In 1603, Dutch ships ventured into the waters of the South China Sea searching for a base from which to open trade with China. They bore the commission and the guns of the then one-year-old Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC), or the Dutch East India Company, which was working out of a new base in Batavia (now Jakarta), through which it would funnel nearly all Asian trade for the next 200 years.
But access to the riches of East Asia wasn't easy. After Ming dynasty forces kicked the Dutch out of what is now Penghu for the second time in 1624, the European traders were allowed to take possession of a larger island beyond the Penghu archipelago to the west. They settled near present day Tainan on a sandbar islet that they inferred from local speech was called "Tayouan" or "Taywan." The name was eventually used to identify the entire island, but did it also produce an identity?
A case for this historical origin of Taiwan -- and by this I don't just mean an Aboriginal word for some sandbar, but instead the international perception of Taiwan as a place distinct from China -- is advocated in The Birth of Taiwan: Formosa in the Seventeenth Century (
Two years in the planning, the exhibition focuses on the Taiwan of the Dutch colonial era (1624-1662), taking full advantage of the VOC's rich legacy of historical records, maps, trade wares and other sundry artifacts. Its contents include more than 270 pieces from more than 35 museums in Taiwan and Europe. Several are rare and fascinating finds, like a handwritten dictionary that translates Aboriginal names from Sinkanese, a Dutch romanization of an Aboriginal language, into Chinese characters.
The lexicon is just one of many details of a show that offers the most complete and interesting picture of Dutch-occupied Taiwan ever exhibited locally, or for that matter, probably anywhere in the world.
At the time of the Dutch arrival in 1624, little was known about Taiwan. China's court records produced conflicting accounts, and the Portuguese, who never really spent much time in Taiwan even though they christened the "Ihla Formosa" after spying it from a ship three-quarters of a century earlier, depicted it on their maps as a string of three separate islands. Taiwan was not mapped as a single body by Europeans until the first Dutch governor of Taiwan, a man named Snock, in 1625 sent the cartographer Nordeloos to circumnavigate his new territory and map the coastline.
But maps are only one topic explored. Another major element is the introduction of Dutch trade and technology and the transformations that ensued. Under the guidance of a group known as the Seventeen Gentlemen, the VOC's directors in Amsterdam, Taiwan became a Dutch transit hub with major links to both China and Japan. It moved Chinese silks and porcelain, Indonesian pepper and Japanese silver. Taiwan's sugarcane, silk, and skins of the abundant Formosan deer, whose hides were used by the Japanese in the manufacture of samurai armor.
Dutch journals and engravings show an ethnographic interest in the native Formosans, the Aborigines of the Pingpu (平埔) tribe. There were few Chinese settlers in the Taiwan of the 1620s, though by the time the Dutch left that had changed. In a push for development, the new colonists introduced European-style agriculture and imported water buffaloes and plows from China. Han Chinese colonists followed. There were an estimated 40,000 of them by 1662, the year the Dutch were expelled at the hands of Koxinga (鄭成功).
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