What is Taiwan? What is a Taiwanese? Here I would like to first explain to you three concepts that are both related and not identical: Taiwan Island, Taiwan Province, and Taiwan Region. The so-called Taiwan Island refers to China's largest island with an area of about 35,800 square kilometers, while Taiwan Province is composed of Taiwan Island, Penghu Islands and surrounding subsidiary islands (an area of about 36,000 square kilometers). The Taiwan region refers to the areas under the actual control of the Taiwan authorities: Kinmen and Matsu are subordinate to Fujian Province in terms of administrative divisions, and the Dongsha Islands are subordinate to Guangdong Province in terms of administrative divisions, but due to historical reasons, these areas are actually under the control of the Taiwan authorities.
As of 2019, the demographics of Taiwan are 23.6 million. Of these, 98 percent are Han Chinese immigrants from Chinese mainland, and the other 2 percent are indigenous people who settled here before han Chinese moved to Taiwan. Taiwan's indigenous peoples can be roughly divided into two main categories: most of the Pingpu ethnic groups that lived in the western plains and had earlier contact with the outside world have integrated with the Han chinese residents of Taiwan; and the ethnic groups living in the mountainous or eastern plains have been able to maintain their inherent customs and languages. Taiwan's Han Chinese residents are divided into two major groups, people from their own provinces and people from other provinces, and in fact, both the people in this province and other provinces come from Chinese mainland, but there is a difference in the time of migration to Taiwan.
The so-called Taiwanese natives refer to the Han residents who have successively moved into Taiwan since the late Ming and early Qing dynasties. The people of this province are divided into two major groups: minnan people naturally move in from the southern region of Fujian, they account for about 70% of the total population of Taiwan; the Hakka people mainly move from the eastern region of Guangdong, accounting for about 14% of the total population of Taiwan. Of course, within the Minnan people's group, they can be subdivided into different groups such as Zhangzhou and Quanzhou according to the specific ancestral place. The so-called Taiwanese from other provinces refers to people who migrated to Taiwan after 1945 from Chinese mainland provinces with the Kuomintang regime, and the descendants of these people now account for about 14% of the total population of Taiwan.
Taiwanese people are known as "Heluolang". "Heluo" refers to the Central Plains. Many Fujian and Taiwanese worship the same distant ancestor, Chen Yuanguang, the Holy King of Kaizhang. Chen Yuanguang was born in 657 in Gushi, Gwangju (present-day Gushi, Henan). During the reign of Emperor Gaozong of Tang, Chen Yuanguang accompanied his father Chen Zheng into Min to quell the rebellion of the local Shanyue clan. Chen Yuanguang wrote to the imperial court to set up prefectures and counties in the 14th year of his entry into Fujian, and two years later Wu Zetian approved the establishment of Zhangzhou between Quanzhou and Chaozhou, and Chen Yuanguang was appointed as the first assassin in the history of Zhangzhou. During Chen Yuanguang's tenure as the Assassin of Zhangzhou, he used the Grace and Wei of the Shanyue people and mainly used them to appease, thus promoting the integration of Central Plains culture and Minyue culture.
Chen Yuanguang, as the first thorn in the history of Zhangzhou, carried out the earliest large-scale development and construction of Zhangzhou. Chen Yuanguang's descendants have migrated to Taiwan many times. Today, the largest surname in Taiwan is Chen. In 1953, Taiwan's official household registration statistics showed that the genealogy of 63 surnames, including Chen, Huang, Qiu, Song and Lin, of the 100 surnames with more than 500 households at that time, recorded that their ancestors were from "Gwangju Gushi" in Henan. A total of 670512 of these 63 surnames, accounting for 80.9% of the total number of 828804 households in Taiwan that year. This means that 4 out of every 5 Taiwan residents are from Gushi. The so-called Taiwanese people are mainly composed of these people.
After the Nationalist government restored Taiwan in 1945, some residents of various provinces Chinese mainland and officers and soldiers came to Taiwan. After the kuomintang regime's defeat in Taiwan in 1949, a large number of people were brought to Taiwan: among them were government officials and their families who voluntarily followed the Kuomintang regime to Taiwan, and a considerable number of military and civilian Zhuang Ding who were coerced or even forcibly recruited. In 1946, Taiwan's population was about 6.1 million, and by 1950 it had surged to 7.45 million. The vast majority of these increases were new residents who followed the Kuomintang regime. The Kuomintang government called these new residents of Taiwan "Rongmin" (short for Honorary National). During this period, the government began to build houses or arrange dormitories for the people in order to solve the housing problems of the common people.
