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The Formation of the Modern East Asian Economy

The Portuguese secretly sought to purchase children 10 years or older. Each child was purchased at 100 cash, causing the evil youth of Gwangdong to hasten to kidnap children. The number thus eaten was beyond counting. Their method was first to boil some soup in a huge iron pan and place the child, locked up in an iron cage, into the pan. After being steamed to sweat, the child was then taken out and his skin peeled with an iron scrubbing-brush. The child, still alive, would not be killed, until he was disemboweled and steamed for eating.

     Nowhere in seventeenth century East Asia did such international East-West competition and contention so strikingly shape the way these peoples interacted than on Taiwan, the island 100 miles off the coast of Fukien province on the mainland of China. The early political history of its international and Chinese settlements is well-known, and I hope that the Taiwanese here will forgive me for giving a brief account of these encounters on behalf of others who may not know them as well.

     Although a Chinese government had first noted its existence when it sent missions there in 607 and 608 , actually a millennium would pass before Chinese began to pay Taiwan close attention. In the mid-sixteenth century, some Chinese fishermen and pirates began to frequent its western shores, as they were anxious to escape from Ming naval attacks and official levies in Fujian ports. Other Chinese followed suit to purchase mainly deer pelts and deer horns from the local aborigines for the Chinese and Japanese market. Northern Taiwan then became an international transshipment center for ships from these two countries. It was a neutral ground where these ships could all avoid the Ming dynasty's ban on direct Japanese trade with China and on any Chinese foreign trade during the Japanese invasions of Korea at the end of the sixteenth century. In fact, the Ming drove the Japanese out of the port of present-day Tainan in southern Taiwan in 1603.

     But it was only in 1624 that Westerners began to settle on Taiwan. The Portuguese had established Macao off Guangdong Province in c. 1555, the Spanish their Manila in 1571, and the Dutch, as latecomers, wanted a land base for their ships voyaging between China and Japan. So after being repulsed from the Pescadores Islands in the Taiwan Strait by Ming forces, they founded their Zeelandia Castle in the vicinity of present-day Tainan in southern Taiwan in 1624. Over the next four decades, they would secure control over much of the lowlands of this mountainous island.

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