Statue of Ch’eng Ch’eng-kung. (Photo by M.Rubinstein)
Taiwan Under the Dutch and the Cheng Regime
Statue of Ch’eng Ch’eng-kung. (Photo by M.Rubinstein)
The history of Taiwan seems to present some remarkable discontinuities. The long development of a maritime frontier for settlers from South China was altered around the edges by the opening of ports to trade and the whole island to foreign residence after the Arrow War. The occupation by Japan in 1895 was a more profound discontinuity. Then came the retrocession to Kuomintang China in 1945 and about two decades of cold war political repression and secure but modest beginnings of economic growth. The subsequent mounting pace of economic change, the rise of levels of education and of cosmopolitan connection, the demands of an articulate and sophisticated people, and the considerable political wisdom of Chiang Ching-kuo and those around him opened the way to the rich, messy, and vitally democratic Taiwan of today.
If we go back to the beginning of the age of the Fukien frontiersmen we find discontinuities every bit as startling. Taiwan in 1600 was on the outer edge of Chinese consciousness and activity, with little or no permanent Chinese settlement, visited only by fishermen, smugglers, and pirates, and only dimly reflected in the discussions and records of the officials who administered and patrolled the South China coast. It was inhabited largely by the Malayo-Polynesian peoples, called “aborigines” in the English-language literature. In the course of the seventeenth century, maritime Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, English, and Dutch warriors and traders all sought to settle on the great island, make it a commercial base, and profit from its riches. Its incorporation into the Ch’ing Empire in 1683 was another dramatic discontinuity; it almost immediately ceased to be a center of multinational maritime trade, and its southern Chinese frontier phase, slowly under way under the Dutch and the Ch’eng-kung regime, began in earnest.
The study of Taiwan in the seventeenth century places us at the intersection of two rapidly changing fields of scholarship. The involvement of seagoing Europeans, Chinese, and Japanese makes it a wonderful case study in what used to be called the history of European expansion in Asia but now, in recognition of the major and dynamic maritime roles of Asian peoples, more often is called the history of maritime Asia.1 The other scholarly trend is the approach to the history of Ming and Ch’ing China, greatly indebted to Skinner’s “macroregions” paradigm, that takes seriously the great variety of cultures, economies, and trajectories of change in different parts of the great empire.2 Taiwan was in some ways part of “Maritime China,” which does not quite fit yet does not quite violate the Skinner paradigm.3 It also can be viewed as a very distinctive case of the phenomena of Chinese frontier expansion, which were very important for a number of other Ming—Ch’ing macroregions.4
As we learn more about the energy and tenacity of Chinese frontiersmen and the occasional, serious efforts of local elites and bureaucracies to bring newly settled areas fully within state and civilization, we are likely to find the history, or prehistory, of Taiwan more and more puzzling. The connections with China seem to go back a very long way. There are Neolithic sites on Taiwan that are closely related to those of the Chinese mainland.5 The languages and cultures of the present-day “aboriginal” peoples of Taiwan suggest that their ancestors may have reached the island in the early stages of the dispersal of proto-Austronesian peoples from South China to the south and east.6 One group even worships a millet god, for all the world like the ancestors of the Chou dynasty.7 The Taiwan strait is only a hundred miles wide. This might have been daunting to Han dynasty seamen, but certainly not to those of the Sung who sailed to Southeast Asia and perhaps to India. So why didn’t they get to Taiwan?
Except for records of the Three Kingdoms and Sui periods that refer to Taiwan or to the Ryukyu islands,8 the earliest Chinese record we have of a visit to Taiwan is Wang Ta-yuan’s Tao-i chih-lueh (1349).9 Wang found substantial settlements of Chinese traders and fishermen in the P’eng-hu islands. Officers occasionally had been stationed there since about 1170, bringing the islands under the control of the Chinese state for the first time, but there is no record of Chinese settlement or political authority on Taiwan at this time. The early Ming rulers, reversing the positive policies toward seafaring characteristic of southern Sung and Yuan, withdrew their officials from P’eng-hu, attempted to evacuate all the people, and forbade all Chinese maritime activity. If any Chinese managed to remain in P’eng-hu or in the harbors of Taiwan they were completely outside the law and no record of them has been found.
The collapse of Ming maritime restrictions after 1550 was accompanied by a multifaceted upsurge of maritime activity. Probably the first effect on Taiwan and P’eng-hu was a revival of Chinese fishing. The Portuguese passing through the Taiwan strait to Japan called P’eng-hu the “Pescador” (Fisherman) islands. Ocean fishing has formed one of the most enduring links between Fukien and Taiwan. Very little can be known about it before the period documented by the Dutch. Brief references seem to link it to Wang-kang, Pei-kang, Tan-shui (Tam-sui), and Keelung. Chinese fishermen probably spent weeks ashore at these places during fishing seasons, salting and drying their catch. These temporary settlements had to defend themselves against aborigine raids, but also may have been able to conciliate the local people with gifts of fish and salt; an early Dutch observer commented on the aborigines’ meager fishing abilities and dependence on Chinese traders for supplies of salt. Fishing communities in P’eng-hu were reported to select their own headmen, and some kind of primitive democracy may well have prevailed in the fishing camps on the coast of Taiwan, as it did in those on the wild coast of Newfoundland in the same years.
After the limited legalization of Chinese maritime trade in 1567, a few licenses were given every year for voyages to Tam-sui and Keelung. The ships so licensed sometimes made illegal voyages to Japan, and, as Japanese maritime trade expanded, Japanese and Chinese sometimes met and traded in the harbors of Taiwan. The dramatic expansion and commercialization of the Japanese economy also gave Taiwan its first important market for exports, as Chinese traders bought deer hides from the aborigines for sale in Japan.
In the late 1500s many heavily armed ships—Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish—passed through the Taiwan strait every year, and the strategic position of Taiwan and P’eng-hu attracted a good deal of attention. There were discussions in Japan in 1593 of an expedition to Taiwan. Eventually there was an exploratory expedition of Arima Harunobu in 1609 and the much larger but still unsuccessful effort of Maruyama Tōan in 1616.10 The Tokugawa authorities still were discussing the possibility of expeditions against Taiwan and Luzon in the early 1630s. The Portuguese were much less interested; references to the island they called Formosa (“beautiful”), are scarce in their records, and their only known landing on it was the ten-week stay in 1582 of the survivors of a shipwreck.11
Far more important was the advance of Chinese organized force, both outlaw and official, toward Taiwan. Two major pirate leaders took refuge there from increasingly effective Ming defensive measures, Lin Tao-ch’ien in 1566 and Lin Feng in 1574.12 Neither stayed long, but one of them or some other unknown Chinese or Japanese expedition so frightened the aborigines with their firearms that the local people fled to the mountains and recalled the incident decades later; it is recorded in Ch’en Ti’s record of the Ming expedition there under Shen Yu-jung in 1603.13 That expedition, part of a general reinforcement of coastal defenses begun in response to Hideyoshi’s invasion of Korea, led to the re-establishment of a Ming military presence in P’eng-hu. Ch’en Ti’s record says nothing about Chinese settlers on the Taiwan coast, but it is clear that there were Chinese traders or fishermen who could translate from an aboriginal language for him.
The years between 1600 and 1620 represented the peak of commercial activity, and one of the peaks of drama and disorder, in the history of the South China Sea.14 Streams of silver from the mines of Japan and of South America—via Manila and Acapulco—flowed into China. At Manila a great massacre of Chinese residents in 1603 was followed immediately by a new appreciation of their indispensability and the peak years of their trade. Licensed “red seal ships” full of samurai and merchants traded to Vietnam, as far as the Malay peninsula, and caused much unease when they stopped at Macao. The Japanese domain of Satsuma conquered the Ryukyu islands. It is highly probable that there was a growing outsider presence on the coast of Taiwan. When the Dutch got there in 1622–24 they estimated that there were 1,000 to 1,500 Chinese on the Taiwan coast. This may have included a good many sojourners for the fishing or trading season, but it seems to represent an increase from the situation described by Ch’en Ti in 1603. And it soon became clear that the Dutch had blundered into the middle of a well-established nexus of Chinese-Japanese trade in at least one of the Taiwan ports.