Most of the rong people are grouped in a certain range according to their own military type, occupation, origin, etc. This kind of place where the people live is known in Taiwan as the "village of dependents". There are 879 villages in Taiwan at the most: Taoyuan City, which has the largest number of villages, has 80, followed by Taipei, Hsinchu, Taichung, Chiayi, Tainan, Kaohsiung and other metropolitan counties and cities. Nowadays, many well-known figures in Taiwan's political, business, and performing arts circles have a background in the village: the political figures who have come out of the village are Song Chuyu and Zhu Lilun... The business celebrities who came out of the village include Zou Kailian, Chen Qili, Gou Taiming... Performing artists who have come out of the village include Li Liqun, Liu Dekai, Hu Hui, Teresa Teng, Lin Qingxia, Ren Xianqi, Jiao Enjun, Ma Jingtao, Zhao Wenxuan, Zhou Yumin...
The ethnic division of the indigenous people by the Taiwan authorities is relatively complicated. After the Nationalist government restored Taiwan in 1945, the indigenous people of Taiwan were divided into two major ethnic groups: the Gaoshan and Pingpu. The Pingpu ethnic group is an ethnic group with more contact with the outside world and a higher degree of Sinicization, while the Gaoshan ethnic group is more ethnic group that maintains its own ethnic characteristics, in fact, there are many branches within the Alpine and Pingpu ethnic groups. Later, the Nationalist government included the Pingpu ethnic group with a high degree of Sinicization in the Han population statistics, and no longer regarded them as an indigenous group. On March 14, 1954, the Taiwan authorities divided the aborigines into nine ethnic groups: Taiya, Saixia, Bunun, Cao, Lukai, Paiwan, Beinan, Yamei, and Ami. In November 1998, the Cao people changed their name to zou.
Before 2001, the Shao ethnic group, which was classified as belonging to the Pingpu ethnic group and included in the Han population, was identified as the 10th indigenous ethnic group. The Karmalan, who originally lived in Yilan in 2002 and later moved to Hualien, are listed as a separate family. In 2004, the Taroko were separated from the Taiya by the Taiwanese government to become the 12th ethnic group. In 2007, the Satchlea, who were originally hidden among the Ami, became the 13th ethnic group. In 2008, the Saidek ethnic group, which was originally included in the Taiya ethnic group, was approved by the resolution of the 3089th session of the Executive Yuan as the 14th ethnic group of Taiwan's indigenous people. This is an independent ethnic group that has been confirmed by the Taiwan authorities, in addition to the undecorated ethnic groups such as the Babusa, Basai, and Hongya. On the mainland side, these Taiwanese aborigines are collectively referred to as the Mountain Ethnic Group.
How did these different ethnic groups living in Taiwan come to the island? In fact, during the Ice Age, about 10,000 years ago, Taiwan was connected to the mainland, and a large number of mammals from north and south China came to Taiwan through land bridges, while hunters in prehistoric times followed the footsteps of their prey. The earliest human activity sites in Taiwan were found in the Eight Immortals Cave in Changbin Township, Taitung, which borders the Pacific Ocean. This proves that humans arrived in Taiwan at least 30,000 years ago. People at that time did not know the geological theory, but the objective laws of nature affected their lives: as the sea rose, the land bridge connecting Taiwan and the mainland was submerged, so Taiwan became an island above the East China Sea.
Those who first came to Taiwan constituted the earliest indigenous tribes on the island. In the era of extreme backward navigation technology, the strait blocked the exchange between the mainland and Taiwan, but one of the characteristics of human beings is that they do not like to be bound, and the curiosity of exploring the unknown world prompts human beings to cross the mountains and cross the sea but explore what kind of world is on the other side of the mountain and the other side of the sea. About 5000 to 6000 years ago, a group of seafarers drove canoes to the west coast of taiwan and bred a unique Daxiaokeng culture here, which marked the arrival of Taiwan's Neolithic Age. These early inhabitants of Taiwan even spread to the surrounding Southeast Asia and pacific regions to form the Austronesian language family.
