Penghu County: Twice Rejecting Casinos, the Chrysanthemum Islands Chose More Than Frugality

30-second overview: On September 26, 2009, Penghu held its first gambling referendum. The opposition won 56.44%, by a margin of 3,962 votes: Taiwan's first local gambling referendum in history. Seven years later, on October 15, 2016, Penghu voted again. This time 81.07% opposed, 25 percentage points higher than the first time. In those seven intervening years, nothing happened that suddenly made Penghu wealthy. This outlying island county, with annual rainfall of only around 1,000 millimeters, 108,000 registered residents but only around 80,000 usual residents, and the second-lowest registered population in Taiwan, voted down resort casinos in two consecutive referendums. What this article wants to say is this: the object of those two NO votes was not the casino. It was the right to choose "what Penghu should become."

At four in the morning, no one is on Magong's Zhongyang Street.

Zhongyang Street is one of the oldest surviving Han Chinese streets in Taiwan.¹ At its northern end, the "Four-Eyed Well" is said to have been a communal water source since the Ming period; it is now a county-designated historic site.² Walk another 200 meters south and you reach Taiwan's First Mazu Temple, Kaitai Tianhou Temple. In 1919, the eighth year of the Taisho era, temple staff uncovered a granite stele during repairs. It bore nine Chinese characters: "Shen Yourong ordered the red-haired barbarian Wybrand and others to withdraw."³ The stele dates to the thirty-second year of Wanli: 1604 CE.

At four in the morning, the temple gates are closed, and the stele sits inside a glass case in the Qingfeng Pavilion cultural relics hall. Penghu sleeps. Tourists will not arrive until tomorrow's 7:30 flight. The winter northeast monsoon blows from the northwest across the old street's coral-stone walls and into the alleys. For two-thirds of every year, Penghu is wind like this.

This 141-square-kilometer archipelago was the first place in Taiwan that European powers set their eyes on during these four centuries. The Portuguese called it the Pescadores, the Fishermen Islands, in the sixteenth century. The Dutch came first in 1604, and a second time in 1622. The French came in 1885. The Japanese landed here in 1895 to take over all of Taiwan. Every time, Penghu was the entrance. Taiwan proper was always the one that came later.

The 1604 Stele: Shen Yourong Orders Wybrand to Withdraw

Kaitai Tianhou Temple, 2014. Photo: Outlookxp via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The founding date of Tianhou Temple is disputed. The Penghu cultural history website penghu.info summarizes it this way: "There has never been a settled conclusion as to when it was founded. What can be confirmed, however, is that it already existed in the thirty-second year of Wanli in the Ming dynasty (1604)."⁴ Scholars have proposed five dates: 1563, 1592, 1597, 1604, and 1622. Only 1604 has material evidence, namely the Shen Yourong stele.

What happened in 1604?

That year, Dutch East India Company commander Wybrand van Warwijck led two ships into Penghu and sent men to Fujian to request trade. The Ming court sent the military officer Shen Yourong with fifty warships to negotiate. Wybrand weighed the commercial prospects against the balance of military force and withdrew from Penghu on December 15, 1604.⁵ There was no battle. A stone stele recorded the event, with an inscription written by Ming officials of the time. Three hundred and fifteen years later, it was dug out from beneath the temple's foundation. In March 2022, the Ministry of Culture designated the stele a National Treasure.⁶

📝 Curator's note: When junior high school textbooks introduce Taiwan's early history, they usually begin with the Dutch building Fort Zeelandia in Tainan in 1624. But 1624 was the Dutch "Plan B": the place they originally wanted to occupy was Penghu. When they came the second time in 1622, they had already built a fortress at Fengguiwei, called the "Dutch Fortress at Fengguiwei, Penghu" (today's Snakehead Hill at Fengguiwei in Magong, where remains still survive). In 1624, after the Ming court reinforced Penghu, the Dutch were forced to withdraw to Tainan. The Dutch era on Taiwan proper began only after Penghu drove them there. The 1604 Shen Yourong stele is the first-round record of this twenty-year contest. In Dutch eyes, Penghu was "the island we want to occupy"; Taiwan proper was "the place we have to go because we cannot hold Penghu."

