The Dutch, Spanish, and Ming-Zheng Period

In the summer of 1683, in front of the Prince Ningjing Mansion in Tainan, Qing general Shi Lang erected a stone stele. It stood 279 centimeters tall and 106 centimeters wide, visible to anyone passing by. ¹

The inscription was Shi Lang’s way of recording his own achievements. But between its lines, it reveals something else: the people of Tainan feared his retaliation, and his commanders had occupied civilians’ land and homes. The opening line is even more telling: “Taiwan lies far overseas,” “aboriginal peoples and wandering migrants live intermingled there,” and it “had not belonged to any particular regime.”¹

Shi Lang said this in order to argue that the Qing court should take control of Taiwan. Yet at the same time, he acknowledged that before his arrival, the island had not belonged to China.¹

Sixty years earlier, this island had only just been written systematically into the map of world trade.

30-second overview: In 1624, the Dutch East India Company established a trading post at Tayouan in present-day Tainan, later known as Fort Zeelandia. In 1626, the Spanish entered Keelung and Tamsui. In 1642, the Dutch defeated the Spanish and unified control over Taiwan. In 1662, Koxinga defeated the Dutch governor Frederik Coyett and established the Kingdom of Tungning. In 1683, Shi Lang captured Penghu, and the Zheng regime surrendered. Over these sixty years, four regimes succeeded one another. Taiwan was transformed from a set of autonomous Indigenous societies into an immigrant society dominated by Han Chinese, while also being drawn into the maritime trade networks of East Asia and the wider world.

Formosa First Appears on European Maps

In 1596, a book titled Itinerario was published in Amsterdam. Its author, Jan Huygen van Linschoten (1563-1611), had been stationed in Portuguese Goa in India, where he served as secretary to the archbishop and gained access to Portuguese navigational materials collected in Asia. One map of the East Indies in his book depicts three islands off the coast of Fujian; the northernmost is labeled I. Formosa.²

This was one of the earliest appearances of “Formosa” in European written sources. Around the same period, the Chinese navigational manual Shunfeng Xiangsong recorded “Xiao Liuqiu Jilongtou Mountain” at Taiwan’s northern tip, today Keelung Islet, and “Beigang Shamato Dawan Mountain” at its southern tip, today Maobitou. Both were important landmarks on East Asian sea routes.²

In 1624, after being expelled from Penghu by Ming forces, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) moved to Tayouan in Tainan and built Fort Zeelandia. Two years later, in 1626, the Spanish sailed north from the Philippines, building Fort San Salvador on Heping Island in Keelung and Fort Santo Domingo in Tamsui.³

The two great maritime powers of the seventeenth-century world occupied opposite ends of Taiwan, one in the south and one in the north.

The Dutch 38 Years: Trading Post, Romanization, and Wall Anchors

The Dutch ruled Taiwan for 38 years, from 1624 to 1662. Administratively, the Governor of Taiwan was the highest official, assisted by a council. Toward Indigenous peoples, the Dutch adopted indirect rule: they signed treaties with the leaders of individual villages, recognized their autonomy, and required tribute in return.³

The economic core was entrepot trade. Taiwan served as a relay point connecting China, Japan, Southeast Asia, and Batavia, today Jakarta. The Dutch brought in Han Chinese migrants to cultivate the land and developed export agriculture centered on sugar and rice.

Some traces left by the seventeenth-century Dutch can still be seen today. On the gable walls of old temples and houses in Tainan, one may notice components that Taiwanese call “iron scissors” or “wall locks.” These in fact derive from a seventeenth-century Dutch architectural element, the muuranker, or Dutch wall anchor, still commonly visible today on seventeenth-century buildings in Amsterdam, Utrecht, and Leiden.⁴

Even more striking is the writing system. Dutch missionaries used Romanized spelling to write the languages of Indigenous peoples, specifically the Pingpu peoples of the western plains, and compiled biblical materials for evangelization. This Romanization system was still being used in land contracts between Indigenous peoples and Han settlers 150 years after the Dutch had left Taiwan. One extant contract from 1782 places Romanized Taivoan language beside Chinese characters, 120 years after 1662.⁴

Writing outlived regimes.

The Spanish 16 Years in Northern Taiwan

The Spanish landed in 1626, intending to divide Taiwan with the Dutch and promote Catholic missionary work. But funding was insufficient, and Indigenous resistance was frequent. In 1642, Dutch forces captured their positions, and the Spanish withdrew from Keelung to Manila. Their rule lasted only 16 years.³

Most remains from the Spanish period in northern Taiwan are found around today’s Heping Island in Keelung and Fort San Domingo in Tamsui. In recent years, archaeological work on Heping Island has uncovered seventeenth-century European ceramics, fragments of crosses, and Indigenous ritual objects. It is one of the few sites in Taiwan where material evidence of the Spanish period can be seen.