In 230 AD, Sun Quan ordered Wei Wen and Zhuge Zhi to lead ten thousand people to float in such a large ship to seek Yizhou (Taiwan), which is the first time that the ancestors of Chinese mainland opened up Taiwan in history. The Three Kingdoms Eastern Wu Danyang Taishou Shen Ying's "Linhai Soil Chronicle" details the production and life forms of Taiwan at that time. This is the world's earliest account of Taiwan. The Sui Emperor sent Zhu Kuan, Chen Ling, and others to Liuqiu (present-day Taiwan) on three occasions. From the 9th to the 10th century, at the end of the Tang Dynasty and the beginning of the Song Dynasty, Han Chinese began to settle in Penghu. In the middle of the 12th century, the Southern Song Dynasty placed Penghu under the jurisdiction of Jinjiang County (present-day Jinjiang, Fujian) and sent troops to defend it. On this basis, the Yuan Dynasty also set up the Penghu Inspection Department for jurisdiction.
During the Song and Yuan dynasties, the Penghu Archipelago had basically formed a population pattern dominated by Han residents, compared with the development of Taiwan's main island at this time. The passage of time to the great geographical discoveries of the 15th century has made the world increasingly linked into a whole: the history of the world before that was actually the history of the various regions of the world, after which humanity really entered the stage of global history. However, when Europeans began to move towards the distant sea of stars, the Ming Dynasty of China promulgated a policy of sea ban, but the sea ban could not completely block China's connection with the sea. The southeast coastal provinces of Zhejiang, Fujian, Guangdong and other provinces have formed a tradition of relying on the sea to eat the sea since ancient times.
Even after the promulgation of the sea ban policy, the merchants on the southeast coast still resisted the pressure to go to sea to trade. When the imperial court retreated from the sea, Chinese merchants were widely involved in the international trading system of the Age of Discovery: merchants on the southeast coast brought back nearly half of the silver from Spanish America to China through trade with the Spaniards, and japanese silver was imported into China in large quantities through trade with Japan, the world's second-largest silver-producing region at the time. In the late Ming Dynasty, silver replaced copper coins as the main circulating currency in the Chinese market, and in the southeast coast, Mexican eagle coins and Spanish silver coins also became common currencies, and China began to integrate with the world from the monetary field, so that China at that time was regarded as a "silver empire" by Westerners.
At that time, there was no clear line between maritime merchants and pirates: if the sea ban policy was severe, it would force normal trade merchants to become pirates; if the sea ban policy was relaxed, then pirates could also transform into merchants. For those who eat by the sea: everything is for survival, and the issue of identity has never been their concern. In fact, in the official context of the Ming Dynasty at that time, these maritime merchants were called "thieves". From the late Ming Dynasty to the apocalypse, the maritime merchants along China's southeast coast have been in a state of "bandits", but most of them are vassals of Western colonists, and it is difficult to become a climate alone.
It was not until the appearance of Yan Siqi that a Chinese hero finally ushered in the late stage of the magnificent Era of Navigation. Born in 1589 in Haicheng County, Fujian Province (present-day Qingjiao Village, Haicang, Xiamen), Yan Siqi was physically strong and proficient in martial arts, and from an early age, he had a "big brother style", and he beat the servants of the officials' families to death one day. Yan Siqi, who was beheaded according to the Ming Law, fled all the way to Hirado, Japan, when he was only fourteen years old. Japan was in the early days of the Tokugawa shogunate's rule, and Hirado's merchant travel as a treaty port was booming, and Fujian's hometowns were everywhere. Yan Siqi opened a tailor shop here. Yan Siqi, who was bold by nature, soon gained a foothold in a foreign country, and after some hard work, became a big merchant across the sea.
After Yan Siqi's rise to fame, twenty-eight Chinese merchants and righteous knots Jinlan regarded him as their boss, including Zheng Zhilong, the father of Zheng Chenggong, a national hero who later recovered Taiwan. Dissatisfied with the japanese forces' oppression of Chinese businessmen, these Chinese merchants planned to capture the port of Hirado. Unexpectedly, before the incident, everyone was drinking for a brother's birthday celebration, and one of them was drunk and inadvertently leaked the plan, which attracted the officers and soldiers of the shogunate to surround and suppress. Yan Siqi, who had been informed, fled to the sea with his brothers in a hurry. Yan Siqi, who escaped death, had no other way but to go to Taiwan. In 1624, Yan Siqi led his fleet to dock at Bengang (present-day Beigang, Taiwan). The island of Taiwan is fertile and watery, and a large wilderness is waiting to be reclaimed.