The stele was uncovered in 1919. The Japanese had already ruled Taiwan for 24 years. In 1920, the ninth year of Taisho, local administrative reforms were implemented: "Makeng was renamed Magong, a name still used today. The two characters 'Magong' were the Japanese abbreviation of 'Makeng.'"⁷ The same temple changed names three times across three centuries: Makeng Temple, Tianfei Temple, Tianhou Temple. The stele had been buried under the foundation from the moment the temple was built. It waited until 1919 to be found.

Basalt Houses, Basalt Weirs

Columnar basalt on Tongpan Island, 2008-07-12. Photo: Carrie Kellenberger / globetrotter via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

The Penghu County Cultural Affairs Bureau produced an online teaching resource called "A Wonder of the World: Penghu's Basalt." Its first paragraph says the basalt "erupted from fissures in the earth's surface through several discontinuous eruptions around 17.4 to 8.2 million years ago."⁸

The oldest basalt is on Wang'an Island, from an eruption around 17.4 million years ago. The youngest is on Dongyupingyu, 8.2 million years old. For more than nine million years in between, magma kept surging out of submarine fissures, cooling, contracting, and cracking into pentagonal or hexagonal columnar joints. That is how the ninety islands were piled up.

Only one of the ninety is an exception. The Penghu County Government's geology page says: "The geology of the Penghu Islands was produced by Pleistocene volcanism. Except for Huayu, which consists of andesitic igneous rock, most are basaltic igneous rock."⁹ Huayu is the westernmost point. Its geology is older andesite, and the island has nearly a hundred native plant species, hence the name "Flower Islet." Among eighty-nine black-stone islands, one older gray-white island is hidden.

Basalt is Penghu's building material. Traditional settlements built walls by mixing basalt with coral stone, locally called laogu stone, meaning calcified coral reef. The Erkan Settlement in Xiyu Township was built this way. The Chen family old residence was designated a Grade Three Historic Site in 1988, now a county-designated historic site, and was Taiwan's first traditional settlement preservation area.¹⁰ Thick stone slabs press down on the roofs, for the northeast monsoon. Penghu receives only around 1,000 millimeters of rain a year, among the lowest bands on Taiwan's western coast, but the wind is strong. Every year from October to March, the northeast monsoon lasts half a year; without added weight, roof tiles would be lifted away.¹¹

Roof in the Erkan Settlement, 2011-07-09. Photo: Perryn1258 via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Things grow inside walls. Penghu's "vegetable gardens," called caizhai, are the solution to winter farming. The Wikipedia entry on Penghu caizhai writes: "Penghu's 'caizhai,' also called 'zhai-nei,' are refined agricultural plots enclosed on four sides by stone walls to resist the powerful northeast monsoon, allowing delicate crops to grow successfully in winter. ... The northern wall is the highest, around 1.6 to 2.5 meters. ... The stone walls are usually built from local materials such as coral stone or basalt."¹² From the air, hundreds of caizhai connected together look like honeycombs. In winter, outside is the wind blowing in from Houmen Channel. Inside the walls are cauliflower, cabbage, ginger, and sweet potatoes.

The same stones also go into the sea. "There are fewer than 600 stone weirs in the world; Penghu County has more than 574 existing stone weirs, including at least 109 around Jibei Island, the highest density in the world."¹³ Fishers pile basalt and coral reef into curved walls in the intertidal zone. At high tide, fish swim in; at low tide, they are enclosed inside. The Taiwan Prefecture Gazetteer of 1696, the thirty-fifth year of Kangxi in the Qing dynasty, already recorded Penghu's stone weirs. As late as the 1950s, stone-weir catch still accounted for nearly 80% of the county's total fishery output value.¹⁴ Today most stone weirs remain only as cultural landscapes, but beneath the sea cliff north of Dingxi in Donghu Village, Qimei Township, there is still the most complete Twin-Heart Stone Weir, rebuilt in 1937 by Master Bala from Jibei.¹⁵

