The 19th-Century Camphor Wars: The World's Desired Fragrance, Hidden in Indigenous Mountains

30-Second Overview: After Taiwan opened its ports in 1860, camphor transformed from a traditional medicine into a global industrial raw material: billiard balls, false teeth, film stock, and smokeless gunpowder all required it. But every camphor tree on the island grew in indigenous hunting grounds. In 1868, British warships shelled Anping harbor, forcing the Qing court to abandon the camphor monopoly — an event known as the Camphor War. The shells targeted a tax ledger that had sustained Qing finances for forty years. The real price was paid over the following four decades: Liu Ming-chuan's barrier lines (隘勇線), the Japanese colonial camphor monopoly bureau, and the Tapao tribe's (大豹社) population collapsing from over a thousand to around three hundred by 1906. A sentence Swinhoe wrote in 1864 has been read for over a century: "The Chinese can only penetrate the mountains occupied by the more tractable tribes."

The Equation

February 6, 1864. Tamsui. British Consul Robert Swinhoe wrote three numbers in his consular report: 6, 16, 28.

One picul of camphor (approximately 60 kilograms) cost 6 dollars at its source. The Taiwan tao-tai (道台, circuit intendant) purchased it from producers at 16 dollars. That same picul, transported to Hong Kong, sold for 28 dollars¹.

The nearly fivefold markup did not leave a single coin in the hands of those who felled the trees. It fell into "the pocket of the tao-tai" — Swinhoe's exact words; he used the word monopolist. In the same report he added: "The annual produce of camphor in the district of Tamsui amounts to about 6,000 piculs."¹

Behind that astronomical figure of 6,000 piculs, an island was being slowly consumed by a tax ledger written in account books.

And from 1860, that ledger became a world-class problem.

Whose Mountains

"The gigantic camphor trees from which the camphor is obtained are found throughout the mountains running north and south through Formosa." So Swinhoe wrote in the same article, "Formosa Camphor." "But, as the greater part of this range is in the possession of the aborigines, the Chinese can only penetrate to the parts occupied by the more tractable tribes bordering on Chinese territory."¹

This sentence carries two layers. One is geographic fact: the Qing court's actual administrative control in 19th-century Taiwan extended only to the western plains and lower hills; the Central Mountain Range and the south were the "aboriginal boundary" (番界). The other is a prophecy: to enter the mountains to fell trees, the question of "whose mountains" had first to be addressed.

The Qing court's method was bounty payments. In July 1864 at Su'ao, Swinhoe recorded that for "delivering the head of an aboriginal," one could collect 12 silver taels (about 4 pounds) from officials; by the year of his visit, the bounty had fallen to 4 silver taels (about 1 pound 6 shillings 8 pence)².

Han Chinese camphor workers had a different approach. "They make a present to the chief of the tribe for permission to cut the trees," Swinhoe noted, "the best portion of the camphor trees being left for timber, the rest being cut into chips."¹

"Gift-giving" was a transactional language. It presupposed that the mountains had owners. But this language could only hold as long as camphor remained a scarce commodity — once the world began demanding it in quantity, the gifts gave way to cannon fire.

The Iron Pot

The method for distilling camphor — Swinhoe saw it in 1864, William Pickering saw it in 1868, and later Japanese government surveyors saw it too. In thirty years it barely changed.

"The chips are placed in iron pots, and boiled, another iron pot being inverted on the top of them; the sublimated vapour is the desired result."¹ Pickering's 1898 memoir put it more plainly: "The chips were boiled in iron pots, one inverted on another, and the sublimated vapour was the desired result."³

The camphor was then packed into large barrels, with holes at the bottom to allow the camphor oil to slowly seep out — used as a folk medicine for rheumatism³. Solid camphor was bagged in picul-weight sacks and transported to port.

This primitive mountain operation sustained the headwaters of a global supply chain. In March 1856, a 19-year-old Swinhoe arrived for the first time at Xiangshan harbor outside Hsinchu. Stepping off the boat, the first thing he noticed was "the pleasant smell of camphor diffused through the atmosphere."⁴ Local residents took him to "the establishment of a camphor merchant," where the firm's silversmith told him he was purchasing camphor for "a brigantine riding at anchor outside the village amid heavy breakers … the captain's name was Crosby."⁴

That vessel was the American firm Williams & Co.'s merchant ship Frolic. The Xiangshan of 1856 was a crack in the Qing monopoly system — smuggled camphor boarded ships here, bypassing the tao-tai's accounts, transported to Hong Kong, then on to Calcutta and London¹⁴.

