From Takow to Kaohsiung

Formosa

1680 Map including "I.Formosa"
(photo: Wikipedia Commons

Due to Taiwan having long been known in the West by the name Ihla Formosa (Portuguese: "Beautiful Island"), it is often assumed that Taiwan was, at some date, a Portuguese colony. This is incorrect for at least two reasons:

i) No Western power ever controlled much of the island of Taiwan. The Dutch had a colony in southwestern Taiwan and the Spanish had a colony in the north, but somehow (perhaps due to Western assumptions about other imperial outposts) this has been interpreted as "Taiwan was a colony of the Dutch" (or Spanish). Even the Japanese at the start of the 20th century did not fully overcome resistance to their rule by autonomous Aborigines until the middle of their five decades of rule (1895~1945).

Thus, for example, we have an article written by Gerrit van der Wees (a former Dutch diplomat and now university lecturer in the history of Taiwan) in the Taipei Times in 2019 stating: "1624 ... was the beginning of 38 years of Dutch colonial rule". This is, at best, very loose use of language.

ii) there is no evidence, archaeological or historical (textual) of the Portuguese having landed, never mind set up a base, on Taiwan. The standard explanation, as van der Wees notes, "It was Portuguese sailors who, in 1544, first passed by Taiwan on their way to Japan, dubbing it Ilha Formosa, a moniker that would stick in the West until the early 1950s".

But even this might not be true. In their 2017 book "解碼臺灣史 1550-1720" (Decoding the History of Taiwan from 1550-1720), Academia Sinica associate reseracher Weng Chia-yin (翁佳音) and editor Huang Yen-wan (黃驗完), suggest that the Portuguese sailors were actually describing Okinawa, not Taiwan.

> ................. Taiwan depicted as cluster of islands called "Fermosa" in a map from 1570.
> ................. (photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Their study of contemporary Portuguese records suugests the island described as Formosa had a northwest / southeast orientation and a length of 100 kilometers, whereas Taiwan has a northeast / southwest orientation and a length of over 400 kilometers. From this, Weng inferred that the Portuguese were actually referring to Okinawa, which he says is 112 km long,

{MC: Of course, the Portuguese did have a habit of calling any half-pretty island they saw "Ilha Formosa".



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