Reports of two Dutch visitors to the big aboriginal village of Hsiao-lung (Soulang) in 1623 provide a fascinating picture of the Chinese presence before the arrival of the Dutch had changed anything.15 Every house had one or more Chinese lodgers, whose main business was the purchase of deer skins and dried deer meat “for a trifle, because they [the aborigines] have no knowledge of money.” The Chinese made the aborigines provide them with food, threatening to cut off their supply of salt if they did not do so. Li Tan explained that the Chinese imported salt from the mainland and did not manufacture it on the Taiwan coast so that the aborigines could not learn the process and break their dependence.
But these were pretty tentative beginnings for a convenient coast and a potentially rich agricultural hinterland just a hundred miles off the South China coast. It seems fair to say that, left to itself, the Chinese presence on Taiwan would have continued to grow in subsequent decades, but not nearly as fast as it did with the catalyst provided by the incursion of the Dutch East India Company. So where were all those tough Chinese frontier farmers and civilization-bringing bureaucrats who made their different contributions to China’s expansion on several frontiers? We need to remember that Chinese maritime expansion up until this time was not propelled primarily by the overpopulation and land hunger that pushed so many out to Southeast Asia, the South Pacific, and the Americas from 1700 or 1750 on, but by commercial motives: a search for new markets for Chinese goods and for supplies of spices, incense woods, and other exotic consumer goods. And for seafarers of that kind, Taiwan, however close by, simply had not been an attractive destination.16 On the other hand, it might be argued that since Sung times the trade of the South China Sea always had produced one major nexus where all parties could meet with a minimum of political complication: Ch’uan-chou in Fukien under the Southern Sung and Yuan, the Ryukyus for much of the Ming.17 With the Ryukyus now under Satsuma control and the China coast increasingly unsettled, the shift to a Taiwan entrepôt might have gone a long way without the Dutch catalyst.
The Dutch made a first appearance in the P’eng-hu islands as early as 1604 and were told at that time that something might be worked out for trade with them, not on P’eng-hu but on the coast of Taiwan.18 In 1622 they returned in force, having just been beaten off in a major attack on Macao, occupied one of the P’eng-hu islands, and set out to try to terrorize the Ming Empire into permitting them to trade, forcing their Chinese captives to work on a small fort.19 The Ming authorities assembled a substantial fleet, pushed them back into the waterless peninsula on which their little fort stood, told them that they would have to leave P’eng-hu, which was imperial territory, and implicitly repeated their suggestion of almost twenty years before: Try Taiwan. Very active in these negotiations were Li Tan, the “captain” of the Chinese community in Hirado, Japan, and his subordinate, Cheng Chih-lung. Cheng may already have been influential in the Chinese settlements on the Taiwan coast; as he rose to power on the Fukien coast in the late 1620s, he retained many forms of influence and apparently a few sources of revenue on Taiwan, under the noses of the Dutch or outside their sphere of power. When his son, Cheng Ch’eng-kung, came to oust the Dutch in 1661, he proclaimed that he was claiming his inheritance from his father.
The first Dutch post was on a sandbar at the mouth of a coastal bay; in the next year they bought from the local aborigines an area on the mainland side of the bay. On the sandbar they would build in the 1630s a formidable stone castle, Casteel Zeelandia; on the mainland a smaller brick fort, Provintia. Today the pile of rubble and a wall or two on the site of Casteel Zeelandia can be seen in An-p’ing-chen on the coast west of Tainan city, and a good deal more of Fort Provintia, Ch’ih-k’an-lou, in the city.20
The Dutch had come to the region looking for a base from which to seek to trade with China and Japan and to wage war on their enemies and anyone else whom they saw fit to bully; for those purposes P’eng-hu would have been almost as good as Taiwan. At first the aborigines and the Chinese settlers were seen as sources of trouble; only later were they seen as a source of revenue. In all lines of trade, and especially in trade between Japan and China, the Dutch were competitors of established Chinese and Japanese traders who had been using Taiwan as a rendezvous point for some years, and the potential for competition and conflict was very real. For the time being, however, the Dutch need not have been altogether unwelcome. They would help make Taiwan safe for traders and settlers; provide large supplies of pepper, sandalwood, and other tropical goods; and invigorate all lines of trade with new capital. Conditions on the South China coast were more and more unsettled, and the future of Japanese foreign trade was uncertain. If they treated other traders sensibly, the Dutch could have made their settlement a welcome island of commercial and political stability. But the Company’s basic orientation was toward the use of force to obtain and enforce monopolies. Even in terms of that general policy, the Taiwan commanders so mismanaged things for ten years that they made enemies for themselves and aggravated the general disorder.
The rapidly changing situation among the Chinese with whom the Dutch interacted sometimes would have baffled the wisest policymaker and the most percipient observer. The Ming state, in deep systemic crisis composed of bankruptcy, court factionalism and eunuch power, Manchu invasion, and widespread rebellion, paid little attention to the local version of that crisis on the South China coast. Would-be sealords, often called pirates both by the Dutch and by the Ming officials, contended for control of the coast and its rich trade. Eventually it was Cheng Chih-lung who made himself indispensable to the Ming, received office from them, and came to dominate the South China coast with his fleets and control most of its trade. He had mediated the beginnings of the Dutch presence on Taiwan and early and late seems to have been eager to use his connections with them to advance his own power and trade. But the Dutch treated him very badly, holding him under arrest on one of their ships until he signed a trade agreement on their terms, constantly complaining that he was keeping others from trading with them, and finally burning some of his best ships in Amoy (Hsia-men) harbor in July 1633. But Cheng had forces in reserve, and in October 1633, 150 of his ships attacked eight Dutch warships off Quemoy (Ch’in-men), burned three, and the others fled. In 1635—36 the Dutch finally were ready to negotiate with him for stable arrangements for peaceful competition in the import of Chinese goods to Japan and for stable supply of Chinese goods to the Dutch on Taiwan.21
Japanese and Chinese traders had been meeting in the harbors of Taiwan before the arrival of the Dutch. A first Dutch effort to collect tolls from the Japanese on their trade was abandoned when the Japanese objected, but it had set a hostile atmosphere. In 1627 the Japanese demanded that the Dutch convoy them to the China coast or help them hire Chinese junks to go there and attempt to collect their debts. The Japanese were not at all welcome in China, and the Dutch quite sensibly refused. When the Japanese left they took with them a delegation of aborigines from Hsin-k’ang who apparently were going to offer sovereignty over their village to the Japanese government. The offer was rejected by the shogunate. When the Japanese came again in 1628 they came heavily armed. Pieter Nuyts, the new and inexperienced governor, insisted on searching their ships and removing all weapons and imprisoned the returning Hsin-k’ang delegation. Nuyts refused to let the Japanese leave until ships from Batavia called on their way to Nagasaki, so that the Dutch version of the Taiwan quarrels would be presented at the same time as any Japanese complaints. This detention was the last straw for the Japanese, who surrounded Nuyts’s house and held him and his small son hostage at sword point until the Dutch council on Taiwan revoked the detention and agreed to other Japanese demands. The Tokugawa authorities were so incensed by this conflict that they imprisoned the Dutch at Hirado, stopped their trade, and demanded that the Dutch leave Taiwan. They showed some signs of relenting in 1630, but it was not until 1632, when Nuyts was sent to Japan and turned over to the authorities there to serve a term under house arrest, that trade was completely restored.