The existence of that crack made the 1860 port opening seem overdue. What the opening had to do went far beyond patching this crack: the entire wall needed to come down.

The Shells

In 1868, American demand for camphor surged dramatically.

"There had gradually arisen a great demand for this article in America, and prices had gone up to a great height in consequence," Pickering wrote in his 1898 memoir⁵. Historians would later clarify: this was because American inventor John Wesley Hyatt was experimenting with using camphor to manufacture a new material called celluloid — which could make billiard balls, false teeth, piano keys, and later film stock⁶.

The British firm Elles & Co.'s Anping representative, William Alexander Pickering (who styled himself "Bik Ki-lin" in Chinese), received orders from company headquarters in Amoy: enter the camphor trade. They set up a warehouse at Wuqi (present-day Taichung Port, which Pickering spelled "Go-ch'e" in his original text) and partnered with the local Ts'oa clan to purchase camphor⁵.

The tao-tai refused to let go. From spring 1868 onward, one incident followed another. In March (some sources say July; sources conflict⁷), Tait & Co. manager J.D. Hardie was assaulted by Qing agents while traveling from Takao to Tainan. Subsequently, camphor Pickering had purchased at Wuqi "was plundered to the value of 6,000 dollars in the clan war"⁵. Pickering went to investigate; Tainan Qing officials refused to sign travel papers; he went around by sea to reach Wuqi, only to find the warehouse surrounded by the Tan clan — the Ts'oa clan was Elles & Co.'s partner, and the Tan clan had been privately armed by the tao-tai to oppose the Ts'oa⁵.

"Our seven-shooter rifles and two field guns," Pickering wrote afterward in his memoir, "succeeded in repulsing the enemy for a time."⁵

In May, U.S. Consul at Amoy Charles Le Gendre sailed to Takao aboard the gunboat Aroostook, joining British Consul at Anping John Gibson and the Customs Commissioner to protest before Taiwan Taotai Liang Yuan-gui⁷.

Negotiations failed. On November 20, 1868, HMS Bustard and HMS Algerine arrived at Anping⁸. On the afternoon of November 25, HMS Algerine fired seven shells at the Anping fort. That night British troops landed; the defending Qing naval officer Jiang Guozhen swallowed poison and died⁷⁸. Anping remained in British hands for five days.

On November 29, both sides signed the Camphor Convention: the camphor monopoly was abolished, the Lukang subprefect and Fengshan magistrate were dismissed, an indemnity of over 17,000 silver dollars was paid, and the rights of foreign missionaries were recognized⁷. Tainan gentry members, led by Huang Jingqi, assembled 40,000 silver dollars as a guarantee⁷.

British casualties: zero dead. Qing casualties: 11 dead, 6 wounded⁸.

After the Treaty

The 1868 bombardment looked like an ending, but was actually a transition.

Two months after the shelling, Gibson was removed from his post by the new British government — London judged he had exceeded his authority in using force⁷⁸. Pickering returned to Tainan and continued in the camphor trade. In the seventeen years between the Camphor Convention and Taiwan becoming a province of the Qing empire in 1885, foreign merchants took over camphor exports, and Taiwan's camphor entered the global industrial chain.

But the monopoly did not truly disappear. It merely changed location. In 1886, the first Taiwan Governor Liu Ming-chuan implemented a second camphor monopoly, establishing the "Camphor Bureau" (腦務局) as the monopoly organ, operating until 1890⁹. The stated rationale was opening revenue streams for the treasury; the actual function was to reorganize the profiteering formerly in the tao-tai's hands into a modernized state-run system.

Alongside this system came "opening the mountains and pacifying the savages" (開山撫番). From 1886 to 1892, Liu Ming-chuan launched military campaigns against the Takoham (大嵙崁) Atayal groups of present-day Fuxing District, Taoyuan, known as the Dakekan Campaign¹⁰. Telephone lines, landmines, barrier lines — the technology had upgraded. Camphor workers could now penetrate deeper into the mountains.

From 1891 to 1895, Taiwan's camphor exports accounted for 30 to 66 percent of global supply¹¹.

