ABSTRACT
If we go back to the beginning of the age of the Fukien frontiersmen we find discontinuities every bit as startling. Taiwan in 1600 was on the outer edge of Chinese consciousness and activity, with little or no permanent Chinese settlement, visited only by fishermen, smugglers, and pirates, and only dimly reflected in the discussions and records of the officials who administered and patrolled the South China coast. It was inhabited largely by the Malayo-Polynesian peoples, called “aborigines” in the English-language literature. In the course of the seventeenth century, maritime Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, English, and Dutch warriors and traders all sought to settle on the great island, make it a commercial base, and profit from its riches. Its incorporation into the Ch’ing Empire in 1683 was another dramatic discontinuity; it almost immediately ceased to be a center of multinational maritime trade, and its southern Chinese frontier phase, slowly under way under the Dutch and the Ch’eng-kung regime, began in earnest.
