How to start a story

In my family, the beginning of history always starts with the same line: “In 1949, Chiang Kai-Shek came to our island and did unspeakable violence”.

That’s kind of a strange way to start a story, isn’t it? For one, what happened before Chiang Kai-Shek got to the island?

Speaking of strange beginnings, here is another popular one: “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue”… and arrived on Turtle Island and did unspeakable violence.

Perhaps the line about Chiang Kai-Shek is not such an unusual way to start a story after all.

What happened before the beginning of the story?

As a kid, I was always curious about what happened before Chiang Kai-Shek, before 1949, before the beginning of the story. This is a story about that. This is a story about why people moved from the Chinese mainland to the island whose naming has been contested for generations, the island my family calls Taiwan.

This story will cover 2 major waves of Han Chinese migration to Taiwan. The first will stem from a Dutch attempt at settler colonialism. The second will be a wave of wartime migration as power passed from the Ming to the Qing dynasty.

Migration 1: Dutch attempt at settler colonialism

In the 1510s, Europeans started showing up on the Western shores of the Pacific Ocean. They had long heard the tales of Marco Polo, and wanted to experience the wealth of the Orient for themselves. For centuries, European explorers had spent most of their efforts facilitating trade between China and Japan because it was more profitable to serve the large Asian markets than to ship goods on a precarious trip back to Europe.

However, in the early 1600s, the Portuguese established a monopoly on the spice trade all the way from the Maluku Islands to Lisbon. In Europe, they solidified their monopoly by creating a dynastic union with Spain. In the Pacific, they cemented the monopoly by colonizing crucial trading posts in present-day Malaysia and the Maluku Islands.

The Dutch found the Portuguese monopoly intolerable. As mercantilist traders, they too wanted to enter the profitable Chinese market. The Dutch brought with them expectations of huge profits, Indian slaves, and the right to declare war from the Dutch royal family. In pursuit of profits, they set up colonies in present-day Indonesia and pillaged coastal Chinese villages as pirates. In 1633, Dutch Admiral-Pirate Hans Putmans was defeated by Chinese Admiral-Pirate Zheng Zhilong in the Battle of Lioaluo Bay. As a result of their defeat, the Dutch were forced to retreat to the island of Pakan¹ (present-day Taiwan).

In Pakan, the Dutch set to making a profit. First, they mined the island of deer. Deer was in high demand in Japan for use in samurai armor, and in China for meat and medical use. When the deer population was exhausted, they tried to enslave the Aboriginal peoples on Pakan, but the Aboriginals proved too fierce. Finally, they decided the only way to make a profit would be by taxing residents. After the Aboriginal peoples strongly refused Dutch governance, the Dutch encouraged Han Chinese people from the Chinese mainland to migrate to Pakan. Many Han Chinese refused to migrate, fearful of the island’s deadly shores on which many sailors and explorers had died. However, a number of them did migrate to the Dutch colony, becoming the first major wave of Han Chinese migration to Pakan. Most of the migrants were young single men.

Migration 2: Wartime migration as the Ming fell to the Qing

To tell the story of the second wave of migration, let’s rewind a bit. The Dutch will come back into the story, but to understand what’s going on, we need to backtrack and tell the story from a Chinese point-of-view.

In 1618, Khan Nurhaci’s army attacked and captured Fushun, a walled city near the present-day border of China and Korea. This was the beginning of a 65-year conflict and transition of power from the Ming to the Qing dynasty.

Khan Nurhaci and his allies attacked China from the North. By 1644, the northern part of China had fallen to the Qing (the dynastic line established by Khan Nurhaci), but the South remained a Ming stronghold. In the South, a military commander titled Koxinga² dedicated himself to restoring the Ming Emperor and decided to use Pakan as a military base to strike back against the Qing³.

In order to use Pakan as a military base, first, Koxinga had to fight the Dutch. It took less than a year for his troops and allied Aboriginals to defeat them. The Dutch retreated back to their colonies in present-day Jakarta, and Koxinga established a Ming-style system of governance in the southwest part of the island. In 1661, he claimed the southwest part of the island as the Kingdom of Tungning.

Koxinga brought tens of thousands of Han Chinese to the Kingdom of Tungning, primarily soldiers and their families, and prepared for war against the Qing.

In response to Koxinga’s actions, the Qing instituted a Great Clearance on the mainland. They forcibly relocated all people from southern coastal towns and ports in order to starve out Koxinga and his troops. The people in these towns and ports had been living through decades of war between Qing supporters and the Ming loyalists. The Qing forcing them to relocate from their homes presented immense hardship. As a result, the Qing’s policy backfired. Instead of relocating inland and experience further hardship under Qing rule, many people chose to relocate to the island. Peasant men were particularly encouraged by Koxinga’s son’s offer of land⁴ in exchange for the promise of military service. Many Ming loyalists and government officials also moved to the Kingdom of Tungning. Many more men than women migrated, resulting later in intermarrying with Aboriginal women. This was the second major wave of Han Chinese migration to Pakan.

Eventually, this wave of Han Chinese migration turned into settler colonialism. Even though Koxinga and his heirs later lost to the Qing, some Han Chinese who had migrated with him chose to stay in Pakan. They continued to aggress on Aborigine lands, particularly North towards the Kingdom of Ta-tu. Fertile farmland wrested from Aboriginal peoples were taxed at a lower rate, incentivizing Han Chinese people to claim more land. They also sometimes used intermarriage with Aboriginal women as an excuse to occupy more land. When the Qing loosened restrictions on the island in the 1760s, hundreds of thousands of Han Chinese moved to Pakan, intensifying the colonial relations.

Footnotes