Three Foreigners Witness 1895 Taiwan: A Photographer's Album, a Reporter's Notes, a Pastor's Diary

30-second overview: In the Yi-Wei War of 1895 (乙未之役), three foreigners left behind the most important foreign-language eyewitness documents of that conflict: Japanese military photographer Endo Makoto photographed the Commemorative Album of the Victorious Taiwan Expedition (征臺軍凱旋紀念帖); American journalist James W. Davidson wrote embedded notes with the Imperial Guard Division (later the most widely cited English-language source on modern Taiwanese history); and Japanese pastor Hosokawa Ryu recorded a diary from his three months in Taiwan following the war. The question is not what they saw, but for whom they were watching: the photographer was employed by the Japanese military, the journalist guided Japanese troops into Taipei city and received a medal for it, and the pastor arrived as a "comfort envoy" representing the spiritual dimension of the Japanese occupation. Who writes history — these three documents make that question impossible to evade.

The Name of an Album

In the summer of 1895, Endo Makoto shouldered his photographic equipment and landed in Taiwan with Japan's Taiwan expedition forces.¹

He was a photographer employed by the Japanese military. His task was to record — or more precisely, to witness this occupation through the lens. The following year, he compiled his photographs into a volume published in Tokyo. The album's name was: Commemorative Album of the Victorious Taiwan Expedition (征臺軍凱旋紀念帖).

Pause at that title: 征 is "conquest," 凱旋 is "triumphant return," 紀念帖 is "a record of glory worth preserving." Before the album is even opened, its cover has already delivered a historical verdict: this landing was not occupation — it was glory.

What a photographer chooses to photograph, and what not to, is one choice. What name to give the album is another. Every choice is one version of history.

The Reporter Who Was Also an Actor

In the same year, in May, the British acting consul at Tamsui, Goldschmidt, repeatedly mentioned one name in his reports: "Mr. Davidson, war correspondent."³

James W. Davidson — a military correspondent for the American New York Tribune — covered Taiwan's fighting while embedded with the Imperial Guard Division. He wrote his dispatches in English, sent them back to the United States for publication, and they were then reprinted in English-language newspapers in Hong Kong and Japan.² Goldschmidt mentioned him repeatedly in his diplomatic reports: he appeared in the Taipei Governor's yamen, interviewing Chen Chi-tung, Foreign Minister of the Taiwan Democratic State; he was a first-hand witness when the collective telegram from Taipei's gentry was sent from the yamen.

"Indeed, we still hold hope." In mid-May, Chen Chi-tung said this to Davidson. He spoke of his hope for European intervention — France, Germany, any great power willing to halt Japan.³ That hope came to nothing.

In early June, after Tang Ching-sung fled, Taipei fell into chaos. It was at this moment that Davidson did something that made the label "bystander journalist" deeply suspect: he, the German Aurea, and the Englishman Thompson formed a three-man delegation, voluntarily crossed through Japanese military checkpoints outside the city, reported to the Japanese military the chaos inside Taipei, and requested that Japanese troops enter to restore order.⁴

Japanese troops moved immediately.

Afterward, the Japanese side rewarded the three men with medals. The Japan Daily Mail ran a report under the headline: "A Well-Deserved Medal."

Davidson's 1895 notes were compiled and published in 1903 under the title The Island of Formosa, Past and Present.⁵ Over six hundred pages, chapters fifteen through eighteen detail the entire story of the Taiwan Democratic State. It became the most widely cited primary English-language source on modern Taiwanese history for an entire century.

📝 Curator's Note

The phenomenon of a "journalist who is also an actor" is not rare in history, but Davidson's case has a particular character: guiding Japanese troops into the city, accepting Japanese medals — these details almost never appear in the academic footnotes that cite The Island of Formosa, Past and Present. His work is still widely cited today; most citations simply say "American journalist." When a historical source's author is simultaneously an actor in the events he records, and we still call it "an objective primary document" — whose objectivity are we invoking?

The Pastor's Post-Battle Diary

In late September 1895, Hosokawa Ryu arrived in Taiwan.

He was a Japanese pastor, this time in Taiwan under the title of "comfort envoy" (慰問使). That title represented Japan's spiritual consolation effort following the occupation — representing the winning side's spiritual dimension.⁶ When he arrived, the large battles in northern Taiwan were already over, but Liu Yung-fu's Black Flag Army was still holding out in Tainan in the south. On October 21, Japanese troops peacefully entered Tainan, after Rev. Thomas Barclay of the English Presbyterian Church came forward on behalf of the city's residents to request Japanese entry so that the city would not be shelled.⁷

After Tainan changed hands, Hosokawa began traveling with Barclay to visit churches and local people across the region.