For purposes of trade with China and Japan, a post on the P’eng-hu islands would have served the Dutch almost as well as one on the coast of Taiwan. At first Taiwan and its aboriginal people seemed to be a source of difficulty, not opportunity. Relations with Hsin-k’ang remained wary after its leaders’ involvement in the conflict with the Japanese. In 1629 the people of Ma-tou attacked a party of Dutch soldiers, the Dutch burned Ma-tou in retaliation, and Ma-tou warriors raided Hsin-k’ang. This conflict simmered until 1635, when more than four hundred Dutch soldiers arrived, Ma-tou was burned to the ground, and its elders came to the castle to sue for peace. The Dutch troops now made several more expeditions to the north and south of the castle, more villages submitted, and in February 1636 representatives of twenty-eight villages met in a council, a practice that would be regularized as the Dutch sphere of control widened. Thus the breakthrough toward a more peaceful environment for the castle and a wider sphere of influence on the island came in the same years as the ends of the conflicts with the Chinese and the Japanese.
The Dutch now were drawn much farther into domination of the great island by their response to the presence on its northern end, at Keelung and Tam-sui, of their Spanish enemies.22 The Spanish had come from Manila to Keelung in 1626 and to Tam-sui in 1629. The area already was the scene of a good deal of Chinese and Japanese trade, but we have no record of conflict between those traders and the Spanish. The Spanish hoped to counter the strategic dominance of the Dutch in East Asian waters, attract Chinese trade to their outpost, and use it as a way-station for missionary penetration of China. Their efforts were shaped by the peculiar geography of the area. The Keelung fort was built on the west end of what is now called Ho-p’ing island, at the mouth of Keelung harbor. The harbor was an unusually fine safe anchorage. But it was closely ringed by mountains, and just beyond the mountains was the wide, populous plain of the Tam-sui river, which even then was said to produce a surplus of rice. Missionary efforts in that wider sphere inevitably led to involvement in wars between tribes. The little garrison’s efforts to levy a tax of chickens and rice from every household caused more trouble. Meanwhile, the main fortress at Keelung did attract some traders from China, but the incessant winter rains caused much sickness. Once the Tam-sui garrison was abandoned in 1638, hostile tribesmen just over the ridge in the Tam-sui valley made Keelung very uncomfortable. The Manila authorities already were cutting their losses; in 1640 the Keelung garrison had only 50 Spanish soldiers, 30 Filipinos, 200 slaves, and 130 Chinese. In 1642 a force of more than five hundred Dutch soldiers took it, encountering little resistance.
The Dutch in their turn faced a good deal of resistance in the Tam-sui basin, but sent reinforcements that brought it under control in 1644 and then marched southward overland, crushing occasional resistance and receiving the submission of many villages. The number of villages over which the Dutch claimed sovereignty rose from 44 in 1644 to 217 in 1646, 251 in 1648, and 315 in 1650.23 Headmen were named for each village and given robes and staffs of office, and summoned to annual regional councils where their disputes were mediated and they were exhorted to keep the peace among themselves and not attack the Chinese who were in the villages with Dutch permission. The people of Hsin-k’ang were converted to Christianity at least nominally by about 1630, and after 1635 missionary activity spread to Ma-tou and other villages. At least two aboriginal languages were given romanized forms, and basic Christian instructional materials were prepared in them. The struggle to make these conversions more than nominal, to root out the old “superstitions,” was a long one. Female shamans, leading practitioners of the old cults, were exiled. Much attention was given to schools, in the hope that a properly educated younger generation would be purer Christians. Missionary ministers and schoolmasters often were the only Dutch presence in an outlying village, more or less willingly performing quasi-governmental functions, sometimes causing trouble with the local people by their misconduct, resisting Company efforts to cut costs by reducing the missionary presence in outlying areas.
Hsin-k’ang was largely converted in the early 1630s, Ma-tou not long after. Near the end of Dutch rule, in 1659, many of the big villages under their authority had a school, and in many of them it was reported that half the people could recite their catechism.
The success of this missionary effort in just a few years with limited manpower is surprising, but some explanations can be suggested. From a religious background in which specific powers and spirits were approached for specific worldly benefits, the power of the Dutch arms had a great effect; there were not many “rice Christians” but quite a few “musket Christians.” When a shrine or cult object was destroyed or a taboo violated and the violator lived and the crops grew, it seemed that the newcomers had a superior form of power that should be tapped. The new way of life of going to school and reading and writing also clearly had its uses and appeals. And, as John Shepherd has shown us, the Siraya, the people closest to Casteel Zeelandia, had a social and cultural organization that was stable and comfortable in isolation but vulnerable in the new situation.24 Women did most of the growing of food. Young men hunted and went to war, taking heads from neighboring villages. Couples did not live together in their younger years, but husbands regularly spent the night with their wives. A pregnant wife could ruin a hunt, whether for deer or human heads, so all pregnancies were ended by massage abortion until women were in their late thirties, when their slightly older husbands ended their active participation in hunting and war. The resulting low number of births per woman kept the population stable at a low density, which helps to account for the great material comfort of aboriginal life and the good health and fine stature that impressed the Dutch, and also for the rather meager manpower available to resist invaders. The Dutch missionaries of course set out to abolish head-hunting, to change the marriage customs entirely, and to wipe out the culturally mandatory practice of abortion. In some villages they succeeded. Some women may have welcomed the possibility of having babies when they were younger and stronger, and of having their husbands around to help them in the fields. Some men probably were relieved not to be going out taking heads and risking their own, and still could go to war and even take heads sometimes as auxiliaries for the Dutch. Leadership and cultural dominance in the villages now was exclusively male, no longer shared with the female shamans.
From the beginning the Dutch had claimed 10 percent of any product of their zone in Taiwan, for example, of the Chinese fishing along the coast. The most important products for which such a tax was levied were deer meat and hides. The antlers and some other parts of the deer went into the Chinese medicine market. Most of the meat was salted and dried for sale in China. Most of the hides were sold in Japan, many of them by the Company. The spread of Chinese deer hunters, taking some deer themselves and buying more from the aborigines, had begun before the Dutch arrived. The Company sold licenses to Chinese hunters, collected a tenth of their take as a tax, and bought much of the rest. In 1645 the Company shifted to a system of competitive bidding for a “tax farming” license to the Chinese for the monopoly of trade in each aboriginal village that included all forms of trade, not just deer-hunting. This system was the commercial mainstay of Chinese frontier interaction with the aborigines until the Ch’ing period; the Dutch pachter (tax-farmer) passed into Chinese as pak-she (in Taiwan dialect; in Mandarin p’u-she). The scale of this deer trade was astonishing: more than 60,000 hides per year from the mid-1630s to 1659. Some of the closest zones were hunted out fairly quickly, but the trade spread, and the numbers shipped were highest for 1655–59.25
While some Chinese were living this rough frontier life, others were moving into the plains near the Dutch fort and building up a zone of Chinese-style intensive agriculture, growing rice and other food crops for local consumption and growing sugar cane for sale to the Company for the world market. Land-clearing and water control required substantial investments of capital and hired labor before the first crop. Several big merchants did a great deal of investing and organizing, setting up “parks” or plantations of about 20 morgen (45 acres) each.26 The most interesting figure among them was Sung Ming-kang, or “Captain Bencon,” formerly astute adviser of the fearsome Jan Pietersz Coen and first headman of the Chinese at Batavia, who resigned that post in 1635, came to Taiwan, and built himself a fine stone house there.27 The Company had already been buying sugar grown in South China and probably continued to do so. It sold this sugar in Europe, Persia, and India. The market was very strong until the mid-1650s, when production began to revive in Brazil, followed by the West Indies. Sugar cultivation in Taiwan continued to grow, from about 1,500 acres in 1645 to an unsustainable peak of more than 9,000 in 1650 to more than 4,000 in 1657.28
These products of Taiwan, and the taxes on Chinese trade and Chinese residents, made marvelous supplements and supports for the Dutch presence there, but they were not its main purpose. Taiwan was supposed to be the Dutch access point to the China market and to the goods, especially raw silk and silk goods, that could be exported from China and sold in Japan at a great profit. Once the Dutch had come to their senses and decided to try to live at peace with Cheng Chih-lung, this trade expanded amazingly. The Japanese made a wonderful opening for them by prohibiting all Japanese maritime trade and expelling the Portuguese. The Chinese were the only competition the Dutch had in importing foreign goods to this vital, rapidly urbanizing country with its own sources of gold, silver, and copper. In the nineteen months ending in January 1639, Dutch Taiwan sent to Japan cargoes worth more than f4,600,000 (“f” stands for the Dutch guilder, figured at f3.5 = 1 tael in this period), well over a million taels; in August 1640 three Dutch ships left Taiwan for Japan with cargoes valued at f5,173,00Q.29 Large cargoes of Taiwan sugar, Japanese copper, and much more were also being sent to the ports of India. The profits of trade in Taiwan, that is, the gains on pepper and other goods sold to the Chinese there, and the earnings from tolls and head taxes were quite respectable, but it was through the contribution to the trade with Japan that Taiwan had the greatest impact on the Company’s balance sheets.