✦ "There are fewer than 600 stone weirs in the world; Penghu County has more than 574 existing stone weirs, including at least 109 around Jibei Island, the highest density in the world." (Ministry of Culture, Taiwan World Heritage Potential Site: Penghu Stone Weir Group¹³)

The Ministry of Culture lists both Penghu Basalt and the Penghu Stone Weir Group as Taiwan World Heritage potential sites. But Taiwan is not a member of UNESCO. Even if the list exists, it cannot be submitted. This is a list Taiwan writes for itself.

Twin-Heart Stone Weir cultural landscape in Qimei, 2017-09-24. Photo: Chang Ya-lun via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Fengguiwei in 1622, the Dutch Springboard

Return to the second round after 1604.

At dawn on July 1, 1622, the Dutch commander Cornelis Reijersen led twelve ships and 1,024 soldiers into Makeng Harbor. The Penghu County Government's historical overview writes: "On the morning of July 1 in the second year of Tianqi under Emperor Xizong of the Ming (1622 CE), the Dutch commander Reijersen led 12 ships and 1,024 soldiers into Makeng Harbor."¹⁶ This time the Dutch had learned. They did not request trade. They directly built a fortress at Fengguiwei, today's Snakehead Hill at the southernmost tip of Magong's Fenggui Peninsula.

The Ming court reacted slowly. Two years later, in 1624, Nan Juyi took office as Fujian governor and reinforced Penghu, surrounding the Dutch. The Dutch could not hold out and negotiated with the Ming court. The Wikipedia entry on the Dutch period says: "The Dutch and the Great Ming reached an agreement: the Dutch agreed to destroy the fortress and batteries at Fengguiwei and transfer to Taiwan, which was not part of the Great Ming realm, while the Great Ming would not interfere with the Dutch occupation of Taiwan. On August 26, 1624, Dutch forces withdrew from Penghu and moved to Taiwan."¹⁷

This Dutch force that withdrew from Penghu's Fengguiwei later built Fort Zeelandia at Tayouan, in today's Anping, Tainan. The forty-year Dutch era on Taiwan proper began from there.

After that, this island kept changing hands between Eurasian sea powers. In 1683, Shi Lang attacked Penghu, and Penghu entered Qing rule together with Taiwan proper; Qing rule lasted 212 years, from 1684 to 1895. On March 29, 1885, the Sino-French War reached Penghu, when French commander Amédée Courbet led his fleet to occupy the islands. Another battle on Taiwan proper was still under way: that same year, French forces landed at Keelung but were driven back by Liu Mingchuan and epidemics together.¹⁸ Things in Penghu were no better. After French forces occupied Penghu, cholera broke out. Courbet himself suffered heatstroke while attending a subordinate's funeral on June 8, 1885, and died of illness on June 11 aboard the flagship Bayard in Makung Harbor.¹⁹ That same month, the Sino-French New Treaty was signed in Tianjin, and French forces withdrew.

Ten years later, in 1895, the Japanese came. From where? Penghu. The Penghu County Government's historical overview says: "On April 17 in the twenty-first year of Guangxu (1895 CE), Li Hongzhang and Itō Hirobumi signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki, formally ceding Taiwan and Penghu to Japan."²⁰ But in fact, Japanese forces had already occupied Penghu from March 23 to 25, three weeks before the treaty was signed. On March 26, 1895, Japan established the "Penghu Islands Administrative Office" in Magong, with Rear Admiral Tanaka Tsunatsune as its first director. Only after the treaty was signed on April 17 did Japan proceed to land on Taiwan proper on June 17.

Strategically, the logic was always the same: take Penghu first, then enter Taiwan. The Dutch tried to do this in 1622 and failed. The Japanese did it in 1895.

