The 19th-Century Camphor War: The Scent the World Craved was Hidden in Indigenous Mountains

30-Second Overview: After the opening of Taiwan's ports in 1860, camphor transformed from a traditional Chinese medicinal ingredient into a global industrial raw material: billiard balls, dentures, motion picture film, and smokeless gunpowder all required it. However, the island's camphor trees grew within Indigenous hunting grounds. In 1868, British warships bombarded Anping Port, forcing the Qing government to abandon its state monopoly on camphor—an event historically known as the Camphor War. The cannonballs targeted a tax bill that had sustained Qing finances for forty years. The true cost was paid in the following four decades: Liu Ming-chuan's aoyong (frontier militia) lines, the Japanese colonial Camphor Monopoly Bureau, and the 1906 decline of the Da-pao tribe's population from over a thousand to just over three hundred. A single line written by Swinton in 1864 has been read for over a century: "The Chinese can only enter the mountainous areas occupied by more docile tribes."

The Equation

February 6, 1864, Tamsui. The British Consul, Swinton, wrote three numbers in his consular report: 6, 16, and 28.

A load of camphor (approximately 60 kg) cost $6 at the source. The price at which the Taiwan Daotai (provincial official) purchased it from producers was $16. When that same load reached Hong Kong, it sold for $2_,[8]¹.

The nearly fivefold difference in price did not leave a single cent in the hands of those harvesting the camphor trees. It fell into "the Daotai's pocket"—Swinton's original wording; he used the term monopolist. In the same report, he added: "The area around Tamsui produces approximately 6,000 loads of camphor annually"¹.

Behind this astronomical figure of 6,000 loads, an entire island was being slowly consumed by a tax bill written in a ledger.

And the problem with that tax bill became a global issue starting in 1860.

Whose Mountains?

"Huge camphor trees capable of yielding camphor are spread across the mountains stretching north and south of Formosa." Swinton wrote in the same piece, "But, as most of these mountains are held by the Aborigines, the Chinese can only enter those mountainous areas which are adjacent to Chinese territory and occupied by more docile tribes."¹

This sentence carries two meanings. One is a geographical fact: in 19th-century Taiwan, the Qing government effectively governed only the western plains and low hills, while the Central Mountain Range and the southern reaches were the "Aboriginal Boundary." The other was a warning: to enter the mountains for timber, one first had to resolve the question of "whose mountains they were."

The Qing solution was bounties. In July 1864, Swinton recorded in Su'ao: originally, "delivering an Aborigine's head" could earn an official 12 silver taels (about £4); by the year he arrived, the bounty had dropped to 4 silver taels (about £1 6s 8d)².

The approach for Han Chinese camphor workers was different. "They would present a gift to the tribal chief to obtain permission to cut the camphor trees," Swinton noted. "They would leave the best parts of the tree to be made into timber, while the remainder was cut into chips."¹

"Gift-giving" is a language of transaction. It presupposes that the mountains have owners. But this language could only sustain an era when camphor was still a rare commodity—once the world began to demand it in mass quantities, gifts turned into cannonballs.

The Iron Pot

The method of distilling camphor, which Swinton witnessed in 1864 and W.A. Pickering witnessed in 1868, was also seen later by investigators from the Japanese Governor-General's Office. It remained almost unchanged for thirty years.

"The chips are boiled in iron pots, with another iron pot inverted on top; the sublimated vapor is the desired result."¹ W.A. Pickering's 1898 memoir describes it more plainly: "The chips were boiled in iron pots, one inverted on another, and the sublimated vapour was the desired result."³

Next, the camphor was packed into large barrels with holes at the bottom to allow the camphor oil to slowly seep out—that oil served as a finished medicine for treating rheumatism³. The solid camphor was then packed into sacks, one load per sack, and transported to the ports.

This primitive mountain operation underpinned the source of a global supply chain. In March 1856, 19-year-old Swinton arrived at Xiangshan Port off the coast of Hsinchu for the first time; the first thing he noticed upon disembarking was "the scent of camphor drifting in the air"⁴. Local residents took him to a "camphor monopolist's firm," where the firm's silver trader told him he was purchasing camphor for "a two-masted sailing ship anchored outside the village, rocking violently in the heavy waves... the captain's name is Cosby"⁴.