The collapse of the Ming in 1644 and the disorders that followed along the South China coast produced a wave of refugees to Taiwan. There was another surge in the 1650s as Cheng Ch’eng-kung consolidated his base on the Fukien coast and the Ch’ing increased their efforts to crush him. Dutch incomes from the work of all these Chinese and their head taxes increased. But Dutch collection of the head tax on the Chinese caused much resentment, especially when Dutch soldiers pounded on the doors of Chinese houses at night, engaged in petty thievery and extortion, and intruded into households where there were Chinese women. Also, in 1650 the sugar planters overplanted and complained of labor shortages, then cut back the next year and threw the field hands out of work. The result of these tensions and instabilities was the rebellion in 1652 led by Kuo Huai-yi.30 This was a rebellion strictly of the rural poor; as soon as headmen of the Chinese community heard about it, they informed the Dutch. There may have been as many as 4,000 rebels, but they were very poorly armed and trained. They allowed Dutch musketeers to wade ashore and form up and broke almost as soon as the musket volleys began. Three days later the Company soldiers, now joined by aborigine auxiliaries, marched on a rebel gathering place in a valley a few miles to the north. Again the rebels broke at the first volley, and the aborigines joined enthusiastically in the massacre; more than 2,000 Chinese were killed.
There had been rumors that Kuo Huai-yi and the other rebels were linked to Cheng Ch’eng-kung, but this does not seem at all likely. As Cheng took drastic measures to get all Chinese shipping under his control and to strengthen himself against growing Ch’ing pressure he sometimes cut off trade with Taiwan, and the possibility of a hostile confrontation grew. In 1659 and 1660 the Ch’ing evacuated and devastated a wide stretch of coastal Fukien, making it really difficult for the first time for Cheng Ch’eng-kung on Amoy to get food and trade goods from the mainland. Cheng’s great invasion up the Yangtze river to Nanking in 1659 was a spectacular failure.
In 1658 the Dutch Company on Taiwan reduced the fixed price it had paid for sugar.31 The authorities in Batavia, facing major challenges in many parts of maritime Asia, had little force to spare to reinforce Taiwan. With a weak market for sugar and uncertain trade connections with China, it seemed a shaky asset at best. The governor on Taiwan, Fredrik Coyet, was reporting many rumors that Cheng Ch’eng-kung planned to expel the Dutch and take refuge on Taiwan, but the Batavia authorities, advised by an old factional opponent of Coyet, paid little attention. When they finally sent some reinforcements in the summer of 1660, the officer in charge of them looked around, saw no danger, and sailed away. On April 30, 1661, a huge Cheng fleet, hundreds of ships carrying more than 25,000 men, appeared off Casteel Zeelandia. Making his first landing not far from the fields where the Kuo Huai-yi rebels had been mowed down, Cheng was welcomed as a deliverer by many Chinese. “My father, Iquan [Cheng Chih-lung],” he proclaimed, “lent this land to the Dutch; now I come to reclaim it. And since it no longer is fitting for you to occupy my land, give it up, and I will raise you to high ranks and spare your lives, along with those of your wives and children.”32 Within a few weeks he had everything in control except Casteel Zeelandia. A few Dutch prisoners were executed and two were crucified. A new commander sent to replace Coyet arrived with flags flying but quickly sailed on to Japan. Some reinforcements arrived and did manage to enter the castle, but could not even push the Cheng forces out of the town under its walls. On January 25, 1662, Cheng forces took a little redoubt on a sand dune that commanded the walls of the castle. On February 1 a treaty was concluded and the Dutch were permitted to withdraw in peace, leaving all their goods and records.33 Coyet, who had tried to warn Batavia of the danger, was made the scapegoat for the defeat, but it seems clear that nothing the Company could have done would have come close to enabling it to fend off Cheng’s large and well-trained army. In the seventeenth century Europeans expected to conquer, not be conquered, outside Europe. News of the great defeat, and the name of Koxinga (Cheng Ch’eng-kung) in many forms, appeared in print in several European languages within just a few years.34
Taiwan had a Chinese ruler for the first time. It was not entirely clear what Cheng Ch’eng-kung intended to do next. Some of his erstwhile allies in resistance to the Ch’ing thought he was turning his back on that losing struggle. He acknowledged the authority of no prince of the Ming imperial house and may have been preparing to claim the succession himself as an adopted “Lord of the Imperial Surname”; he named Casteel Zeelandia Tung-tu (“Eastern Capital”), as if it might be the seat of an emperor. He commanded a ministate of impressive but rather narrow centralization, with an elaborate military organization, rudimentary civil administration of occupied areas, and a widespread commercial network in which the main lines, as far as we can tell, were monopolized by the Cheng family and their agents. The Cheng family, their merchant associates, the military commanders, and the common people all had benefited from the prosperity of trade links from such coastal centers as Amoy into China and the wide family estates on the mainland that characterized the early 1650s, and had suffered as the Ch’ing trade embargo and advances of military forces into coastal Fukien began to bite. Taiwan was as good as Amoy as a base for trade with Japan, Manila, and other points outside China, but that trade would be a sad remnant of past splendors if the China links were cut off. The great island had immense agricultural potential, but almost all of it would have to be opened up by backbreaking pioneer labor amid severe shortages of cloth and other consumer goods and occasionally of food. Thus it is quite understandable that quite a few followers of Cheng Ch’eng-kung preferred surrender to the Ch’ing to the challenges of the Taiwan frontier.