Yan Siqi was determined to do something here: he led everyone to cut down wood and build a squatter village, while at the same time appeasing the indigenous people of the island, agreeing on boundaries, and not invading each other. After the overall situation was initially decided, Yan Siqi sent his subordinates to lead a fleet of ships to recruit immigrants in their hometowns of Zhangzhou and Quan, and more than 3,000 people went to Taiwan before and after. Yan Siqi divided the reclamation into ten villages, distributed silver two and cultivated cattle, agricultural tools, etc., and began the earliest large-scale reclamation activities in Taiwan. Reclamation requires capital investment, so Yan Siqi selected a group of Zhang, Quan people with navigation experience, with the original 13 large ships to take advantage of the convenience of sea transportation to carry out maritime trade with the mainland; at the same time, organize sea fishing and island hunting, develop the mountain and sea economy, in order to solve the material needs of migrant production and life.
In 1625, when Taiwan had a bumper grain harvest, the excited Yan Siqi dragged the brethren into the Zhuluo Mountains to hunt. After returning, Yan Siqi fell ill and died a few days later at the age of 37. Yan Siqi's life was like a shooting star, but his feat opened a new era in Taiwan. Since then, a large-scale migration has come: every year a large number of people cross the strait into the island of Taiwan, where they cultivate and multiply. Following Yan Siqi, who continued to write the marine legend of Chinese, Zheng Zhilong and Zheng Chenggong father and son. The Cheng family is essentially a maritime-military complex with both military and commercial functions.
Zheng Zhilong was able to monopolize trade in Champa City, Luzon, Beigang, Pingdo, Nagasaki, Mumbai, Banten, Old Port, Malacca, Cambodia, siam and other places with strong military support. At this time, the Zheng family already had 20,000 soldiers of different races, including Han Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, and even black Africans, and a fleet of more than 3,000 large and small ships. Zheng Chenggong took over the most powerful naval force in East Asia at that time, and he relied on his powerful naval strength as a support to control the trade routes around the South China Sea, established the five merchant systems of mountains and seas, and obtained huge military salaries from the trade network connecting the East and west oceans.
In terms of weapons and equipment, Zheng Chenggong's fleet and the European fleet are not different: the main warship of the Zheng family fleet, The big blue head, is about 10 zhang long, 2 zhang 1 foot wide, 5 feet high, 8 feet draught, and carries a load of 3,000 to 4,000 cartons. The Zheng family fleet was equipped with Hongyi and Weiyuan cannons, some of which weighed two or three thousand kilograms. In the spring of 1661, Zheng Successfully led more than 25,000 officers and soldiers to cross the sea in more than 300 boats of various types to recover the island of Taiwan occupied by the Dutch colonists. At that time, the Dutch East India Company did not actually occupy the entire island of Taiwan, but only established Plominja (Chichi City) and Zeelandia City as trading posts, and the total number of Dutch troops stationed on the island of Taiwan was only a few thousand, and the warships were only 4 armed merchant ships of the East India Company.
There was no generational difference between the two sides in terms of weapon performance, and Zheng Chenggong's marine division completely achieved absolute superiority in strength over the Dutch colonists. In the Battle of Prominjae, four armed merchant ships of the Dutch East India Company were besieged by hundreds of warships of Zheng Chenggong's marine division, and eventually 1 sank and 3 fled. After taking the city of Prominsha as a stronghold, Zheng's army immediately besieged the city of Zeelandia from both sea and land, where the Zheng army encountered more stubborn resistance from the Dutch, so Zheng Chenggong sent his subordinates to tun tian on the island of Taiwan on the one hand, and on the other hand, to obtain supplies through overseas trade, while adopting a protracted war strategy of encircling and not attacking the city of Zeelandia.
