2 - Taiwan’s many histories

Summary

There is no single grand history of Taiwan. Instead, there are many histories involving multiple peoples, civilizations and empires that have all at different times lived, thrived, or struggled on the islands of Taiwan. These histories are imperative to understanding contemporary Taiwan, but even scholars often lament the difficulty of succinctly retelling them. Taiwan has been ruled by the Portuguese, Dutch, Ming dynasty, Qing dynasty and the Japanese. From 1945 to the present day, it has existed as the Republic of China (ROC), which was founded in China in 1912 and existed there until 1949. For thousands of years before that, Taiwan was home to Indigenous peoples of Austronesian heritage, who are culturally and linguistically related to other Pacific Island cultures. Traders and pirates once made Taiwan one of the most important and diverse centres of commerce, and in the last 400 years people from all over Southeast and Northeast Asia – and periodically, Europeans – have called Taiwan home. Today, Taiwan’s population is predominantly Han Chinese (over 95 per cent). But to describe Taiwan as a Han Chinese society would be to erase the multicultural melange that has defined so much of Taiwan’s history. The goal of this chapter is to explore some of this historical diversity, showing how various settlers, colonizers, and empires have shaped Taiwan, and how these forces are manifest today.

PREMODERN TAIWAN

Any history of Taiwan must begin by recognizing that Indigenous peoples lived and thrived on these islands long before any Chinese or western powers brought Taiwan into the world of modern geopolitics. At the same time, perhaps no other group has suffered more throughout each era of Taiwanese history than Indigenous peoples. Today, Indigenous Taiwanese make up a small percentage of the total population (around 2.5 per cent) due to centuries of colonialism, imperialism, and systemic oppression. But they continue to survive as complex contemporary peoples, and their relevance to Taiwan’s history and politics today should not be understated.

Indigenous Taiwanese likely arrived in Taiwan over 4,000 years ago. By contrast, Han Chinese only began living in Taiwan around 400 years ago. Indigenous languages are Austronesian, unlike Sinitic Chinese languages, and based on linguistic clues anthropologists suspect that from Taiwan Austronesian peoples migrated as far as Hawaii and Madagascar (Ko et al. 2014).