In 1662–64 the melodramas of Cheng family politics made Taiwan even less attractive to many Cheng family members and military commanders. The last months of Cheng Ch’eng-kung’s life were dominated by a furious quarrel with his son and putative heir, Cheng Ching, still on Amoy, over his “incestuous” relationship with the wet nurse of a younger son. Cheng T’ai, a younger brother of Cheng Ch’eng-kung who was very important in the family’s commercial operations, resisted Ch’eng-kung’s orders to kill Ching and order Lady Tung, Ch’eng-kung’s principal wife, to commit suicide. Cheng Ch’eng-kung slipped deeper into insanity and died on June 23, 1662. Generals on Taiwan tried to set up one Cheng Hsi as Ch’eng-kung’s heir, but at the end of the year Ching crossed to Taiwan and defeated the Hsi faction. But by now Ching and T’ai both were negotiating behind each other’s back for surrender to the Ch’ing. In February 1663 Ching and his commanders returned to Amoy. In July they imprisoned T’ai, who soon was murdered or committed suicide. T’ai’s relatives and followers, perhaps one-fourth of the whole Cheng force, now surrendered to the Ch’ing. They provided much of the manpower, backed up by earlier defectors and Dutch warships, for the Ch’ing conquest of Amoy and Quemoy in November. Cheng commanders at other coastal outposts surrendered to the Ch’ing or fled to Taiwan early in 1664, so that the tension in the Cheng regime between commitment to Taiwan and attraction to the mainland was temporarily resolved, but at the cost of very substantial losses of leadership and manpower.35 Cheng Ching’s control was secure. His leading aides both were products of the lower coastal elite, mentioned among his first appointees after his father’s death, each later tied to his ruler by the marriage of a daughter to a son of Cheng Ching: Ch’en Yung-hua in civil affairs and Feng Hsi-fan in military. A third important figure was one Liu Kuo-hsuan, who was from inland Fukien, had supported the wrong side in the succession struggle, spent the 1600s defending a base area near modern Chang-hua in central Taiwan,36 and always stood a little apart but was a major supporter of the regime and probably its most effective commander down to its last days.37
The Ch’ing rulers sought to maintain momentum and put an end to maritime resistance by sending an expedition to conquer Taiwan. The key figure in these efforts was Shih Lang, who had defected from Cheng Ch’eng-kung’s regime in 1646 and was one of the very few maritime experts in the very continental early Ch’ing regime. Adept at finding the right patron and maximizing his own power and freedom from the usual bureaucratic checks and balances, very much interested in trade and ready to cut a deal with anyone, a sort of mirror image within the Ch’ing state of the Cheng outlaw traders-mediators-sealords,38 he is one of the key figures in the history of Taiwan in the seventeenth century. In September 1664 he, assisted by other former Cheng commanders, was ordered to command a large fleet of Ch’ing warships and cooperate with ships of the Dutch East India Company in an assault on Taiwan. The ships set out at the end of December but soon turned back, Shih explaining to the skeptical Dutch that the weather had been dangerous. After the Dutch ships returned to Batavia, Shih’s fleet set out again in late May 1665, but it was scattered by a storm.
Thereafter the Ch’ing rulers lost interest in a direct conquest of Taiwan and sought to negotiate its surrender. Already in 1663 Cheng Ching had changed the name of his capital from Eastern Capital to Tung-ning (East Pacified), and seems to have been ready to discuss acknowledging Ch’ing suzerainty as a tributary state, on roughly the same terms as Korea. These negotiations continued off and on until 1669, and in their last phase involved Ming-chu, a fast-rising star of the K’ang-hsi emperor’s new personal rule. But there was no precedent since the Five Dynasties for permitting tributary autonomy of a regime of Han Chinese language and culture. The Cheng regime had legitimized itself as part of the Ming loyalist resistance to the Ch’ing. Cheng Ching continued to use the reign period of the last Ming loyalist emperor, who was executed in Yunnan in 1662, and made it clear early and late that his peace terms were “not cutting the hair, not coming to the mainland.” The Ch’ing certainly would have wanted to be free to move surrendered commanders around and break up their concentration. But for both sides the adoption and nonadoption of the queue was of central importance as a symbol of acceptance or nonacceptance of the Ch’ing mandate to rule. The focus on it here made it absolutely certain that no modus vivendi could be found. It is disconcerting to see in these tentative and always doomed negotiations the widening of the rift between maritime China and the Ch’ing empire, and the sharpening of a sense that there was no room for imperial recognition of partial autonomy of any group of Han Chinese, that all had to be complete subjects of a single political center, that the late imperial political tradition gave no support to any idea of “one empire, two systems.”
Records of Dutch efforts to maintain a presence in the Taiwan strait after their rule of the great island ended in January 1662 offer a few sidelights on the strengthening grip of the Cheng regime. In January 1664 Cheng soldiers in the P’eng-hu islands attacked a Dutch landing party and then fled to Taiwan. Going on land in the area of modern Kao-hsiung, the Dutch engaged in very murky negotiations first with someone who may have been a dissident Cheng commander but more likely was simply trying to shake them down, and then with Cheng Ching’s regime, which was willing to offer them trading posts in outlying areas but certainly was not interested in surrendering Tung-ning. In July 1664 a Dutch squadron found Cheng defenses on P’eng-hu much improved. Part of this squadron went on to reoccupy the old fortress at Keelung, as a counterweight to the Cheng presence and a possible center for trade with China. A Dutch garrison of 200 to 300 held on there until 1668. Sick, drunk, quarrelsome, crazy from the isolation and the rain, the Dutch soldiers managed to make some repairs on the fort. Cheng Ching took their presence as a threat and by 1665 had moved troops into the Tam-sui area. In May 1666 a force of more than 2,000 landed on the island where the Dutch fort stood, gaining surprise by a very bold landing on the shelving sandstone outer coast of the island. The badly outnumbered Dutch garrison shot at any Chinese who approached the fort but did not venture out. After ten days the Dutch were amazed to see the Cheng army boarding its ships and sailing away; they had probably not expected any prolonged resistance and had brought provisions for only ten days. Thereafter slower pressures did their work, as Chinese settled in the aborigine villages just over the hills in the Tam-sui valley, the Dutch bullied and alienated the nearby aborigine villages, and not a shred of trade was done with China. The Dutch garrison was withdrawn in 1668. The Cheng response very probably had accelerated the expansion of the regime’s presence in the important Tam-sui area.39
Even before the Dutch finally surrendered Casteel Zeelandia, Cheng Ch’eng-kung had been busy receiving the homage of Chinese settlers and plains aborigines, surveying roads and land-holdings, and sending some of his soldiers out to farm on assigned lands. As more troops arrived from the mainland and Cheng Ching’s regime stabilized, the systematic deployment of soldiers in “garrison fields” (t’un-t’ien) was very vigorously pursued. Land that had been reclaimed under the Dutch was treated as “official fields” and taxed at a high rate, basically a rent, not a tax. Much lower rates were levied on newly reclaimed land to encourage settlement and investment in land-clearing. Most of the Dutch structure of monopolies of trade with aborigine villages and collection of various categories of tax was maintained, but with fixed quotas, not competitive bidding. The Dutch had even given Cheng Ch’eng-kung lists of their lease-holders and debtors. The Cheng regime monopolized the export of deer hides and sugar, mostly to Japan. The deer hide trade seems to have approximately equaled the volumes under the Dutch, but the sugar trade was considerably smaller, since the urgent need for food produced a considerable shift from sugar cultivation to rice.40
Cheng Ch’eng-kung’s army of invasion in itself represented a major increase in the Chinese population of Taiwan. More troops and civilians followed as Cheng Ching and others withdrew from the mainland. From the late 1650s on, there was a varying and unquantifiable stream of refugees from the ruthless Ch’ing coastal evacuation policies. But Taiwan was not healthy, the frontier work was very hard, and many returned to the mainland in the 1670s. In broad terms, it can be estimated that if the Chinese population of Taiwan under the Dutch was 30,000 to 50,000, under the Cheng regime it was 50,000 to 100,000. Even a mapping of the locations of military colonies shows an expansion of the zone of settlement around modern Tainan and a number of other small centers to the north and south. The almost unmappable presence of merchants in aborigine villages and pioneers pushing out on their own no doubt was affecting much more of the western plains and the Tam-sui area.
