Audiobook can be found HERE.
When the Qing defeated the heirs of Koxinga and came into possession of the short-lived Kingdom of Dongning, the new masters were faced with a choice of what to do with the island. The resulting debates and decisions are well covered in MIT professor Emma J. Teng’s Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683–1895, a relatively readable book for an academic work that began life as a doctoral dissertation. The period covered is when Taiwan (or at least the western lowland areas) was under the dominion of China’s Qing dynasty.
On the question of what to do with the newly conquered territory, the Kangxi emperor is reported to have told his officials: “Taiwan is no bigger than a ball of mud. We gain nothing by possessing it, and it would be no loss if we did not acquire it.” He favored abandoning Taiwan (after repatriating all the Chinese). Keeping the island would be an economic burden, a needless expenditure for what was considered a wild land of tattooed cannibals, dangerous terrain, and disease. Kangxi had – as did his predecessors – a continental mentality; his eyes were on expansion into Central Asia, not turned toward maritime horizons.
Admiral Shi Lang, the man responsible for capturing Taiwan, thought the island worth keeping, and it was his side – by stressing strategic considerations – that eventually won the debate. Having decided to keep Taiwan, the contention now shifted to whether it was fit for colonization or not.
As Teng says, the Qing had not set to acquire Taiwan permanently and in effect ended up as “an accidental colonizer.” The rulers in distant Peking would continue to feel ambivalent about Taiwan. Unlike the Zhengs, and the Dutch before them, the Qing did not seek to develop the island. They followed a policy of quarantine, restricting Chinese immigration to Taiwan, and did not seek to extend control over the entire island. Instead, they sought to restrict Chinese infiltration into aboriginal areas, in the hope of avoiding frontier disputes.
The Qing rulers did not initially allow women to cross, hoping to keep the men tied to the mainland. The hope was that most of the men would return home to their families after the fall harvest and then go back for the spring planting. Permission from port authorities was needed for travelers sailing to Taiwan, and the required papers were invariably an opportunity for official graft. Of course, as ever, it was cheaper and easier to do things outside the law. The emperor was far away and enforcement difficult.
In 1722 the Chinese authorities established a north–south boundary line the length of Taiwan. Stretching along the western foothills, this demarcation line – mostly existing as ink on maps, but marked by 54 steles in strategic locations – prohibited the Chinese settlers from moving into the mountain areas. Encroachment did occur, however, and the line was redrawn higher up four times during the century. Eventually ditches were dug and some guards posted to mark and better enforce the line.
As Taiwan developed and became more attractive a destination, the pro-colonization camp eventually won the debate. As Teng writes: “By the nineteenth century, Chinese attitudes toward Taiwan and the material conditions of the colony had changed so dramatically that ‘the ball of mud’ was now considered a ‘land of Green Gold.’” (“Green gold” meaning “tea.”)
The Qing were unable to stem the flow of Chinese immigrants, and – fearing Japanese interest in the island – decided to bring the entire island into the fold. In 1875, the Qing began the “Open the Mountains and Pacify the Savages” policy, permitting Chinese settlers – backed with Qing military might – into formerly off-limit aboriginal lands.
Taiwan’s Imagined Geography excels at showing history in all its messy complexity and dynamism. We come away from it with a more nuanced understanding of the Qing period, of how events were sometimes happenstance, how widely perceptions varied, and how contentious policies were. It’s also refreshing to see Qing China portrayed as the empire it was; Europeans didn’t have a monopoly on imperialism. Given the Chinese Communist Party’s continual bleating about the humiliations suffered from Western imperialism, it’s always useful to point out that China was itself – and continues to be – an imperial power. Teng’s book is not a polemic against Chinese imperialism, though; a strong takeaway from it is that Qing rule over Taiwan was no worse than what Europeans were doing elsewhere at the time. And rather than the Chinese having a monolithic view of non-Chinese peoples as savages, they had a range of views that changed over time.
Below: A painting from the late 1700s of Indigenous hunters (from the Library of Congress)
Another excellent book covering Taiwan’s formative years is Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier, 1600–1800 (1993), by John Shepherd. It’s not just required reading, but required repeat reading. Is “repeat reading” a backhanded compliment? Well, like Teng’s book, Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier is an academic publication that was originally a doctoral dissertation, so it is heavy going at times but packed with fascinating details – things like the nature of land rental regulations – that reward a second look.
Shepherd’s was one of the first books I read on Taiwan and a revelation, correcting the oversimplified assumptions I had about early Taiwan; the idea that Chinese settlers had turned up and driven the aborigines – by conflict, force of numbers, and development – into the mountains, and that the Qing authorities had largely ignored the island. Shepherd emphasizes the importance of plains aborigines in the process and how government “neglect” actually involved continued surveillance and interference in a “rationally calculated policy of indirect control and quarantine.”