The Cross-Sea Bridge Stitched Six Townships into One Penghu

The Penghu Great Bridge crossing Houmen Channel, 2015-06-30. Photo: Wing1990hk via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

In 1965, the Penghu County Government began building the cross-sea bridge. The Penghu National Scenic Area official website records it this way: "Construction of the cross-sea bridge began in 1965, and it was completed and opened to traffic in 1970."²¹ The first-generation bridge was 2,478 meters long and was then the longest deep-sea bridge in Southeast Asia.

The bridge connects Houmen Channel between Baisha and Xiyu townships, where the water is deep and the currents are fast. Before that, Xiyu could only be reached by boat. After the bridge was built, the four townships and city of Magong, Huxi, Baisha, and Xiyu were connected by road. The remaining two townships, Wang'an and Qimei, are still in the middle of the South Sea and require a boat or plane.

In 1984, the bridge structure began to suffer severe corrosion because it sat every day in saltwater and strong wind. In 1996, the second-generation bridge was completed and opened to traffic: "The Penghu Great Bridge has a total length of 2,494 meters."²² It has two lanes and a 13-meter-wide deck. For the 26 years from 1996 until the Kinmen Bridge opened in 2022, it was Taiwan's longest cross-sea bridge.

✦ The physical meaning of the Cross-Sea Bridge is not "connecting two places." It is "stitching six townships and a city into one Penghu."

What it stitched together was not only roads. Before 1970, if you asked someone from Penghu "Where are you from?", he might say, "I am from Xiyu," or "I am from Wang'an." After 1970, the self-identity of "Penghu person" finally had a concrete physical vessel. The townships and city remained, but the people inside them shared the same identity.

The Flight That Broke Apart in 2002, the First Fireworks Festival in 2003

At 3:28 p.m. on May 25, 2002, China Airlines Flight 611 took off from Chiang Kai-shek International Airport, bound for Hong Kong's Kai Tak Airport. Fifteen minutes later, it broke apart in midair and crashed 23 nautical miles northeast of Magong, Penghu, at an altitude of 34,900 feet. All 225 people aboard died. The accident investigation ultimately pointed to improper repair after a tailstrike in the 1980s.²³

Penghu's summer tourism industry was devastated. The next year, on the lunar Qixi Festival, China Airlines organized an event called "Ten Million Charms on the Chrysanthemum Islands" as compensation for the impact the air disaster had brought to Penghu tourism. In 2003, the Penghu County Government took over and held the first Penghu Ocean Fireworks Festival. The Wikipedia entry on the Penghu Fireworks Festival says: "To compensate for the tourism impact this air disaster brought to Penghu, China Airlines held the 'Ten Million Charms on the Chrysanthemum Islands' event on the lunar Qixi Festival that year. The following year (2003), the county government again held the first 2003 Penghu Ocean Fireworks Festival."²⁴

From that year onward, Penghu had a signature summer event. In 2019, the Fireworks Festival held 22 shows and drew around 420,000 tourist visits, the highest in its history. COVID knocked that back to zero. It restarted in 2022, when tourism revenue during the festival exceeded NT$322 million.

But the Fireworks Festival has a structural problem: it only takes place in summer. Penghu tourism operators told The Reporter: "Working in summer and resting in winter is the common pattern among Penghu tourism operators."²⁵ Every year, April to September is peak season, and October to March is off-season. In the off-season, flights are easily canceled because of the northeast monsoon, and most restaurants and homestays sit empty. The Reporter once wrote an even more precise sentence: "Every other year, another homestay operator changes hands."

Outsiders see Penghu as blue skies and turquoise seas in summer. Penghu people see Penghu this way: summer is when they work; winter is the real Penghu. In winter, the caizhai are still growing crops. In winter, the northeast monsoon keeps blowing. On winter nights, Magong's Zhongyang Street has no tourists, only local people. Penghu's two kinds of time are stacked on those 141 square kilometers.