The change of regime and the increase in Chinese population must have put new pressures on the aborigines. The Cheng regime seems to have tried to prevent encroachment on its land by its military colonies, but it is not clear that it always managed to do so, and it cannot have avoided the many modes of frontier accommodation and clash that had begun before the Dutch and would continue under the Ch’ing. There was some talk of encouraging the aborigines to increase their grain production by plowing with oxen. Headmen were appointed over the villages. Some exulted over their release from the discipline of Dutch pastors and schoolmasters, but others preserved the practice of using the Roman alphabet to write their languages until the early nineteenth century. The Cheng regime made some efforts to replace Dutch projects of “civilization,” establishing schools where aborigine children were to be taught the Chinese language and the basics of proper behavior. The prestige and magic of text and writing, the focus on male cultural and political leadership, the breaking of the web of magic and custom in favor of productivity, universalized religious and cultural values, and propriety— all were striking continuities from the Dutch civilizing project to that of the Chinese.41
Beginning in 1670, the British East India Company attempted to trade with the Cheng regime, first on Taiwan and later at Amoy.42 The directors of the Company in London were interested in trade in temperate climates where the market for English woolens might be better than it was in India and Indonesia. They were especially interested in Japan and in sources of goods that might be sold in Japan, such as Taiwan sugar and deer hides. Their one voyage to Japan, in 1673, was turned away so firmly that they did not try again. But they still thought a good trade with Taiwan might open up proxy sales of English and Southeast Asian goods via Chinese merchants going from there to Japan, Manila, and the Chinese mainland. The possibility of buying Chinese gold and selling it in India or Europe, profiting from China’s lower price of gold in terms of silver, also was attractive. The trade was managed from the English post at Banten (Bantam in most older books), west of Batavia on the north coast of Java. Their first voyage to Taiwan was in response to the arrival at Banten of an envoy sent by Cheng Ching, apparently one of several sent to Southeast Asian ports in 1668–69 to encourage everyone to come to Taiwan to trade. When the first English ship reached Taiwan in 1670, its merchants were very cordially received, a detailed “contract” on procedures was soon signed, and Cheng Ching gave the English a list of goods that he would buy from them every year. But the English soon found that Cheng Ching monopolized the export of sugar and deer hides and that they could not compete with the low prices at which Chinese merchants imported pepper and other Southeast Asian goods. A shift to Amoy when the Cheng forces reoccupied it produced only limited improvement. A few small cargoes were bought and sent to Banten, but they in no way compensated for the expense and the risk to ships in the South China Sea. For the historian the main interest of the whole episode is in the eyewitness accounts by the handful of Englishmen who still were on Taiwan winding up the affairs of the trading post there when the Cheng regime finally collapsed in 1683.
Both Chinese and English sources make it clear that Cheng Taiwan was a hard frontier world and that many of its Chinese residents, having grown up not on frontier farms but in the urbanized consumer society of coastal Fukien, resented the hard life and the nearly total absence of cloth and other consumer goods. The regime, although impressively thorough in its promotion and taxation of agriculture, had been built up under Cheng Chih-lung and Cheng Ch’eng-kung on a base of the taxation and monopolization of maritime trade. Thus it is not surprising to find Cheng Ching sending trade promotion emissaries as far as Banten and monopolizing the export of sugar and deer hides to Japan. Taiwan must have been an especially welcome haven for merchants from the mainland and Southeast Asia when Ch’ing coastal evacuation policies were being harshly enforced in the 1660s. The results of this advantageous position and of the regime’s energetic promotion of its foreign trade probably were substantial for their trade with many ports in Southeast Asia. They can be fairly well quantified for trade with Manila and Japan. Of 186 Asian ships recorded as reaching Manila between 1664 and 1683, 41 came from Taiwan. From 1664 to 1673, the proportion was 32 out of 101. The peak was 8 out of 18 in 1670.43 For Chinese ships (including those from Southeast Asia) reaching Nagasaki between 1662 and 1683, out of 714, 201 were from Taiwan; peak years were 14 out of 33 in 1666 and 20 out of 38 in 1671.44
Despite all the Ch’ing prohibitions and drastic measures, trade between the Cheng regime and the mainland was never completely cut off. Any base on the coast would very much facilitate it. One Chinese source says that an outpost was re-established on Amoy as early as 1666. The English reported in 1670 that the Chengs had outposts on Amoy, Quemoy, and P’u-t’o-shan!45 And what about a return to military action on the mainland? Cheng Ching continued to use the reign period of the last Ming loyalist emperor, but it is not clear that his regime was committed to overthrowing the Ch’ing, even as a myth of self-legitimation. Certainly he had been ready to make peace with the Ch’ing if his people could keep the great island and their long hair. But a return to the mainland would be for many a return to longed-for home places and to all a chance for loot and glory in battle. The opportunity came with the outbreak in 1673 of the Rebellion of the Three Feudatories. Cheng Ching moved some of his forces to Amoy, and several local commanders in other coastal centers declared their allegiance to him. In 1674 Cheng moved his household and much of his administration to Amoy. Several local commanders in coastal areas came over to his side. The Cheng forces and their allies dominated the coastal areas from Hui-chou in Kwangtung to beyond Ch’uan-chou. Much of this expansion was at the expense not of the Ch’ing but of the rebellious feudatories, Keng Ching-chung in Foo-chow and Shang Chih-hsin in Canton. The Keng rebellion collapsed in 1676, and in 1677 Ch’ing forces swept south, taking most of the Fukien cities. Early in 1678 Cheng armies under Liu Kuo-hsuan counterattacked, threatening the important city of Chang-chou. But the Ch’ing changed its provincial leadership, built up its forces, and by the end of 1678 had driven the Cheng forces out of all their mainland holdings except one city. Cheng Ching still was on Amoy and his forces were causing a great deal of trouble in that area. The inexorable Ch’ing buildup continued, the last Cheng stronghold on the mainland fell, and on March 26, 1680, Cheng Ching and his commanders sailed from Amoy for Taiwan in demoralized confusion.46
The mainland venture had accomplished nothing except to divert manpower and resources from the building up of Taiwan. The regime was desperately short of funds, unable to pay its troops. And the new governor general of Fukien, Yao Ch’i-sheng, was a master of “pacification” tactics, rewarding surrendered Cheng soldiers and people, recommending turncoat officers for appointment under the Ch’ing. There were many stories of nearly successful efforts to assassinate Ching, to surrender Taiwan, and so on. At this point the Cheng regime dissolved in family melodrama. Cheng Ching died in March 1681. His eldest son, K’o-ts’ang, was the putative heir. He had been supported by Ch’en Yung-hua, who had been left in charge of the administration on Taiwan, and whose daughter was married to K’o-ts’ang. But Ch’en Yung-hua had died in 1680, and K’o-ts’ang, the product of his father’s scandalous liaison with a wet nurse, was not acceptable to much of the Cheng family. Feng Hsi-fan managed his deposition and the appointment in his place of Cheng K’o-shuang, who was married to Feng’s daughter. Feng was in complete control, except for the forces under Liu Kuo-hsuan. Liu was the focus of much of Yao Ch’i-sheng’s “pacification” effort.
