How to Read the Taiwan Map: Four Hundred Years from Sweet Potato to Satellite

30-second overview: Taiwan's maps are not merely geography — they are four hundred years of evidence for how different people have "seen" this island. In 1554, the Portuguese drew a blurry "I. Fremosa." In 1714, the Kangxi Emperor sent Jesuits to survey the island, but they drew only the western half — the east belonged to indigenous peoples, beyond the emperor's reach, so it was not drawn. During the Japanese colonial period, triangulation produced the most accurate topographic maps ever made of the full island. Today, the Taiwan you see on Google Maps in China looks different from the one you see in Taipei. Maps have never only represented terrain — they represent power.

In 1554, Lopo Homem, royal cartographer to the King of Portugal, drew an island off the southeastern coast of China on a world map assembled from eight sheets of sheepskin, and labeled it "I. Fremosa."¹ He had never been there. Ship fleets had glimpsed it from the sea on voyages to Japan. The shape he drew was neither sweet potato nor whale, but something more like an unresolved presence.

Taiwan historian Tsao Yung-ho (曹永和) later confirmed through research that this was the first time Taiwan had appeared on any world map.¹ That year, the island's indigenous inhabitants had no idea they had been drawn into a European sheepskin.

A map is a way of seeing. Who is drawing it, for whom, and what is deliberately left out says more than what is included.

One Island, Two Names, Five Hundred Years of Shape

What does Taiwan look like? Ask a Taiwanese person, and most will say: a sweet potato (番薯, bān-tsî in Taiwanese).²

The sweet potato metaphor is not only about shape. Early immigrants crossed the treacherous Black Water Channel to make a living in Taiwan, and the sweet potato was the easiest crop to survive: it could grow in poor soil, needed little water, and lay underground, safe from typhoons. Taiwanese people called themselves "sweet potato folk" (番薯仔), with an implicit meaning: we are as tough as sweet potatoes.²

But the sweet potato self-image actually appeared relatively late. Historian Hsu Hsueh-chi has pointed out that "sweet potato folk" as a collective self-designation appeared roughly during the Japanese colonial period — Taiwanese people working in other territories under Japanese rule used the term to distinguish themselves from locals.²

The older image is the whale. Classical Chinese writers called Taiwan "Kun Island" (鯤島). Kun is the enormous fish in the Zhuangzi, "one knows not how many thousands of li across."³ An advertisement for the National Museum of Taiwan Literature in 2005 read: "A great whale lies across the ocean of East Asia." Indigenous artist Chen Gang-yi painted a flag depicting Taiwan as a whale leaping from the sea.³

The sweet potato is a metaphor for survival. The whale is a metaphor for sovereignty. The same outline, interpreted differently depending on who is looking.

By the numbers, Taiwan's main island stretches 394 kilometers north to south and 144 kilometers at its widest east-to-west, covering 35,808 square kilometers⁴ — roughly the size of the Netherlands, but two-thirds of it is mountains.

The Kangxi Half-Map

In the spring of 1714, three French Jesuits boarded a ship from Xiamen, assigned to survey Taiwan for the Kangxi Emperor.⁵ They carried astronomical observation instruments and triangulation technology — this was part of the "Imperial Atlas" (皇輿全覽圖) project, the first time in Chinese history that the entire empire would be mapped using a longitude-and-latitude coordinate system.⁵

They first surveyed the Penghu Islands, then reached Taiwan Prefecture (present-day Tainan). They traveled through the western plains, hills, and foothills. Then they stopped.

The Taiwan map they finally submitted covered only the western half.⁵ The east was a blank.

Not because they could not draw it. Jesuit Jean-Baptiste Régis knew perfectly well: the Qing Empire's administrative reach extended only to the western plains. The east belonged to indigenous peoples — territory the emperor did not govern, so there was no need to draw it.⁵

This was a map of power, not a map of geography. The blank did not mean "unknown" — it meant "not ours."

This half-map echoed an earlier institution: the Qing implemented a Han-indigenous boundary policy (漢番分界) in Taiwan, using earthen mounds and ditches on the ground to mark a boundary, shown as a red line on maps — the "earth-ox red line" (土牛紅線).⁶ West of the red line was plains land open to Han Chinese cultivation; east of it was indigenous mountain territory. Over time the boundary was pushed further into the mountains again and again, with successive red lines layering over one another on maps, forming a visual record of imperial expansion.⁶

The traces of this red line can still be found along Route 3, the "Third Taiwan Provincial Highway," today.⁷

The Japanese Triangulation Survey

After Japan took possession of Taiwan in 1895, one of the first things it did was survey.⁸

By 1903, the Japanese Army's cartographic division had completed 147 maps at scales of 1:50,000 and 1:20,000, covering the island's entire coastal zone.⁸ By 1909, a comprehensive triangulation network covered all of Taiwan. Aerial photography and photogrammetry were subsequently introduced — techniques that were first tested successfully in Taiwan before being promoted as international mapping standards.⁸

Scholars have assessed: "The surveying carried out during the Japanese colonial period was a critical driver of the development of modern cartography and thematic mapping in Taiwan."⁸

The maps the Japanese drew of Taiwan form a striking contrast with the Kangxi half-map. Not because they were more respectful of the east — quite the opposite: Japan used a militarized "guard line" (隘勇線) system to push step by step into the mountains, systematically incorporating indigenous peoples' territories into the imperial domain.⁹ But this time, they drew the whole thing. The prerequisite for rule is measurement, and the prerequisite for measurement is sight.