19 Islands, 80,000 People, 20 People Left on Dongjiyu

In 2005, the Penghu County Government commissioned National Kaohsiung University of Applied Sciences to conduct a full-island survey, confirming the total number of islands at 90. Before that, the county had continued using the Japanese-period survey count of 64. The ninety islands are distributed this way: 7 in Magong City, 10 in Huxi Township, 37 in Baisha Township, 3 in Xiyu Township, 32 in Wang'an Township, and 1 in Qimei Township.²⁶

Of the ninety islands, only 19 are inhabited. The Penghu National Scenic Area children's list names them as: Penghu Main Island, Tongpanyu, Hujingyu, Mudouyu, Jibeiyu, Niaoyu, Yuanbeiyu, Baisha Island, Dacangyu, Zhongtun Island, Yuweng Island, Xiaomenyu, Jiangjunaoyu, Wang'an Island, Huayu, Xiyupingyu, Dongyupingyu, Dongjiyu, and Qimeiyu.²⁷ The other seventy-one are uninhabited. Their total area adds up to only 3.02 square kilometers, smaller than one neighborhood in Magong City.

Dongjiyu is a case in point. It is the largest of the Southern Four Islands. A KKday blog records: "Dongjiyu is the largest island among the Southern Four Islands. At its peak, it once had more than 3,000 residents and was called 'Little Shanghai.' Today, only around 10 to 20 people live there."²⁸ Why did 3,000 become 20? Before the war, Dongjiyu was a relay point between Taiwan proper and Xiamen. Boat crews, traders, and tavern operators all gathered on this island. After the war, the Taiwan Strait was cut off, trade routes broke, the island lost its economic base, and people moved away in batches.

In 2014, Penghu South Four Islands National Park was formally announced. Its Wikipedia entry says: "Penghu South Four Islands National Park is the Republic of China's ninth national park and also the second marine-type national park in Taiwan's history. ... It was officially announced and implemented on June 8, 2014."²⁹ The area includes Dongji, Xiji, Dongyuping, and Xiyuping islands and the surrounding 35,843.62 hectares of sea. The Marine National Park Headquarters specifically records that Xiyupingyu has "coral coverage of more than 50%, the highest among the Southern Four Islands."³⁰ When people have all but left, the coral instead grows back.

The population structure of Penghu County as a whole is moving in the same direction. At the end of 2023, registered population was 108,000, the second-lowest in Taiwan. But the usual resident population in the 2020 census was only 82,000, 77% of the registered population. The aging index was around 194%; people aged 65 and above accounted for 18.97%, while those under 15 were only 9.76%. Magong City concentrated 60% of the population, around 64,000 people, while Qimei Township had only 3,937.³¹

The fisheries have also shrunk. On April 20, 2024, the Central News Agency reported: "Over the past 20 years, fish catch has declined by three-quarters, and annual output value has fallen from NT$4 billion to NT$2 billion."³² The causes are climate change, overfishing, and degradation of coral habitats. Aquaculture, including cobia and grouper cage farming, now produces around NT$1.53 billion a year and sustains two-thirds of total fishery output value. Nearshore catch has shrunk to only NT$730 million. In the 1950s, Penghu's stone weirs once contributed 80% of the fish catch. Today, they mostly function as cultural landscapes.

Wang'an Township's green sea turtles illustrate the same thing. Established in 1995, the "Penghu County Wang'an Island Green Sea Turtle Nesting Habitat Protected Area" is Taiwan's only remaining relatively stable green sea turtle nesting site. But the conservation situation is severe: the number of nesting female turtles has declined year by year from a peak of 19. In 2014, only one female turtle came ashore to lay eggs. In 2022, the number rebounded to 3 turtles laying 6 nests of eggs; in May 2024, the first female turtle of the year came ashore.³³ After thirty years of conservation, the numbers still fluctuate in the single digits.

81.07%: The Second Time Penghu Said NO

Return to the opening.

