Status Updates From Forbidden Nation: A History...

Done. Sometimes the book was difficult to read completely. But mostly the author wrote well.

Did Minnan really suplant Mandarin in the 90s as this says?

I am not surprised that this chinese general considered the Taiwanese a degraded people outside pure chinese civilization and that the KMT troops considered Taiwan conquered territory to be looted. No wonder some preferred the Japanese after a while.

Ironic, the Japanese basically made the Taiwanese, along with their colonial masters, the most highly educated people in Asia.

So Goto created a japanese youth corps for the boys to spy on the population, his actions ruffled Tokyo's feathers because of his violence and the japanese wanted to develop Taiwan to get profit out of it, for that the people needed to stay healthy and only be able to read what was necessary, not make them too smart.

So Liu strengthened Taiwan militarily not simply for defense against outsiders but against the Taiwanese who are known to rebell at the slightest provocation. But building a railway was difficult because of bribery and workers not having the jobs explain and so taking railway pegs for fires.

His writing about the reasons the court rejected trains for China sound really like stereotypes, all this writing about mother earth and feng shui is ridiculous. By that logic they should have never built any dams or roads.
And apparently it was this Liu who renamed Taiwanfu to Tainan after naming the island Taiwan and moving the capital to Taipeh because of the japanese threat after Taichung proved too costly.

I think I read about this guy who led to th first modernization of Taiwan.

Was the Japanese court really that much looking inside before Matthew Perry came along? Was there no one being interested in the outside world?

Hm, I wonder why thee foreigners backed the Qing in those few examples. What was different there?

Oh, that George Psalmanazar fraud, who claimed to be "Formosan" while being in England and France. Did he really have such a big impact on keeping the interest in Taiwan alive in England and France as the book claims?