The local alpine and Han people in Taiwan spontaneously assisted Zheng Chenggong's troops, and finally the city of Zeelandia was besieged for more than seven months and ran out of ammunition, more than 1,600 officers and soldiers were killed and wounded, and the water source was cut off, at which time all the hopes of the Dutch colonial army in Zeelandia were pinned on reinforcements from Batavia. Dutch reinforcements of more than 600 soldiers and eleven warships arrived in Taiwan in July 1661, and they brought a large supply to the city of Zeelandia. At this time, Zheng Chenggongzheng sent his troops to various parts of Taiwan to reclaim land and appease people's hearts, and was already comprehensively carrying out the development and governance work after the recovery of Taiwan, so it was in a state of dispersion, which made the Dutch colonists think that it was organic.
In mid-August, the Dutch and Zheng armies fought a fierce naval battle in the Taijiang Inland Sea, in which the Zheng army sank a Dutch warship and seized several ships, and the Dutch army lost the ability to take the initiative. In December, a Dutch non-commissioned officer defected and provided Zheng Chenggong with intelligence on the city of Zeelandia, and Zheng Chenggong immediately organized a continuous bombardment of the city of Zeelandia, and the poor Dutch finally surrendered, so that Taiwan, which had fallen for more than thirty years, returned to the embrace of the motherland. Zheng Chenggong, who had always regarded himself as a loyal vassal of the Ming Dynasty, used Taiwan as an anti-Qing base, and the Qing government, which lacked the sea power to oppose it, implemented a relocation order: to force the residents of the southeast coast to move inland for more than 20 kilometers in an attempt to cut off the trade between the Zheng regime and the coastal residents in Taiwan.
The policy of relocation was devastating to China's maritime trade, and it was not until 1684, after the pacification of the Cheng regime in Taiwan, that the Qing government limited the ban. Due to the "relocation of boundaries" by the imperial court and the long-term war between the Qing army and the Zheng army, many mainland ancestors risked their lives to cross the rough sea and migrate to Taiwan in order to survive. The descendants of the ancient Central Plains people who emigrated to Taiwan, Southeast Asia, Europe and the United States usually called themselves "Tang people", and their settlements were called "Chinatown" and "Chinatown", and since then, generations of Chinese and Taiwan compatriots who have lived overseas have called the motherland "Tangshan" (meaning TangShan). Chinese mainland the migration of immigrants to Taiwan, the development and construction of Taiwan, this period of history is also known as "Tangshan across Taiwan".
These mainland ancestors who rushed to Taiwan, with their outstanding ethnic nature of perseverance, blue wisps, going forward and going forward, and bravely moving forward, opened up a beautiful treasure island for future generations with hard work and sweat, thus creating a history of "Tangshan crossing Taiwan" for more than 300 years... Lian Heng, a well-known patriotic historian in modern times, prefaced himself in the "General History of Taiwan": "Hong Wei, my ancestor, crossed the sea, entered the wilderness, and reclaimed the land for the sake of his descendants for thousands of years. These indisputable historical facts prove that Chinese the first to discover and develop Taiwan, Taiwan has belonged to China since ancient times. Today, there is a group of large reliefs of "Tangshan Crossing Taiwan" in the "Tangshan Crossing Taiwan" stone carving garden in Zhangpu County, southern Fujian.
These stone sculptures still tell us the arduous story of the early mainland ancestors who went to Taiwan to start a business. At that time, the sailing ships were small, the speed was low, and when the ship passed through the "black water ditch" in the strait, there were often tragedies of ship overturning and death, and those who were lucky enough to arrive in Taiwan had to endure miasma, poisonous snakes, and beasts of prey, and endured the test of natural disasters such as typhoons, heavy rains, and earthquakes. It is precisely because of the hardships of the process of crossing the sea that a few well-known sayings have been left behind: "Tangshan has crossed Taiwan, and the heart and liver are returned to the pill." Six dead, three, one turned back, half of them left."
This short, almost common saying is by no means alarmist, but rather the hardships of the early ancestors who went to Taiwan. Wu Boxiong, honorary chairman of the Chinese Kuomintang and president of the Chinese Federation of the International Fo Guang Association, went to Taiwan with his wife and children in the sixth year of Xianfeng (1856), but Wu Boxiong's great-grandmother unfortunately fell into the sea and died during the sea crossing, and eventually Wu Boxiong's great-grandfather and grandfather, who were only 5 years old at the time, went through hardships to reach Taiwan. Wu Ziguang, a cultural figure in Taiwan's history, also recorded the story of his mother and wife going to Taiwan: Wu Ziguang went to Taiwan with his father to work hard in the early years, and later his mother Cai And his wife Chen also crossed the sea from their hometown to Taiwan to find a husband.