On September 26, 2009, Taiwan held its first local gambling referendum. The question: "Should Penghu establish an international tourist resort area with an attached tourist casino?" The result:

• Yes: 13,397 votes (43.56%)
• No: 17,359 votes (56.44%)
• Turnout: 42.16%
• No side led by 3,962 votes³⁴

This was the second local referendum after the Referendum Act passed. The law was designed so that casino legalization first required a local referendum. Penghu was chosen because it met the conditions: an outlying island, small population, tourism-oriented economy, and available land. Consortiums placed their bets. After the votes were counted, Shih Chao-hwei, the Buddhist scholar who convened the Penghu Anti-Gambling Alliance, said a sentence still quoted today: "The little shrimp defeated the big consortiums. Penghu people used their ballots to save Penghu, and also to save Taiwan."³⁵

Tourism actually rose over the next two years. The Reporter later tracked the data: "In the two years after Penghu's 2009 anti-gambling referendum, by 2011, Penghu's tourist visits had increased by 15%."²⁵ Without casinos, tourism still grew. But this frame is too thin. Penghu people did not actually live by the narrative that "the referendum brought tourism growth."

Seven years later, on October 15, 2016, Penghu voted again. The same question, different numbers:

• Yes: 6,210 votes (18.93%)
• No: 26,598 votes (81.07%)
• No township or city had a yes vote above 31%³⁶

What happened in those seven years? Not much. Penghu did not get rich. It did not solve the winter off-season problem. It did not solve youth outmigration. It did not solve the contraction of the fisheries. Penghu people simply cast 25 percentage points more opposition votes and said NO a second time.

📝 Curator's note: The common online narrative is that "Penghu people did not want casinos because they feared public security problems." But that explanation reverses cause and effect. The real core of Penghu's anti-gambling stance is hidden in Shih Chao-hwei's 2009 sentence: "Penghu people used their ballots to save Penghu." The subtext of the word "save" is that Penghu was about to be turned into something else, and Penghu people themselves chose not to become that thing. An airport service worker told The Reporter: "That is all a money game played by consortiums. It has no real substantive help for us in Penghu at all."³⁷ A local specialty-products operator put it more concretely: "Casinos emphasize one-stop eating, drinking, and entertainment all inside the casino. The 'tourists' who come to the casino are enclosed within the casino by its facilities and services. Who will still come out to the streets to browse and walk around? We simply would not earn the money after casinos are established."³⁸ The object of those two NO votes was not the casino. It was the right to decide "who defines Penghu." When people outside have already imagined what you should become, you say no. Even if you cannot yet see what the next step should be, you still first say no.

CommonWealth Magazine interviewed several second-generation Penghu returnees. What they were doing was in-depth travel, ecotourism, and environmentally friendly tourism: after rejecting the casino's imagination of tourism, they had to regrow something else in the blank space. One of the most frequently quoted lines is: "Pursuing in-depth travel and environmental friendliness is the value they identify with."³⁹

In another in-depth interview in The Reporter, Liu Yi-yang of the Penghu Youth Front said something closer to the core: "Actually, every Penghu child is searching for a way to come home."⁴⁰ Every child who leaves Penghu to study or work on Taiwan proper carries in their mind a version of what Penghu should grow into. The people who vote are the cumulative decision of all those versions.

Winter Caizhai, the Northeast Monsoon Blowing Outside

Return to the opening scene.

Magong's Zhongyang Street at four in the morning. There is water in the Four-Eyed Well, though it is no longer everyday drinking water. The gates of Kaitai Tianhou Temple are closed, and the 1604 Shen Yourong stele sits quietly in a glass case in Qingfeng Pavilion. The northeast monsoon blows in from the northwest, into the alleys, across walls built of coral stone and basalt.

Two hundred meters away, by the sea at Guanyinting, the summer Fireworks Festival stage sits empty in winter. Twelve kilometers away, on Snakehead Hill at Fengguiwei, only remains are left of the fortress the Dutch built in 1622. Thirty kilometers away, there are no cars on the Baisha Cross-Sea Bridge. Farther on is Jibeiyu, where 109 stone weirs reveal heart shapes and arcs at low tide. Farther on is Qimeiyu, where the two hearts of the Twin-Heart Stone Weir rise clearly on the sea surface when the tide recedes.

