ABSTRACT
Taiwanese jurisdiction includes numerous islets and the archipelagos of Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu. The island was originally inhabited by Malayo-Polynesian Aboriginal peoples from Southeast Asia. Tonio Andrade, whose book is the most authoritative history on this period, describes Taiwan in 1600 as “a wild land, inhabited by headhunters and visited mainly by pirates and fishermen”. Taiwan was “discovered” by Portuguese sailors in the early 1500s; they named it Formosa meaning “beautiful island.” In the early 1600s, the Dutch East India Company set up a trading post on the Penghu Islands off Taiwan’s southwest coast, but China’s Ming government stepped in and pursued the Dutch until they left the island. A group of Taiwanese intellectuals declared the island the Taiwan Democratic Republic, a sovereign nation, and even wrote a Declaration of Independence. The Republic of China (Taiwan) is a unitary state divided into 22 subnational divisions of three different types: special municipalities, cities and counties.