By the early 20th-century peak, this share was estimated at nearly 70 percent¹². Billiard balls, false teeth, film stock, the plasticizer for smokeless gunpowder⁶ — more than half the world's industrial camphor came from this island. The price paid — which mountains were bleeding — Swinhoe had already written in 1864.

The Barrier Line

After the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895, Taiwan changed rulers, but the logic of camphor did not.

On June 17, 1899, the Government-General promulgated the "Law for the Monopoly of Crude Camphor and Camphor Oil."¹³ Goto Shinpei's calculation: complete what Liu Ming-chuan had left unfinished — bring all camphor production, transport, and export under state control. The Government-General established the Camphor Monopoly Bureau in 1901¹⁴.

In June 1900, conflict broke out between workers and the Tapao tribe (大豹社, Topa) in an area adjacent to the Dakekan camphor production zone¹⁵. The cause recorded in Wikipedia is "workers sexually assaulting tribal women, triggering resistance" (this account comes from a single Chinese-language source; scholarly consensus remains to be clarified¹⁵). From 1900 to 1906, Tapao paramount chief Watan Syat led his people in resistance to Japanese rule; after the fighting, Wikipedia records the tribe's population shrinking from over a thousand residents to just 25 households¹⁵.

Watan Syat's son, Losin Watan (Chinese name Lin Ruichang), later served as a provincial assemblyman and was executed on April 17, 1954 during the White Terror¹⁵.

From the shells at Anping harbor in 1868 to the mountains of Tapao in 1906 is one story told in different episodes. The world wanted camphor; camphor was in the mountains; people lived in the mountains. To obtain camphor, those people had first to be removed. The methods escalated from gifts, bounties, and treaties, all the way to barrier lines, landmines, and monopoly bureaus.

"The Chinese can only penetrate to the parts occupied by the more tractable tribes" — when Swinhoe wrote that sentence in 1864, it was still a geographic observation. Looking back from 1906, it no longer was.

The Fragrance Disappears

The most ironic coda to the story is that camphor itself vanished.

Taiwan's camphor production was 1,037 metric tons in 1919; by 1921 it had fallen to only 589 metric tons¹⁶. The camphor trees were still in the mountains; the cause of the decline was that German chemists had learned to synthesize camphor from turpentine. The celluloid industry's demand continued, but the raw material source shifted from Taiwan's mountains to German chemical factories.

After 1945, Taiwan's camphor industry gradually wound down. In the 1990s, the last camphor workshops went dark.

Taiwan's 2026 chemical industry (CPC Corporation, Formosa Plastics, Chang Chun Petrochemical) has no direct corporate lineage to the 19th-century camphor industry. CPC was founded in 1946, inheriting Japanese petroleum assets¹⁷; Formosa Plastics was founded by Wang Yung-ching in 1954, producing synthetic PVC, with no connection to camphor¹⁸.

But the context is there. Late 19th to early 20th-century camphor was Taiwan's first experience as "a key raw material supplier in the global industrial chain." The PVC from Formosa Plastics in the 1980s, the wafers from TSMC — that same position, filled with different raw materials. From natural camphor to synthetic plastics to semiconductors, Taiwan's role in the global economy began to take shape in this period.

The price also began accumulating in this period. Swinhoe's "the Chinese can only penetrate to the parts occupied by the more tractable tribes," written in 1864, can still be read in 2026 this way: behind every felled camphor tree, whose mountain was it. Every renamed tribe, every severed mountain path, and the ledger item missing from the invoices of the global chemical industry at the peak of Taiwan's camphor export era — it is all the same account.

The account has not been settled.

Further Reading

• Robert Swinhoe: When a Diplomat Became a Naturalist — The primary source provider of this article; "Formosa Camphor" from 1864 is the prehistory of the Camphor War
• Qing Dynasty Rule — How the 1860 port opening restructured Taiwan's political economy
• Japanese Colonial Era — How the Camphor Monopoly Bureau and "pacification campaigns" continued the mountain policies of the late Qing
• Taiwan Forest Development History — From camphor to cypress, the complete context of Taiwan's mountain forest exploitation
• Alishan: The Empire's Timber Station and Uyongu Yatauyungana's Mountain — How timber extraction extended to Japanese-era Alishan and postwar White Terror

References