The mother-in-law and daughter-in-law walked across the rugged mountain road of Fujian for more than 200 miles from Guangdong province, and in Xiamen they got the official road, so that they could successfully board the ship and go to sea. At first, the smooth sailing was quite calm, but just when Taiwan was close at hand, there was a strong wind from the northeast, and the bow of the ship was blown away from the direction by the strong wind, so the east ferry trip became a westward return. On the way back to the west, the mother-in-law and daughter-in-law encountered a series of tribulations: they were blackmailed, robbed, and even overturned and fell into the water and almost died. Many years later, Wu Ziguang's wife Chen Shi came to Taiwan, but her mother was unable to come with her, which became the biggest regret of Wu Ziguang's life. In that era, it was particularly difficult for women to go to Taiwan, so they left a saying that "there is a Tangshan Gong, no Tangshan Ma".
However, it is impossible for a group to develop and reproduce without women. In fact, there is also no shortage of stories of legendary women in the magnificent historical torrent of mainland ancestors going to Taiwan: In the fifty-fourth year of the Kangxi Dynasty (1715), Li Ciqin, a woman who commanded an edict, resolutely crossed the sea to Taiwan, and her motivation for crossing the sea to Taiwan was actually to prevent her husband, who had already gone to Taiwan earlier, from taking concubines. It was almost normal for a man to take a concubine at that time, but Li Ciqin was a woman with a very assertive and independent consciousness, so she could not accept this, so she took the child and chased it directly across the sea. Perhaps it was because of her competitive sense of independence that she reached a land development contract with the indigenous tribal leaders of the Miaoli area after arriving in Taiwan, thus beginning the history of reclamation in the Miaoli area.
Li Ciqin's behavior must have been typical of a humble woman by the apologist of traditional etiquette and culture at that time, but it was precisely such a humble woman who became a pivotal figure in the history of Taiwan's development. Many of the stories of the pioneers who came to Taiwan in the early days can only be found in the local chronicles of Fujian, Taiwan and other places, as well as from the genealogies of the families who went to Taiwan, because the history of the feudal dynasty will not record them. In the eyes of the rulers, this is a group of insignificant people, and may even be regarded as restless and self-guarding people, but it is this group of small people who witness the blood ties between the mainland of the motherland and Taiwan and the development and construction process of taiwan's yanlu blue wisps.
In Chinese history, the name of Taiwan has changed several times: Taiwan was called "Daoyi" during the Spring and Autumn Warring States Period, "Yingzhou" in the Qin Dynasty, "Yizhou" in the Three Kingdoms Period, "Liuqiu" from the Sui Dynasty to the Yuan Dynasty, "Dongfan" officially in the Ming Dynasty, and fujian immigrants who followed Yan Siqi, Zheng Zhilong, and Zheng Chenggong to Taiwan called it "Dayuan", "Taiyuan", "Dawan" and so on in Minnan. During the Ming Dynasty, the name "Taiwan" was officially used in official documents according to the name of the "TaiwoWan" Society of the Pingpu aborigines of Anping, Tainan, but the word "Taiwan" in the Ming Dynasty referred only to the Tainan region of Taiwan Province. After the Ming Dynasty, there were endless exchanges between the mainland and Taiwan.
Zheng He's fleet of ships that sailed to the West during the Ming Dynasty yongle years stayed in Taiwan, bringing crafts and agricultural products to the local population. Today, the legend of "Three Treasures Ginger", a specialty of Fengshan Mountain in Kaohsiung, is left over from Zheng He. After the 15th century, the Wokou continued to harass the southeast coastal areas of China, so the Ming government added "guerrillas" in Penghu and stationed troops in Keelung and Tamsui Ergang. In the forty-fifth year of the Wanli Calendar (1617), Zhao Ruosi (Bingjian), an officer of the Fujian Water Division of the Ming Dynasty, built a castle in Chikan, Tainan, to manage it. This indicates that the jurisdiction of the Chinese government was formally extended to the main island of Taiwan at that time. At the beginning of the 17th century, Dutch, Spanish and other colonists took advantage of the turmoil at the end of the Ming Dynasty to invade Taiwan.