That ship was the Florica, a merchant vessel of the American firm W. Smith & Co. In 1856, Xiangshan represented a crack in the Qing monopoly system—smuggled camphor was loaded here, bypassing the Daotai's ledgers, sent to Hong Kong, and then redistributed to Calcutta and London¹⁴.

The existence of these cracks made the 1860 opening of the ports seem late. The task required by the opening of the ports went far beyond mending this crack: the entire wall had to be torn down.

Cannonballs

In 1868, demand for camphor in the American market surged.

"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 later clarified: this was because the American inventor John Wesley Hyatt was experimenting with using camphor to create a new material called celluloid, which could be used for billiard balls, dentures, piano keys—and later, motion picture film⁶.

W.A. Pickering (who referred to himself as "Bi Qilin"), the representative of the British firm Elles & Co. stationed in Anping, received instructions from their Xiamen headquarters: enter the camphor trade. They established warehouses in Wuchi (now Taichung Port; written as Go-ch'e in Pickering's original text) and partnered with the local Tsai clan for procurement⁵.

The Daotai refused to let go. From the spring of 1868, incidents occurred one after another. In March (some sources say July⁷), J.D. Hardie, manager of the British firm Tait & Co., was assaulted by Qing officials while traveling from Takao to Tainan. Subsequently, "our camphor that was ready for shipment was plundered to the value of 6,000 dollars" during ethnic clashes involving Pickering's acquisitions in Wuchi⁵. When Pickering went to investigate, Tainan Qing officials refused to sign transit permits; he traveled by sea to Wuchi, only to find the warehouses under siege by the Chen clan—the Tsai clan was a partner of Elles & Co., and the Chen clan had been privately armed by the Daotai to oppose them⁵.

"Our seven-shot rifles and two naval guns," Pickering later wrote in his memoir, "successfully repelled the enemy for a moment"⁵.

In May, Charles Le Gendre, the American Consul in Xiamen, arrived in Takao via the warship Arustu from Xiamen, inviting John Gibson, the British Consul in Anping, and the Customs Superintendent to lodge a protest with Liang Yuan-gui, the Qing military commander of Taiwan⁷.

Negotiations were futile. On November 20, 1868, the British warships HMS Bustard and HMS Algerine arrived at Anping⁸. At 4:00 PM on the 25th, HMS Algerine fired seven cannon shells at the Anping Battery. That night, British troops landed; Jiang Guo-zhen, a deputy of the Qing naval command stationed there, committed suicide by swallowing medicine⁷⁸. Anping remained in British hands for five days.

On November 29, both parties signed the "Camphor Treaty": abolishing the state monopoly on camphor, dismissing the officials of Lukang and Fengshan, paying an indemnity of over 17,000 silver dollars, and recognizing the freedom of foreign missionaries⁷. Tainan gentry, coordinated by Huang Jing-chi, raised 40,000 silver dollars as a security deposit⁷.

The British suffered zero deaths; the Qing forces suffered 11 deaths and 6 injuries⁸.

After the Treaty

The 1868 bombardment seemed like an end, but it was actually merely a transition.

Two months after the bombardment, Gibson was removed from his post by the newly appointed British government—London believed he had exceeded his authority by using force⁷⁸. Pickering returned to Tainan and continued his camphor business. In the 17 years between the Camphor Treaty and the Qing establishment of Taiwan as a province 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 simply moved. In 1886, Taiwan's first Governor, Liu Ming-chuan, implemented a second camphor monopoly, establishing the "Camphor Bureau" as the monopoly agency, which operated until 1890⁹. The public justification was to increase provincial revenue; the actual action was to reorganize the massive profits previously held by the Daotai into a modernized state-run system.

Accompanying this system was the policy of "opening the mountains and pacifying the aborigines" (kaishan fufan). Between 1886 and 1892, Liu Ming-chuan launched military operations against the Atayal Daguquan groups (present-day Fuxing District, Taoyuan); this is historically known as the Daguquan Campaign¹⁰. Telephone lines, landmines, aoyong lines—the technology had upgraded. Only then could camphor workers venture deeper into the mountains.

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

By its peak in the early 20th century, this proportion is estimated to have approached 70%¹². Billiard balls, dentures, motion picture film, and the plasticizers for smokeless gunpowder⁶—more than half of the world's industrial camphor came from this island. The cost was the bloodshed in those mountains, which Swinton had already written about in 1864.

The Aoyong Lines

After the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895, Taiwan changed rulers, but the logic of camphor remained unchanged.

