could blow a hole in our enemy's city wall" - this lead to an arms race in Europe where guns became ever bigger and city walls ever thicker. In China the arms race never occurred because the activation energy to trigger it was too high). I have also read "Lost Colony", which describes 鄭成功's 1661 siege of the Dutch colony in control of Taiwan, his eventual victory and banishment of the Dutch from Taiwan, in great detail over several hundred pages.

This book, by contrast, focuses on the overall history of Dutch Taiwan (1624-1662), and devotes only a couple of pages to describing 鄭成功's siege. It's the first book I've found on this topic. The short version of what happened is that the Dutch set up a colony on Taiwan for reasons that I don't remember, and then realized that to make it prosperous they needed a lot of farmers to come and farm the land. They considered importing colonists from the Netherlands, but decided it was impractical, and so instead encouraged Chinese living in Fujian province across the Taiwan strait to come to Taiwan and farm the land. There were, in fact, already some settlers from Fujian province already living in Taiwan when the Dutch arrived, but not a lot. This is because the activation energy of moving to Taiwan and creating a farm was too high - in large part because of the danger of Taiwanese aboriginals, who at the time were a warlike people that regularly practiced headhunting. The Dutch offered Chinese settlers protection from Taiwanese aboriginals, and also offered free land and no taxes for the first X years after settling. They also did some other things that I forget, but the overall theme is that they did everything possible to lower the activation energy of settling in Taiwan for prospective Fujian immigrants.

The three-way relationship between the Dutch, the Chinese, and the aboriginals is an interesting one. After some initial wars, the Dutch managed to largely pacify the aboriginals - at least those living in the vicinity of present day 台南 (which is where the Dutch had their base) - in the sense that they largely stopped trying to kill both each other and the Dutch. So, the Dutch brought with them a kind of peace. However, they also heavily exploited the aboriginals, whose standard of living steadily dropped over the course of Dutch colonization. This is in part because the Dutch devastated the deer populations of Taiwan via massive overhunting (deer pelts were a valuable commodity for trade with Japan), which many aboriginal groups depended on for survival. To this day, the deer populations in Taiwan have not recovered to pre-Dutch colonization levels (however, you do run into them now and again if you go out trekking - they are rather small and cute - quite different from the deer in Canada). The Dutch also set up a system in which individual Chinese settlers were given monopolies on trade rights with individual aboriginal villages - allowing them to set prices however they pleased - which also hurt aboriginal standards of living.

The book talks about the brief experiment of Spanish colonization of Taiwan from 1626-1644, something which I previously knew nothing about. Whereas the Dutch set up base in present day 台南, the Spanish set their main base much closer to where I currently live - in 基隆, a kind of suburb of present day 台北. However, they also had a presence in 淡水, which can be reached from my apartment by biking for an hour or two along the bike path that follows the river near my house. 淡水 is part of 台北 proper, and can also be reached simply by riding the skytrain for 30 minutes or so. The Spanish colony, however, never prospered like the Dutch one did, possibly because they never had the bright idea of importing Chinese settlers to farm the land. But there was also a lack of interest in the colony on the part of the higher ups in Spain, which didn't help. In any event, the Spanish were gone from Taiwan by 1644, having retreated back to Manila (it was the Dutch who ultimately ousted them).

The Dutch, in the end, didn't last much longer than the Spanish, being Ousted by 鄭成功 in 1962 and retreating to Batavia (present day Jakarta in Indonesia). 鄭成功's invasion was in fact precipitated by the Manchu invasion of mainland China, which lasted from 1618-1683, and replaced the Ming Dynasty with the Qing Dynasty (China's last dynasty). Things started getting serious in 1644 when Beijing fell (by chance, the same year that Spanish Taiwan fell), but the conquest of Southern China lasted well into the 1660s. In a move eerily similar to what Chiang Kai-Shek would do in 1949 after losing the Civil War against Mao Zedong, 鄭成功's motive for invaded to Taiwan was to create a base from which to regroup and retake the mainland. Just like Chiang Kai-Shek, he never succeeded. In 1683, Taiwan fell to the Manchu's, and the Qing conquest was complete (this was the first time that Taiwan became integrated into China - a move which the emperor was initially strongly opposed to - but it would only remain so until 1895, when Taiwan was ceded to Japan). That time around, Taiwan took only 19 years to fall after the fall of the mainland. This time around, we're at 72 years and counting. How much longer can we hold? Probably, those of us who don't unexpectedly die young and so make it to old age, will know the answer before we die.

[Gena Haensel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic writer, who has done an immense amount of research (and in so many different languages !!). Very impressed by his intricate account on Taiwan under the subjugation of Dutch colonial rule.

The only thing I missed in this book was the account of the original inhabitants and their experiences during these times. I understand these accounts are hard to access (he also mentions that) but it felt like an important lens that was absent. Excited to read more by Andrade!

[Aaron Arnold · Rating 4 out of 5]

China's relationship with Taiwan has become very geopolitically fraught since WW2, but fascinatingly, the island's involvement with the mainland really only goes back a few centuries, and was originally driven more by European colonialism than by any initiative of the Chinese imperial governments. Before the Europeans arrived off the Chinese coast, Taiwan was inhabited only by a sparse scattering of Austronesian hunter-gatherer tribes who had far more linguistic, cultural, and genetic connection with Southeast Asia and Polynesia than with the Middle Kingdom barely 100 miles across the Strait, playing host to only a few fishermen and pirates. But thanks to Portuguese and especially Spanish and Dutch rivalry over trade routes, Taiwan gradually became settled with Chinese farmers as part of a global deal - the colonists helped the Europeans clear the island of aboriginal headhunters, established bases and ports, and grew valuable crops like rice and sugar for export, and in return the pioneers became free from the onerous thumb of the Emperor. While initially the rival settlements were primarily used for intra-European struggles, they gradually started playing a larger role in mainland politics towards the end of the Ming dynasty, becoming host to the famous pirate warlord Koxinga and eventually attracting the not-quite-welcome attentions of a newly active Japan. A lot of history is more recent than you think, and this unusual "co-colonization" effort of Europeans and Chinese puts the contemporary regional struggles over the Nine-Dash Line in a new perspective.