Farther south are the Southern Four Islands. On Dongjiyu, 10 to 20 people are asleep. The coral of Xiyupingyu is still growing. Across the entire 35,843 hectares of marine national park, there are few people and much coral.

Every caizhai stone wall was built later than that Dutch fortress. Every caizhai has also been used longer than that Dutch fortress.

Outside, the northeast monsoon is blowing. Penghu people learn this as children: you cannot stop the wind, but you can decide what kind of walls you will grow crops inside. In 1604, Shen Yourong made the Dutch withdraw. In 1622, the Dutch moved to Tainan. In 1885, the French commander died in Makung Harbor. In 1895, the Japanese began taking over Taiwan from Penghu. In 2002, China Airlines 611 crashed; in 2003, the Fireworks Festival began. In 2009, 56% opposed casinos; in 2016, 81% opposed. Penghu has always been selected by others as an entrance, a springboard, a bargaining chip, a resort zone, a casino backup plan. Every time, Penghu has been saying: what you think does not count. I think for myself.

Winter. Inside the walls of one caizhai, a cauliflower grows slowly in the lee. Outside are Houmen Channel, 17.4-million-year-old volcanic rock, nineteen inhabited islands and seventy-one uninhabited islands, 80,000 usual residents, and two referendums.

It takes only 50 minutes to fly from Taipei to Magong. Next time you go to Penghu, do not go only in summer. Go again in winter. Look at those stone walls. Look at what grows inside them.

Further Reading

• Penghu Folk Culture — Complete local folk records of Kaitai Tianhou Temple, Mazu belief, Erkan praise songs, and king-boat rituals
• Outlying Islands and Ocean Culture — The Taiwanese outlying-island ocean culture system formed by Penghu, Kinmen, Matsu, Lanyu, and Green Island
• Taiwan's Island Geography and Formation — The geological differences between the Penghu basalt archipelago and Taiwan proper's mountain-building movement
• Legends of Mazu and Baosheng Dadi — The cross-sea origins of Mazu belief at the site of Kaitai Tianhou Temple
• Taiwan's Administrative Divisions — The local administrative reform context for Makeng's 1920 renaming as Magong
• Sino-French War — A full view of the Taiwan-Penghu theater in 1885: French occupation of Penghu, Courbet's death in Makung Harbor, and the Sino-French New Treaty
• The Dutch, Spanish, and Ming-Zheng Period — The crucial 1622-1624 turn from the Dutch withdrawal from Penghu's Fengguiwei to Tayouan in Tainan

Image Sources

This article uses 5 Wikimedia Commons licensed images:

• Hero (frontmatter): Bridge across the Houmen Channel (CC BY-SA 3.0) — Panorama of the Penghu Great Bridge, photo: Wing1990hk, 2015-06-30.
• Scene § The 1604 Stele: Penghu Tianhou Temple 02 (CC BY-SA 4.0) — In front of Kaitai Tianhou Temple, photo: Outlookxp.
• Scene § Basalt Columns: Columnar Igneous Rocks on Tongpan island in Taiwan (CC BY 2.0) — Columnar basalt on Tongpan Island, photo: Carrie Kellenberger, 2008-07-12.
• Scene § Erkan Roof: 二崁聚落古厝的屋頂 (CC BY-SA 4.0) — Red-tile roof pressed down by stone slabs in the Erkan Settlement, photo: Perryn1258, 2011-07-09.
• Scene § Twin-Heart Stone Weir: 七美雙心石滬文化景觀 (CC BY-SA 4.0) — Aerial photograph of Qimei's Twin-Heart Stone Weir, photo: Chang Ya-lun, 2017-09-24.

Further video:

• PTS Our Island Penghu Basalt Conservation Area Series — Geological documentaries on the 1992 Penghu Basalt Nature Reserve and the 2008 Penghu South Sea Basalt Nature Reserve.
• PTS Our Island Wang'an Green Sea Turtle Conservation Special — Field observations of the Wang'an Island Green Sea Turtle Nesting Habitat Protected Area established in 1995.

References