ABSTRACT
A single theme dominated Taiwan’s history from 1860–1894, distinguishing the late nineteenth century from a preceding era in which changes were for the most part indigenously generated, and the half-century of Japanese colonial domination to follow. That theme—or predicament, at least in the eyes of Ch’ing author-ities—was the greatly intensified involvement of the island in the political, economic, and cultural cross-currents sweeping Pacific Asia in the second half of the nineteenth century. For the first time since the seventeenth century, large sectors of Taiwan’s agrarian economy became closely meshed with the market mechanisms of international commerce. Tea, camphor, and sugar exports flourished after the opening, at opposite ends of the island, of treaty ports legitimated by the Peking round of Sino-foreign settlements in 1860. Again, for the first time since the late 1600s, Taiwan emerged as one of China’s pressing “national security” concerns. Large-scale foreign military interventions punctuated this period on three occasions, vividly exposing Taiwan’s vulnerable status within the late Ch’ing empire. In 1874 the Japanese launched a punitive expedition in southern Taiwan, an imperialist probe that threatened to bring about war between Japan and China. In 1884–85 French naval and land forces blockaded the island and assaulted Keelung (Chilung), Tan-shui (Tam-sui), and the P’eng-hu islands (Pescadores). Japanese military occupation, although vigorously contested by popular insurrections, followed Taiwan’s cession to that country in 1895. In each of these cases, conflicts that arose essentially over other issues in other territorial settings came to involve this no longer “solitary island” on the margins of the East and South China Seas. 1
