ROMANTIC HISTORY OF TROUBLESOME ISLAND

Press, Volume LXXXVI, Issue 26221, 19 September 1950, Page 6

ROMANTIC HISTORY OF TROUBLESOME ISLAND

ILHA FORMOSA

(The following article was originally Formosa has never in the past played a part in world history which has affected people beyond its own borders. It may be hoped that this is an omen that it will not do so at the present time; but there have been a number of curious events in its history, and these are recalled by the notoriety now thrust upon the island. The name by which it is generally known is itself a curiosity. Formosa is a Portuguese word, “Ilha Formosa,” “What a beautiful island!” said the Portuguese navigators when they first sailed past the island; the name stuck, and its beauty seen from the sea is so spectacular that it could rightly demand such a tribute. From west to east rise five parallel mountain ranges; then on the eastern side—the Pacific side—the mountains drop straight to the sea, with cliffs six thousand feet high, the tallest cliffs in the world. (If Shakespeare thought Dover cliffs dizzying what would he have said of these?)

Like nearly all beautiful places, Formosa has had a history of much savageness. The basis of its population is aborigines, who are perhaps related to the Malays and are great headhunters. The characteristics which excited most notice from their early visitors were those of their family life. Husband and wife did not set up a joint household until the man was at least 50; it was considered indecent for a woman to have a child before she was 37. There is not a great deal of current information about the aborigines, and it is not clear whether these peculiarities still continue. Their number has dwindled to a mere 150,C00. The Dutch Besides the aborigines, Formosa had from early times a population of Chinese and Japanese pirates, refugees, and traders. The constitution of the island until the seventeenth century was really that of a harmonious pirate confederacy. Complications began when the Dutch East India Company made a settlement in the south part of the island. The Dutch trading posts lasted from 1624 to 1661. The Dutch in Formosa, unlike the Dutch in Japan, were conscientious evangelists, and, by kind methods rather than coercion, persuaded 6000 aborigines to become Christians. Hundreds of these took Dutch names, and. rather superfluously, were taught to speak Latin. The Dutch built a number of very solid forts, the chief of which, at Tamsui, is to-day the most solid monument on the island. It was destined to become British consulate. The Dutch rule was brought to an end by the extraordinary Chinese adventurer Koxinga. This man was the son of a tailor who was a kind of Chinese Dick Whittington; he rose to great wealth, which he invested in a merchant fleet. At this time the control of China was passing from the Mmg emperors to the Manchus. Koxinga’s father had a loyalty, based on either interest or romance, to the Mmgs, and he used his navy in their cause. This loyalty was continued by Koxinga, even after the Ming cause was hopeless. Defeated on the main-* land, Koxinga turned, like Chiang Kaishek to-day, to Formosa for a base. The first need was to drive out the Dutch, and Koxinga prepared an expedition against them. The Chinese Communists to-day might find interesting the manifesto which he addressed to the Dutch. It declared that Formosa had always belonged to China.

Koxinga won his campaign. He and his descendants ruled in the island for 08 years; during this time his son received a letter from Charles II addressed to the “King of Tywan.” Koxinga’s grandson traded the island to the Manchus in return for a pardon and the title “Seaquelling Duke.’’ The paradox of this episode is that Formosa had been brought politically for the first time under Chinese rule by a Chinese who was the grand rebel against the new imperial dynasty at Peking, though this was eventually to inherit his conquest. Whether Formosa had bsen worth conquering must often have been y Chinese Government. The Chinese part of its population increased. But throughout the eight-

printed in the Guardian.") eenth and nineteenth centuries it W proverbial as the most graceless part of the Empire. "Every three years a disorder, and every five years I rebellion,” it was said. There was, after all, an adventurous stock in the island. It was dreaded by passing sailort. Shipwrecked crews were slaughtered or vanished into slavery. One Western visitor in the eighteenth century escaped any such mischance and was perhaps the most vivid person, next to Koxinga, ever to come to the island. This was a Hungarian nobleman named Count Eenyowski. He had served in the Polish Army against Russia in 1770. Captured by the Russians he was imprisoned in Kamchatka, but escaped, taking with him the daughter of the local governor, named Aphanasia. who eloped with him, though he had told her that he was married. From Kamchatka he went to Japan, and from there to Formosa, Here he spent a considerable time, and made friends with another exile, a Spaniard who had been captain of the fort at Cavite in the Philippines, but had fled because he had murdered a Dominican whom he had found seducing his wife. Benyowski . played with the idea of making himself king of the island, but eventually gave it up and sailed away. To become king of an island was an instinct with him; later he went to Madagascar m French service, got himself chosen king by one of the tribes, went to America to try to matt a treaty with the United States, and, on returning to Madagascar in 1786, was killed in battle with the French. The Japanese The final great drama in Formosa before the present time happened after the cession of the island by China to Japan at the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895. China had lost a war. The Chinese Imperial Commissioner, a son of the famous Li Hungchang, sent to hand over the island to the Japanese, left the conquerors in no doubt about what they were in for. He asked to be excused from landing on the ground that the population would murder him. are desperate and wicked characters, he said.

These desperate and wicked characters had decided to resist their transfer to Japan. A little before the Japanese Navy and Army arrived they proclaimed themselves the independent Republic of Formosa. As sucn, they could not be disposed of by the Emperor of China, even though he had ceded them. The republic formed a parliament with eight members. It had a flag—a blue ground on which ramped a yellow tiger with an inordinately large tail. One of its Ministers, the Minister of War, was an American. the fO'mdT boxing champion from Montana. To supplement its arms the republic dug up the buried cannon in the old Dutch forts overthrown by Koxinga. The republic lasted only week's. The Japanese easily occupied its capital. Its President and M'nisters resigned and fled. But when the Japanese moved out from the cities thev found that the warning of the Chinese Commissioner had been right. Of the guerrilla war which followed, ana lasted four months, a contemporary observer wrote: After the easy victory gained by the Japanese forces over thousands of Chinese regulars during the late war, it may seem incomprehensible that in Formosa they have been unable to put down banditti. The difficulty is not in fighting the rogues. It is finding them. The Japanese troops meet by day only humble nessants carrying implements of P ea There is no evidence that they are the banditti of the night, and yet they may very easily be so. Thus the resistance of the humble republic of Formosa began the pattern of Chinese guerrilla war witn which Asia and the world is now familiar.