In 1642 the Dutch occupied the entire island of Taiwan after expelling the Spaniards. In September 1652, the peasant leader Guo Huaiyi led an armed uprising against the Dutch colonists. Although guo Huaiyi's uprising had failed, it successfully attacked Dutch colonial rule in Taiwan. Ten years later, Zheng successfully recovered Taiwan from Dutch colonists. Zheng Chenggong died of illness only four months after the reconquest of Taiwan, after which Zheng Chenggong's son Zheng Jing and grandson Zheng Ketuan ruled Taiwan for 21 years. During their 21 years of rule in Taiwan, the Cheng family promoted tun tian, developed trade, and opened schools. During this period, more and more mainland coastal residents moved to Taiwan to engage in reclamation, and the indigenous people of Taiwan also improved their production technology in contact with mainland immigrants.
When the Qing government implemented the policy of moving borders and banning the sea, Taiwan's Cheng regime was vigorously developing maritime trade: during this period, Taiwan had trade relations with Japan, Siam, Vietnam, the Philippines, Cambodia and other countries. Taiwan sells local specialties such as deerskin, deer breast, camphor, sulfur, and sugar abroad in exchange for swords, armor, and daily necessities that it needs. During the 21 years that the Cheng family ruled Taiwan, Taiwan had close economic ties with overseas countries, while some mainland coastal residents also carried out smuggling trade with Taiwan in defiance of the Qing government's ban. The Cheng regime in Taiwan and the Qing government on the mainland are effectively in a state of military confrontation.
On July 8, the 22nd year of the Qing Kangxi Dynasty (1683), the Qing government sent Shi Lang, the admiral of the Fujian Admiralty, to lead more than 20,000 land and water officers and men and more than 200 warships from Tongshan to Penghu and Taiwan. The Qing naval division commanded by Shi Lang first won a major victory against the Taiwanese naval division at the Battle of Penghu, thus forcing Zheng Chenggong's grandson Zheng Ketuan to lead the crowd to submit to the Qing government. In the 23rd year of the Qing Dynasty (1684), the Qing government established one prefecture and three counties in Taiwan: the administration of Taiwan was located in present-day Tainan, under the jurisdiction of Taiwan County (present-day Tainan), Fengshan County (present-day Zuoying, Kaohsiung), and Zhuluo County (present-day Chiayi). By the sixteenth year of the Qing Dynasty (1811), the population of Taiwan had reached 1.9 million. Most of them are immigrants from Fujian and Guangdong.
These immigrants brought advanced production experience and technology from the mainland to Taiwan, and provided the most important labor force for Taiwan's development. Together with its original inhabitants, they worked hard to transform Taiwan from an undeveloped island in much of the country into a treasure island with a fairly prosperous economy. This process lasted about 200 years. During the Opium War, the Taiwanese soldiers Dao Yao Battalion and the general Dahong'a recruited more than 6,000 xiangyong, shuiyong, and Tunding to repel the invading British army many times. During the war, the Taiwanese defenders captured 182 British troops. In the battle of September 11, 1841 alone, the Taiwanese defenders killed 32 British troops, captured 133 prisoners, and captured 10 cannons.
After the Opium War, the Qing government opened a number of treaty ports under pressure from Western powers. Since the 1860s, parts of Taiwan have opened ports one after another. With the large-scale inflow of capital, the development of industry and commerce and agriculture, five major families have emerged in Taiwan. To this day, these five major families are still rich and are the family forces that cannot be ignored in Taiwan. The most dazzling of these five families are the former Taiwan's richest man, the "Banqiao Lin Family" and the "Wufeng Lin Family". After moving to Taiwan during the Qianlong period of the Qing Dynasty, these two lin families gradually climbed from the bottom up to become the best among mainland immigrants. The family history of the Lin family in Banqiao and the Lin family in Wufeng can be said to be a microcosm of the rise and fall of Taiwan's history.