The Zheng 21 Years: The Kingdom of Tungning

By 1659, the Qing dynasty had consolidated its position on the Chinese mainland. Koxinga, who publicly remained loyal to the Southern Ming and opposed the Qing, turned his attention to Taiwan as a source of supplies and a military base. After nearly a year of fighting, in early 1662, Dutch East India Company Governor of Taiwan Frederik Coyett surrendered, bringing 38 years of Dutch rule to an end.⁵

The Zheng regime established the Kingdom of Tungning in Taiwan. It had three leaders, Koxinga, Zheng Jing, and Zheng Keshuang, and ruled for 21 years. It was the first firmly established Han Chinese regime in Taiwan.⁵

Koxinga described his project as “founding a state and establishing a house.” Tungning’s territory included not only the main island of Taiwan, but also Kinmen, Xiamen, Tongshan, Nan’ao, and other islands along the Fujian and Guangdong coasts. The fertile plains of western Taiwan became military-agricultural colonies for his large army. Under the system of lodging soldiers in agriculture, soldiers were allocated land to cultivate for self-sufficiency. At the center, Chengtian Prefecture administered government affairs; locally, two prefectures, Tianxing and Wannian, were established. Confucian temples were built to promote Confucian education.⁵

An object preserved in the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford testifies to the scale of the Kingdom of Tungning’s international trade. It is a Chinese almanac: The Great Ming Restoration Yongli Datong Calendar (1677). It uses the reign title of the Southern Ming’s last emperor, the Yongli Emperor, and adds the phrase “Restoration,” emphasizing the political claim that Tungning continued the legitimate Ming calendar and order.⁵

Zheng Jing invited the English East India Company to establish a trading post in Taiwan. Following the conventions of Chinese dynasties, he presented a royal calendar to foreigners who came for tributary trade. This calendar of the Zheng dynasty crossed the seas and survives today in the Bodleian Library, catalog number Sinica 88, under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license.⁵

The Kingdom of Tungning also minted its own coins: Yongli Tongbao. These coins were originally minted after the Prince of Gui of the Southern Ming took the throne. After Koxinga occupied Taiwan in 1661, minting continued and the coins circulated in Taiwan. Physical specimens still survive today in the National Museum of Taiwan History, catalog number 2002.012.0011.⁵

The Qing Court’s Choice: Whether to Govern This Island

During the Zheng period, Taiwan repeatedly became the object of rivalry among surrounding powers, including the Dutch East India Company and the Qing state. The Qing made several attempts to attack Taiwan. The person who most strongly advocated an attack, and personally carried it out, was the Zheng regime’s defected general Shi Lang.⁶

In 1683, Shi Lang captured Penghu and Taiwan, and the Zheng regime surrendered to the Qing. But the Qing court immediately began debating whether Taiwan should be formally ruled.

Supporters argued that without actual jurisdiction, Taiwan would become a base for pirates or foreign powers and would eventually become a maritime defense problem.
Opponents argued that Taiwan was a small place, and sending troops and officials to govern it would only add burdens.⁶

There is also a little-discussed episode: after Shi Lang captured Taiwan, he first asked the Dutch whether they wished to rule Taiwan again. Only after the Dutch refused did Shi Lang turn to the Kangxi Emperor and recommend that the Qing court govern Taiwan.⁶

Kangxi’s decision shaped Taiwan’s fate for the next 212 years. From that point onward, the Qing state organized Taiwan as “a small prefecture under Fujian Province” and established an office to administer several counties. Large numbers of Han Chinese migrated to Taiwan, and the foundations of Indigenous societies began to be shaken.

The French Jesuit Joseph-François-Marie-Anne de Moyriac de Mailla came to Taiwan around 1710 under Kangxi’s orders to conduct surveys. The map he drew was later included in the French translation of the Huangyu Quanlantu, or Comprehensive Map of the Imperial Realm. It marked three towns: Zhuluo County seat, Taiwan Prefecture seat, and Fengshan County seat, with the Tropic of Cancer crossing between them.⁶

That map was the first time Taiwan appeared on the shelves of European royalty as “a province under the Chinese Empire.”

Historical Impact

The sixty years of the Dutch, Spanish, and Ming-Zheng period established Taiwan’s character as an immigrant society. Large numbers of Han Chinese moved to Taiwan, and the population grew from about 100,000 in the Dutch period to about 200,000 in the Ming-Zheng period, fundamentally changing the island’s demographic structure.⁵

At the institutional level, Dutch administrative concepts and Ming-Zheng Confucian cultural traditions were layered on top of autonomous Indigenous societies, forming a multi-layered structure in Taiwan’s political culture. The tradition of international trade gave Taiwan a maritime character from the beginning: it was not an isolated island, but a node.

At the level of objects, commodities and cultural practices that entered Taiwan in the seventeenth century were absorbed and transformed by local people, becoming part of the foundation of Taiwanese culture today. These included Japanese saodo copper bars recovered from the waters of Magong Harbor in Penghu, imported in the mid-seventeenth century for use in minting coins and making firearms; “Anping jars,” ceramic vessels from northern Fujian that Han settlers used for pickling foods, and that Siraya Indigenous people used in ancestral rituals to hold “xiangshui,” water used to communicate with ancestral spirits; and the wall anchors still fixed today to the gables of old temples in Tainan.⁴

Foreign styles and multiple cultures came to Taiwan by sea and entered the lives of the island’s people. This character of “the island as node” has continued into the present.

Further Reading:

• Prehistory and Indigenous Peoples — the autonomous societies already present on the island before the Dutch landed
• Qing Rule — the 212 years after 1683, when Taiwan expanded from a “small prefecture” into a province
• Taiwan’s Maritime Trade History — the full trade-network context from the Dutch period to Tungning and Qing rule
• History of Taiwan’s Indigenous Peoples and the Name Rectification Movement — the Pingpu peoples affected by waves of Han immigration
• Taiwan Island-Centered Historical Perspective — Ts’ao Yung-ho’s island-centered historical perspective, a core lens for this period
• Formosa — debates over the origin of the name “Formosa,” and how Westerners have written about this island over the past four centuries
• National Museum of Taiwan History — NMTH’s permanent exhibition Area 3, “The Island and Its People Born of the Sea,” and the 2024 Transcending 1624 International Exhibition directly present this period; 1624 was the year the Dutch East India Company established Fort Zeelandia at Tayouan

References