In 1682 Shih Lang was sent from Peking to resume his command over Ch’ing maritime forces and plan for the conquest of Taiwan. Yao Ch’i-sheng called for an attack on Taiwan in the north monsoon, but Shih argued successfully for the tactical advantages of a south monsoon attack.* Their arguments in memorials to the throne took up much of 1682, Shih pointing out his own lifelong expertise in sea warfare and Yao’s limited understanding. Finally Shih was placed in sole charge of the expedition. In May 1683 he was ready. On July 12 his main fleet of 300 to 400 junks closed with Liu Kuo-hsuan’s Cheng fleet near P’eng-hu. The Cheng fleet held up very well, and Shih was forced to break off the battle. On July 17 the Ch’ing fleet returned to the attack, and after a fierce and complex battle broke the Cheng resistance and occupied most of P’eng-hu. Liu reached Tung-ning two days later. It was clear that resistance was no longer possible. Many feared a general massacre when Shih’s forces landed, but he held back, releasing prisoners and proclaiming that any Cheng soldier who wished to surrender would be taken into his forces at full pay. The effects of this on Cheng soldiers whose pay had been erratic at best for years can be imagined. The Cheng authorities—that is, Feng Hsi-fan and Liu Kuo-hsuan making the decisions for Cheng K’o-shuang—sent envoys to discuss terms, and Shih sent envoys in return. The ordinary people adopted the Ch’ing queue, soon followed by the high officials. Shih Lang’s army entered Tung-ning, evicted all the great men from their houses, and began extorting large sums of money from them on various pretexts.47 But there was no massacre. Cheng K’o-shuang was taken to Peking and given a nonhereditary and powerless dukedom. Liu Kuo-hsuan was named to a very important position as one of the commanders of the garrison at Tientsin.48
It was not at all clear what was to be done with Taiwan. It had never been part of the Chinese imperial state. Shih Lang met with Alexander van’s Gravenbroek, one of a small group of Dutchmen who had been held on Taiwan ever since the Cheng conquest of 1661—62, and asked him to ask his masters in Batavia how much they would pay to get Taiwan back; the latter were predictably uninterested.49 At the end of 1683 Shih conferred with the other high officials of Fukien. There was some talk of abandoning Taiwan and evacuating its entire Chinese population. Shih argued vigorously that it would not be feasible to evacuate all of them, that an outlaw population would surely remain, and that a hostile power might move in and establish a base there.50 His arguments carried the day. Taiwan became a prefecture of Fukien province, divided into two counties. Small garrisons would be rotated to it from the Fukien coast. The coast would be at peace, without the threat of a hostile presence just across the strait, and its ports could be opened to Chinese and foreign trade and to controlled emigration to Taiwan.
Thus the Ch’ing had decided to keep Taiwan largely to keep it out of the hands of trouble-making foreigners and dissident Chinese. But they saw from the beginning that it would be a headache, as every part of maritime China was for them. Eventually they would draw grain from it for the Fukien coastal garrisons, but at first it would produce nothing of sufficient value to offset the trouble it caused. Their administration would keep expenses and commitments as low as possible. This attitude toward Taiwan was a sharp contrast to that of the last two regimes, the Dutch and the Cheng, for whom Taiwan had been an essential base at a time when they were not welcome on the mainland. But the Dutch presence had been destabilized by the four-way tensions among the Europeans, the aborigines, the Chinese settlers, and Cheng Ch’eng-kung. Of these four only the aborigines were completely committed to Taiwan. For Cheng, the Chinese settlers, and the Dutch, its separateness from the mainland was a liability; the Dutch were also drawn away from it by opportunities and commitments elsewhere in maritime Asia. For the Cheng armies and their leaders after 1661, Taiwan was a refuge, but a pretty grim and deprived one. Many of them were quickly drawn back into mainland trade and politics after 1673, surrendered after 1680, or were quite ready to be returned to the mainland after 1683. In the new situation thereafter, the Ch’ing rulers’ attitude toward Taiwan was negative and minimalist, but there was no impermeable barrier between it and Fukien, so that increasingly land-hungry frontier farmers could make their own decisions about going and coming back, going and settling down. No longer a vortex of power politics and world trade, Taiwan now would grow perhaps more slowly but certainly more securely as a distinctive Chinese frontier.
BDR: Dagh-Register gehouden in’t Casteel Batavia, 1628–1682. 31 vols. Batavia: Landsdrukkerij, 1887–1931.
GM: W. Ph. Coolhaas, ed., Generale Missiven van Gouverneurs-Generaal en Raden aan Heren XVII der Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie. Rijks Gescheidkundige Publicatien, Grote Serie, vol. 104 et seq. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1960—.
TW: T’ai-wan wen-hsien ts’ung-k’an. Taipei: Bank of Taiwan, 1958—.
ZDR: J.L. Blussé, M.E. van Opstall, and Ts’ao Yung-ho, eds., De Dagregisters van het Kasteel Zeelandia, Taiwan. Deel I: 1629–1641. Rijks Geschiedkundige Publicatien, Grote Serie, 195. The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1986.
1. John E. Wills, Jr., “Maritime Asia, 1500–1800: The Interactive Emergence of European Domination,” American Historical Review 98, no. 1 (February 1993): 83–105.
2. For a very effective summary of macroregional differences and trajectories, see Susan Naquin and Evelyn S. Rawski, Chinese Society in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987), chap. 5.
3. John E. Wills, Jr., “Maritime China from Wang Chih to Shih Lang: Themes in Peripheral History,” in From Ming to Ch’ing: Conquest, Region, and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century China, ed. Jonathan D. Spence and John E. Wills, Jr. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 204–238.
4. See especially John Robert Shepherd, Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier, 1600–1800 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). This excellent work provides the fullest account of seventeenth-century Taiwan now available. My intellectual debts to it are only partly reflected in the citations in this chapter. In general I have tried to abbreviate my discussion of the themes on which Shepherd focuses and to give more detail on others. An earlier magisterial work from which I have learned much is Ts’ao Yung-ho, T’ai-wan tsao-ch’i li-shih yen-chiu (Taipei: Lien-ching, 1979).
5. Kwang-chih Chang, The Archeology of Ancient China, 4th ed. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 228–233,235,289–292.
6. Shepherd, Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier, p. 28.
7. Wayne H. Fogg, “Swidden Cultivation of Foxtail Millet by Taiwan Aborigines: A Cultural Analogue of the Domestication of Setaria italica in China,” in The Origins of Chinese Civilization, ed. David N. Keightley (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 95–115.
8. “Liu-ch’iu yu Chi-lung-shan,” TW, no. 196.
9. Laurence G. Thompson, “The Earliest Chinese Accounts of the Formosan Aborigines,” Monumenta Serica, 23 (1963): 163–204.
10. Iwao Seiichi, “Shih-ch’i shih-chi Jih-pen-jen chih T’ai-wan chin-lueh hsing-tung” [The Japanese invasions of Taiwan in the seventeenth century], in T’ai-wan ching-chi-shih pa-chi, pp. 1–23. I have found very little information on Japanese trading in Taiwan before the arrival of the Dutch. Lin Ch’ien-kuang, “T’ai-wan chi-lueh,” in Hsiao-fang-hu-chai yu-ti ts’ung-ch’ao [Collected geographical essays from the Hsiao-fang-hu studio: 1877, supplements to 1897], ed. Wang Hsi-ch’i, 9th collection, pp. 136–137, says Pei-hsien-wei, the Dutch Baxemboy, the sand-bar just north of Casteel Zeelandia, was one of the centers of their trade.
11. C.R. Boxer, The Great Ship from Amacon: Annals of Macao and the Old Japan Trade, 1555–1640 (Lisbon: Centre de Estudos Histöricos Ultramarinos, 1959), p. 44.
12. L. Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang, eds., Dictionary of Ming Biography (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1976), pp. 917–919, 927–930.
13. Thompson, “Earliest Chinese Accounts”; Shen Yu-jung et al., “Min-hai tseng-yen,” TW, no. 56.
14. For a summary, see John E. Wills, Jr., “Relations with Maritime Europeans, 1514–1662,” Cambridge History of China, vol. 8, in press, also to appear in Wills, ed., China and Maritime Europe, 1500–1800: Trade, Settlement, Diplomacy, and Missions (Cambridge University Press, nearing completion).
15. Leonard Blussé and Marius P. H. Roessingh, “A Visit to the Past: Soulang, A Formosan Village Anno 1623,” Archipel, no. 27 (1984): 63–80.
16. This point was made and richly supported by evidence and argument by Leonard Blussé of Leiden University in his presentations to a symposium on seventeenth-century Taiwan funded by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation and held at the University of Southern California in November 1992.