After making a fortune in Taiwan, the Lin family in Banqiao opened the Lin Yizhuang in the Zhangzhou area to help the poor Lin people. Lin's righteous deeds of giving back to the people lasted for a hundred years, until after the outbreak of the Anti-Japanese War, Lin's Yizhuang had to be shut down due to traffic reasons. The Wufeng Lin family became taiwan's premier family by reclaiming wasteland and acquiring land: the Wufeng Lin family not only became the richest man in Taiwan economically, but also participated in a series of military operations such as the Qing government's pacification of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the suppression of the Tiandihui Dai Chunchao Civil Rebellion, and the Sino-French War. The Wufeng Lin family is therefore regarded as the largest family in Taiwan that has profoundly influenced Taiwan's modern history.
On December 19, 1871, a Ryukyu ship was blown into the land of the mudans in Taiwan after encountering wind and waves at sea. Due to the language barrier between the two sides, the group of Ryukyu drifters was killed by the residents of the Peony Society as invaders, and several of them escaped to the area where the Han Chinese in Taiwan were concentrated and were protected. The Qing government sent boats to return to Ryukyu after compensating the survivors. It is said that this matter should have passed like this, but the Japanese side took the opportunity to intervene. Japan claimed that Ryukyu was Japanese territory on the grounds that Ryukyu was paying tribute to satsuma domain, and therefore claimed that the killing of Ryukyu drifters by the natives of Taiwan was harmful to the Japanese people, and Japan claimed compensation from the Qing government accordingly.
The Qing government held that Taiwan was Chinese territory and Ryukyu was a Chinese vassal state, and that the imperial court had properly handled the friction between the two sides, and there was really no need to give an account to Japan. In January 1874, Japan invaded Taiwan on the grounds that Japanese nationals had been killed by taiwanese natives. Japan's invasion of Taiwan ended in peace with the Qing government. The Sino-Japanese Treaty of Beijing signed in October 1874 showed that China exercised sovereignty over all of Taiwan. Since then, some Qing officials have proposed the establishment of a province in Taiwan. In 1874, the Qing government expanded the administrative division of Taiwan into two provinces, eight counties and four departments. The French army that attacked Taiwan during the Sino-French War from 1884 to 1885 was severely damaged by the army led by Liu Mingchuan, the inspector of Fujian.
In 1885, the Qing government formally established a province from a province subordinate to Fujian in view of Taiwan's importance. Liu Mingchuan, who made great contributions to the defense of Taiwan during the Sino-French War, was changed from Inspector of Fujian to Inspector of Taiwan. During his tenure as Inspector of Taiwan, Liu Mingchuan laid railways, opened mines, erected electric wires, set up enterprises, created new schools, trained new armies, reformed postal services, and developed shipping, thus promoting the development of Taiwan's modern industry and commerce, thus greatly advancing the development of Taiwan's social economy and culture and becoming one of the most advanced provinces in the country at that time, but in 1895 the Qing government ceded Taiwan to Japan in the "Treaty of Maguan".
From November 22 to 26, 1943, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Chiang Kai-shek, President of the Chinese Nationalist Party, Chairman of the National Government of the Republic of China, and Chairman of the Military Commission of the National Government, met in Cairo. On December 1 of the same year, China, the United States and the United Kingdom simultaneously issued the Cairo Declaration in Chongqing, Washington, and London. One of the contents of the Cairo Declaration is that all the islands that Japan has seized or occupied in the Pacific since the outbreak of the First World War will be deprived of all the territories stolen by Japan to China, such as Manchuria, Taiwan, and the Penghu Islands, and will certainly be returned to China."
This article shows that the international community recognizes that Northeast China, Taiwan, Penghu and other places are China's inherent territory, and secondly, it also affirms China's legitimate right to recover all lost land, including the above-mentioned areas, and restore the integrity of national territorial sovereignty. The Potsdam Proclamation signed by China, the United States and the United Kingdom on July 26, 1945 (which the Soviet Union later joined), reaffirmed that "the conditions of the Cairo Declaration will be carried out." A ceremony of Japanese surrender was held on September 2, 1945, aboard the USS Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay. On September 9, 1945, the surrender ceremony of the Chinese Theater was held in the auditorium of the Central Military Academy in Nanjing, China. On October 25, the surrender ceremony of Taiwan Province in the Allied China Theater was held in Taipei. At this point, Taiwan and Penghu returned to China's sovereign jurisdiction.