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The Formation of the Modern East Asian Economy
     The Chinese sailed to Taiwan came with a set of marriage and commercial practices very different from what the Dutch had expected of them. Most came from the overpopulated coast of southern Fujian, where they had learned to leave their home village. Since the twelfth century, the severe shortage of land throughout this province had forced many of its sons to find jobs outside of their rice paddies. Some then grew rice solely suited for making wine, while others converted their paddies into sugarcane plots or fishbreeding ponds. Commercial opportunities also attracted them to shipbuilding, pottery making, silk textiles, and fishing. But a very common solution to the problem of making a living was simply to leave Fujian.

     By the late twelfth century, the natives of Fujian were already famous for migrating throughout the rest of south China. Four centuries later, such migrations had established patterns whereby villagers regularly spent their entire working lives farming in the neighboring province of Jiangxi to the east, and then returning to die in their native villages in the house of the family they had always supported. For centuries, the Fukienese also had been traveling abroad, as the archetypical overseas Chinese. The earliest record of their residence abroad dates from 1264 , but by that time a total of some 20,000 Fukienese had settled in Vietnam. An apocryphal story even claimed that the emperors of the Le and Trinh dynasties of Vietnam were descendants of Chinese from Fujian. Usually, these men of Fujian would set sail from one of their province's four coastal prefectures, only to return 10 years later for their boat to be refitted and to set sail again. By common consent, they were the best pilots in East Asian waters; even the Portuguese agreed to their pre-eminence. And as the Ming admiral Zheng He had observed, villages of Fukienese were already scattered throughout the islands of southeast Asia by the early fifteenth century. The sixteenth century saw even further spread of their sails. By its end, several tens of thousands were said to be in contact with Japan.

     The Chinese migrant to Taiwan, if he was a village trader, usually took an aborigine wife. But as the decades passed, this type was overwhelmed by the migrants farmers who moved into the villages to work or manage the land rather than trade in deer pelts and other local products. These migrants were often married men who remitted part of their earnings to their wives back in Fukien. For the two decades of Dutch rule and afterwards into Chinese rule, they focused on creating wealth far more than families. In addition to farming and the deer trade, they engaged in fishing, commerce, construction work, porterage, the army, and a wide variety of the growing urban retail and service occupations. Thus, while these Chinese never satisfied the Dutch, and even their own, need for women, they satisfied the Dutch need for skilled labor in the making of an increasingly commercialized rural economy.

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