17. The importance of the Ryukyus for this argument was emphasized by Professor Ts’ao Yung-ho of the Academia Sinica, Taiwan, at the November 1992 symposium.
18. W.P. Groeneveldt, De Nederlanders in China, Eerste Deel: De Eerste Bemoeingen om den Handel in China en de Vestiging in de Pescadores (1601–1624) (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1898); Chang Wei-hua, Ming-shih Fo-lang-chi, Lu-sung, Ho-lan, I-ta-li-ya ssu-chuan chu-shih (Peiping: Yenching Journal of Chinese Studies monograph series, no. 7, 1934), pp. 107–146.
19. “Ming-chi Ho-lan-jen chin-chu P’eng-hu ts’an-tang”, TW, no. 154; BDR 1624–1625, pp. 1–26, 40–42, 139–146; J.L. Blussé, “The Dutch Occupation of the Pescadores (1622–1624),” Transactions of the International Conference of Orientalists in Japan, 18 (1973): 28–43.
20. The Dutch period is by far the best documented in the history of seventeenth-century Taiwan. This summary provides only a suggestion of the richness of the sources. It would be premature to attempt a full-scale treatment at this time, while the Dutch publication of the day-registers of Zeelandia Castle is not yet complete.
21. Leonard Blussé, “The VOC as Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Stereotypes and Social Engineering on the China Coast,” in Leiden Studies in Sinology, ed. W.L. Idema (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 1981), pp. 87–105; Blussé, “Minnan-jen or Cosmopolitan? The Rise of Cheng Chih-lung Alias Nicholas Iquan,” in Development and Decline of Fukien Province in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. E.B. Vermeer (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1990), pp. 245–264.
22. Much remains to be done in finding and using all the source material on this episode in ecclesiastical and Spanish governmental archives. For starting points see Shepherd, Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier, pp. 56–59; ZDR, pp. 237–238; BDR, 1634, p. 284; 1636, pp. 287–288; 1640, pp. 110–120; 1645, pp. 128–129; GM, vol. 1, pp. 229–230, 271–273, 709; F.R.J. Verhoeven, Bijdragen tot de Oudere Koloniale Geschiedenis van het Eiland Formosa (The Hague:Nijhoff, 1930), chaps. 4–7; José Maria Alvarez, O.P., Formosa, Geografica e Historicamente Considerada [Formosa, geographically and historically considered] (Barcelona, 1930), vol. 1, pp. 20–90.
23. GM, vol. 2, pp. 357,455.
24. John Robert Shepherd, Marriage and Mandatory Abortion Among the Seventeenth-Century Siraya, American Ethnological Society Monograph Series, no. 6 (Arlington: American Anthropological Association, 1995).
25. Thomas O. Höllman, “Formosa and the Trade in Venison and Deer Skins,” in Emporia, Commodities, and Entrepreneurs in Asian Maritime Trade, c. 1400–1750, ed., Roderich Ptak and Dietmar Rothermund, Beiträge zur Südasienforschung, Südasien-Institut, Universität Heidelberg, no. 141 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1991), pp. 263–290.
26. BDR, 1637, pp. 37–39.
27. BDR, 1636, pp. 152–153; BDR, 1637, pp. 37–39; B. Hoetink, “Soe Bing Kong: Het eerste hoofd der Chinezen te Batavia,” in Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land-, en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch Indië, vol. 73 (1917), pp. 344–415.
28. Johannes Huber, “Chinese Settlers Against the Dutch East India Company: The Rebellion Led by Kuo Huai-i on Taiwan in 1652,” in Vermeer, ed., Development and Decline of Fukien Province, pp. 276–279; BDR, 1645, p. 172; GM, vol. 3, p. 197.
29. ZDR, pp. 451,499.
30. Huber, “Chinese Settlers.”
31. GM, vol. 3, p. 198.
32. BDR, 1661, p. 489.
33. William Campbell, Formosa Under the Dutch (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, and Trubner, 1903; repr. Taipei: Ch’eng-wen, 1967), pp. 318–328, 383–492; Inez de Beauclair, Neglected Formosa, trans. Frederik Coyett, ed. L. Blussé et al. (San Francisco: Chinese Materials Center, 1975); BDR, 1661, pp. 484–520.
34. Chikamatsu Monzaemon, The Battles of Coxinga, ed. and trans. Donald Keene, Cambridge Oriental Series, no. 4 (London: Taylor’s Foreign Press, 1951), pp. 61–75; Donald F. Lach and Edwin J. Van Kley, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. 3 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 1820–1823.
35. John E. Wills, Jr., Pepper, Guns, and Parleys: The Dutch East India Company and China, 1662–1681 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 28, 41–43, 51–52,72–74,81–82.
36. Shepherd, Statecraft and Political Economy, p. 102.
37. Huang Tien-ch’uan, Cheng Yen-p’ing k’ai-fu T’ai-wan jen-wu-chi (Tainan: Hai-tung shan-fang, 1958), contains a convenient compilation of biographical information on these and other Cheng regime figures.
38. Wills, “Maritime China.”
39. J.L.P.J. Vogels, “Het Nieuwe Tayouan: De Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie op Kelang, 1664–1668,” Ph.D. dissertation, Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht, 1988.
40. Shepherd, Statecraft and Political Economy, chap. 4.
41. For a rich set of examples of similar shifts in early modern Southeast Asia, see Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988, 1993), vol. 2, chap. 3.
42. There is no account of this English trade in any language that makes use of all the material available in the India Office Library in London. My own attempt at a fuller account is contained in my Toward the Canton System: Maritime Trade and Ch’ing Policy, 1681–1690, forthcoming. Many of the important sources were published in Iwao Seiichi, Shih-ch’i shih-chi T’ai-wan Ying-kuo mao-i shih-liao, T’ai-wan yen-chiu ts’ung-k’an, no. 57, ed. Ts’ao Yung-ho, Chou Hsien-wen, and Lai Yung-hsiang (Taipei: Bank of Taiwan, 1959); and M. Paske-Smith, Western Barbarians in Japan and Formosa in Tokugawa Days, 1603–1868 (Kobe: 1930). See also H.B. Morse, Chronicles of the East India Company Trading to China (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926–1929; repr. Taipei, 1966), vol. 1, pp. 41–49.
43. Pierre Chaunu, Les Philippines et le Pacifique des Ibériques (XVIe, XVIIe, XVIIle siècles); Introduction méthodologique et indices d’activité (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1960), pp. 164–169.
44. Iwao Seiichi, “Kinsei Nisshi bōeki ni kansuru shōryōteki kōsa,” Shigaku zasshi, 62, no. 11 (November 1953): 12–13.
45. Iwao, “Shih-ch’i shi-chi Jih-pen-jen chih Tai-wan,” p. 137.
46. Wills, Pepper, Guns, and Parleys, pp. 154–157.
47. The English sources give a particularly vivid sense of these days; Paske-Smith, Western Barbarians in Japan and Formosa, pp. 108–122.
48. This is intriguing in view of Liu’s relative autonomy within the Cheng Ching regime, the reports of Ch’ing negotiations with him, and the excellent evidence that he fought hard in the Pescadores. I suspect that if he had beaten off the Ch’ing fleet he would have seized power on Taiwan, installed his own Cheng puppet, and possibly led the remaining forces on an invasion of Vietnam or Manila. I develop this hypothesis in Toward the Canton System.
49. John E. Wills, Jr., Embassies and Illusions: Dutch and Portuguese Envoys to K’ang-hsi, 1666–1687 (Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1984), pp. 148,151.
50. Shepherd, Statecraft and Political Economy, p. 106; Fu Lo-shu, A Documentary Chronicle of Sino-Western Relations (1644–1820) (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1966), vol. 1, pp. 60–61.
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* The southern or southwestern monsoon comes in the summer from Southeast Asia; the northern monsoon comes from the north in the winter.