On June 17, 1899, the Governor-General's Office promulgated the "Law for the Monopoly of Crude Camphor and Camphor Oil"¹³. Gotō Shinpei's plan was to complete what Liu Ming-chuan had started—to bring all camphor production, transport, and export under state control. In 1901, the Governor-General's Office established the Camphor Monopoly Bureau¹⁴.

In June 1900, conflicts erupted between workers and tribes in the territory of the Da-pao (Topa) tribe, adjacent to the Daguquan camphor production areas¹⁵. Wikipedia records the cause as "workers raping tribal women, sparking resistance" (this is a single Chinese source; historical consensus remains to be clarified¹⁵). From 1900 to 1906, the Great Chief of the Da-pao, Wadan Xiecù, led his people in resistance against the Japanese; post-war records indicate the tribe's population plummeted from over a thousand residents to just 25 households¹⁵.

The son of Wadan Xiecù, Lexin Wadan (Chinese name Lin Rui-chang), later served as a provincial assemblyman and was executed by firing squad on April 17, 1954, due to a White Terror case¹⁵.

From the cannonballs at Anping Port in 1868 to the mountains of Da-pao in 1906, it is the same story in different chapters. The world wanted camphor; the camphor was in the mountains; the mountains were inhabited. To get the camphor, one had to move the people. The methods escalated from gifts and bounties to treaties, then to aoyong lines, landmines, and monopoly bureaus.

"The Chinese can only enter the mountainous areas occupied by more docile tribes"—when Swinton wrote this in 1864, it was a geographical observation. Looking back from 1906, it was no longer so.

The Vanishing Scent

The most ironic epilogue to this story is that camphor itself disappeared.

In 1919, Taiwan's camphor production was 1,037 metric tons; by 1921, it had dropped to only 589 metric tons¹⁶. The camphor trees in the mountains remained; the cause of the decline was that German chemists learned to synthesize camphor using turpentine. The demand for celluloid continued, but the source of raw materials shifted from the mountains of Taiwan to chemical plants in Germany.

After the post-war period of 1945, Taiwan's camphor industry gradually wound down. In the 1990s, the last camphor workshops ceased operations.

The Taiwanese chemical industry of 2026 (CPC, Formosa Plastics, Chang Chun Group) has no direct corporate lineage to the 19th-century camphor industry. CPC was established in 1946 by taking over Japanese petroleum assets¹⁷; Formosa Plastics was founded by Wang Yung-ching in 1954, focusing on synthetic PVC, which has no connection to camphor¹⁸.

But the context remains. The camphor of the late 19th and early 20th centuries represents the first time in history that Taiwan became a "key supplier of raw materials for the global industrial chain." The PVC of Formosa Plastics in the 1980s, the wafers of TSMC—the same position has been filled with different materials. From natural camphor to synthetic plastics to semiconductors, Taiwan's role in global industry began to take shape during this era.

The cost also began to accumulate during this period. Swinton's 1864 writing that "the Chinese can only enter the mountainous areas occupied by more docile tribes" can still be read this way in 2026: behind every felled camphor tree is someone's mountain. Every renamed tribe, every severed mountain path, and the unrecorded entry on global chemical invoices during the peak of Taiwan's camphor exports—it is all part of the same ledger.

The account remains unsettled.

Further Reading

• Swinton: When a Diplomat Becomes a Naturalist — The provider of primary sources for this article; Swinton's 1864 "Formosa Camphor" is the preamble to the Camphor War.
• Qing Dynasty Rule — How the opening of ports in 1860 restructured Taiwan's political and economic framework.
• Japanese Colonial Period — How the Camphor Monopoly Bureau and "opening the mountains and pacifying the aborigines" continued the forest policies of the late Qing era.
• History of Forest Development in Taiwan — From camphor trees to cypress: the complete context of Taiwan's forest exploitation.
• Alishan: The Empire's Timberland and the High Schooler's Mountain— How forestry exploitation extended to Alishan during the Japanese period and the post-war White Terror.
• National Taiwan Museum of History — A national-level third-tier institution that holds primary sources like Swinton's 1864 "Formosa Camphor" (NMTH collection).
• Taiwan Street Trees — The same camphor trees that were once globally contested raw materials in the mountains are now only required to provide shade on the streets: specifically, those lining the green tunnel in Jiji, Nantou.

References