The Five Major Landforms: Five Worlds on One Island

Taiwan's geography education divides the main island into five major landforms:¹⁰

Mountains account for roughly 31% of the island. Five mountain ranges run parallel from north to south — from west to east: the Alishan Range, the Yushan Range, the Central Mountain Range, the Xueshan Range, and the Coastal Mountain Range. Yushan (Jade Mountain) stands at 3,952 meters, the highest peak in Northeast Asia. More than two hundred summits above 3,000 meters are crowded onto this island of fewer than 40,000 square kilometers.¹⁰

Hills account for roughly 24%, scattered between the mountains and the plains. The Miaoli Hills and the Chuanan Hills are typical examples.

Plateaus account for roughly 10% — terrain with flat tops and sloping edges. Linkou Plateau, Taoyuan Plateau, and Dadu Plateau each have their own development histories.

Plains account for roughly 24%, concentrated in the west. The Jianan Plain at 4,500 square kilometers is the largest; the Pingtung Plain is next; the Yilan Plain is enclosed by mountains into its own self-contained world. Ninety percent of Taiwan's population lives in the western plains and basins.¹⁰

Basins account for roughly 11%. The Taichung Basin at 380 square kilometers is the largest; the Taipei Basin at 200 square kilometers is the best known; and the Puli Basin cluster is surrounded on all sides by mountains.

Two-thirds mountains, one-third land for nine-tenths of the population. That ratio alone explains many things about Taiwan: why population density in the east is so low, why traffic is so congested in the west, why indigenous peoples mostly live in the mountains.

The Line That Does Not Exist

The most important line on the map of Taiwan is, officially speaking, nonexistent.

In 1955, US Air Force General Benjamin O. Davis Jr. drew a "center line" in the middle of the Taiwan Strait, as a de facto boundary for military aircraft from both sides.¹¹ Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense published the line's coordinates in 2019: from 27°N, 122°E in the north to 23°N, 118°E in the south.¹¹ But China's Foreign Ministry maintains: the strait center line has never existed.

Another invisible line is the Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ). Taiwan's ADIZ was drawn by the US military in 1954, and its range extends even over China's Fujian, Zhejiang, and Jiangxi provinces.¹² In 2013, China declared its own ADIZ, which overlaps with Taiwan's. The ADIZ is not airspace; it is defined by no international treaty and recognized by no international organization — yet aircraft take off because of it every day.¹²

An unsigned line and an undefined zone constitute the most concrete daily reality of this stretch of ocean.

The entire Taiwan Strait sits on the Asian continental shelf, at depths almost never exceeding 150 meters¹³ — from a seabed topography perspective, the water between Taiwan and the Chinese mainland is only a thin covering. Meanwhile, Kinmen is just 1.8 kilometers from China's Dadeng Island¹⁴ and 210 kilometers from Taiwan's main island. Matsu is 9 kilometers from the Chinese coast and 211 kilometers from Taiwan's main island.¹⁵ On a map, these two "outlying islands of Taiwan" are closer to China than to Taiwan itself.

Where You Are Determines What the Map Looks Like

In 2005, Google Maps launched. Taiwan was shown in a color distinct from China; Chinese netizens called for a boycott.¹⁶

Today's Google Maps solution is: display different versions depending on the user's country of residence. The borders you see in Taiwan look different from the borders you see in China. Disputed borders are shown as gray dashed lines — but what counts as "disputed" is itself disputed.¹⁶

"Digital cartography is a form of soft power. Map platforms normalize territorial claims visually, making them appear self-evident. A border drawn solidly and vividly on a map transforms, in the viewer's mind, from 'a disputed claim' into 'an established fact.'"¹⁶

Taiwan's National Land Surveying and Mapping Center (under the Ministry of the Interior) began building the "Taiwan General Electronic Map" in 2007, completing full coverage of Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen, and Matsu in 2011.¹⁷ This is Taiwan's own mapping infrastructure — a quiet assertion of sovereignty.

How Tsao Yung-ho Read Maps

The historian Tsao Yung-ho (曹永和), who spent a lifetime researching Taiwan's ancient maps, proposed the concept of "Taiwan Island History" in 1990: using the island of Taiwan itself as the subject, observing how different cultures interacted on the island across different periods.¹⁸

He was proficient in eight languages: English, Japanese, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, and Classical Dutch¹⁸ — because to read the annotations on those maps, you have to know what language the cartographer spoke.

Another researcher, Wang Chia-hsiang, spent twenty years writing a study of Taiwan in world historical maps, tracking Taiwan's image across different eras in collections at major libraries and museums around the world.¹⁹ His framework was: maps do not only record what Taiwan looks like — they record how the world sees Taiwan.

From Lopo Homem's sheepskin map of 1554 to Google Maps on your phone in 2026, every map of Taiwan is a projection from a particular angle of observation. The sweet potato and the whale see the same island, but the people seeing are different. The blank east of the red line and the dashed line of the air defense identification zone say the same thing: whether something gets drawn on a map has never been about whether it could be drawn.

Further reading:

• Taiwan's Five Major Landforms and Geographic Structure — Geological origins and detailed distribution of the five major landforms
• Taiwan's Tectonic Plates and Seismic Activity — Why Taiwan has so many mountains: the collision between the Philippine Sea Plate and the Eurasian Plate
• The Dutch-Spanish and Koxinga Era — 1624–1683, the age when Europeans first drew detailed maps of Taiwan
• Offshore Islands and Maritime Culture — Kinmen, Matsu, Penghu: the "Taiwan" that is farthest from Taiwan on maps and closest to China

References