Two pastors, traveling Taiwan together. One (Hosokawa) represented the spiritual consolation of the new ruler — eyes seeing this land for the first time in September 1895. One (Barclay) had served in Taiwan for thirty years, witnessing thirty years of Taiwanese life, including the suffering the war had brought upon his congregation.⁸ They saw the same land, but their respective diaries may not have recorded the same Taiwan.

Hosokawa Ryu's "Diary of a Journey to Taiwan in the Twenty-Eighth Year of Meiji" was published in 1927, appended to his memoir Sholin Kaiko-roku (小鱗回顧錄).⁹ He was in Taiwan from late September through December 17, 1895 — about three months. His record captures the "post-battlefield" appearance of Taiwan in the early days of occupation: later in time than Endo Makoto's photographs, further south than Davidson's embedded notes, and with more everyday detail than official military documents.

📊 Three Observers Compared

	Endo Makoto	James W. Davidson	Hosokawa Ryu
Nationality	Japanese	American	Japanese
Role	Military photographer	War correspondent	Comfort envoy (pastor)
Time in Taiwan	May–June 1895 (northern Taiwan)	May–November 1895	September–December 1895 (mainly southern Taiwan)
Primary source	Commemorative Album of the Victorious Taiwan Expedition (1896)	Embedded notes with the Imperial Guard → The Island of Formosa, Past and Present (1903)	"Diary of a Journey to Taiwan in the Twenty-Eighth Year of Meiji" → Sholin Kaiko-roku (1927)
Relationship to Japanese military	Employed to photograph alongside	Guided troops into Taipei; received a medal	Traveled in an official comfort-envoy capacity

Whose Voice Is Not Here

Three documents. Two Japanese, one American. All male. Not one is Taiwanese.¹⁰

This is not coincidence, and it is not oversight. In 1895, those who could write and have those writings "discovered" by posterity were usually on the resource-rich side. Endo Makoto's photographs were printed as a hardcover album and published in Tokyo; Davidson's notes had a newspaper telegraph, had a university build a family archive; Hosokawa Ryu's diary had someone publish a memoir. These three documents can be read by us 130 years later because they had institutional support, preservation conditions, and channels of circulation behind them.

The voices of Taiwanese resisters are scattered in the family letters of Hakka village elders, the litigation records of the Danshui Hall, or were simply never written down.

But one body of writing survived — and survived locally, in Taiwan: The Taiwan Church News (台南府城教會報), written in Taiwanese Hokkien characters and romanized script, Taiwan's own vernacular-language newspaper. It recorded the same war using a different language and a different perspective.¹¹

Reading the three foreigners' documents alongside this Taiwanese-language newspaper makes for a complete picture.

📝 Curator's Note: Source Criticism Is Not the Same as Discarding Sources

Acknowledging that Endo Makoto's, Davidson's, and Hosokawa Ryu's records carry positional limitations does not make these three sources useless. They remain to this day the most direct visual and textual primary documents for studying the Yi-Wei War of 1895. The National Museum of Taiwan History's publication of the Compilation and Translation of Foreign-Language Historical Sources on the Yi-Wei War series (2018–2019) is itself a declaration: to organize, translate, and annotate these foreign-language sources through a Taiwan-centered perspective — making them available for critical use by Taiwan's scholarly community, rather than allowing these foreign-language viewpoints to become, unreflected upon, the "default version" of Taiwanese history.

Further Reading

Articles in the Yi-Wei War series and original historical sources. This series uses an "object-first" method to approach the multiple perspectives of 1895 through specific documents.

• Yi-Wei War: The 148 Days of the Taiwan Democratic State — Series D-1. Entering through the perspective of 19-year-old Hakka youth Chiang Shao-tsu, recounting the entire arc of the 148-day Democratic State: the president's flight, a poet's surrender, Hakka militia resistance, and the birth of Japan's first colonial government.
• National Museum of Taiwan History Overseas Taiwan Historical Sources Archive — A digital collection of 2,100+ pages of foreign-language historical sources on the Yi-Wei War, including translated works by all three authors in this article and British consular reports; can be browsed online directly.
• James W. Davidson, _The Island of Formosa, Past and Present_ (1903) — The full English text of Davidson's compiled embedded notes, 600+ pages, freely available on Internet Archive. One of the most important English-language primary sources on Taiwanese history; recommended to be read with awareness of the author's positional background.

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