On Saturday, Taiwan was the focus of activities in Schipluiden, a small village between The Hague and Rotterdam in The Netherlands.
The occasion was the unveiling of a monument commemorating Reverend Anthonius Hambrouck, who was a pastor in the old church in the village from 1632 until 1647, when Hambrouck left with his wife and four children, and sailed to faraway Formosa (a journey of almost one year). The church and the pulpit in the church remain the same as when Hambrouck left in 1647.
In Formosa, the Dutch East India Company had established its Fort Zeelandia in 1624 and built up a prosperous colony. Part of the work of the colony was to bring the gospel to the Aboriginal Siraya people, and establish schools and medical clinics in the area around today’s Anping (安平) in Tainan.
photo courtesy of Gerrit Van Der Wees
The first pastor to work in the area was Reverend George Candidius, who arrived in 1627 but refused to live at the fort, and instead made Sincan (present-day Sinshih District, 新市區) his home.
When Hambrouck arrived in 1647, he set up his parish in Mattau (today’s Madou District, 麻豆區) which in the early years had been hostile to the incoming Dutch — and at war with neighboring villages such as Sincan — when Candidius had been the pastor.
Hambrouck started preaching, and also began a school, and initially had some 145 male students, who received education “from the cock’s crowing.” The education gradually expanded, and Hambrouck started classes for girls and women in the afternoon. He trained a number of Aboriginal men as assistant teachers.
photo courtesy of Gerrit Van Der Wees
The ceremony in Schipluiden honored Hambrouck for his work, and particularly his role in establishing the written version of the Siraya language, which is currently undergoing revival efforts.
The plaque that was jointly unveiled by Taiwan representative Tom Chou (周台竹) and current Schipluiden pastor Erika Dibbets-van der Roest shows text taken from the Bible’s Gospel of St. Matthew in both old-Dutch and the Siraya language. The piece of art was a work by a former resident of Schipluiden, Marcel Koeleman.
The village of Schipluiden also decided to honor Reverend Hambrouck by naming the square in front of the church “Hambrouckplein” (Hambrouck square). The mayor of the village, Arnoud Rodenburg, and the town’s councilmember for culture and monuments Wendy Renzen jointly unveiled the new name plate.
Hambrouck became most famous in his role as intermediary after the landing of Cheng Cheng-kung (鄭成功, also known as Koxinga) in late April 1661. Koxinga and his 25,000 invading troops had been able to occupy the countryside area around Fort Zeelandia, but not the heavily defended fort itself.
Koxinga arrested and imprisoned some 500 Dutch who lived in the 40 villages around Fort Zeelandia, and selected Hambrouck to go to the fort and ordered him to convince Governor-General Frederic Coyett to surrender. Koxinga kept Hambrouck’s wife, one daughter and son as hostages. The other two married daughters lived at the fort.
When Hambrouck met Coyett, he urged him not to surrender, but to hold out until reinforcements from Batavia (present day Jakarta) would arrive. His two daughters at the castle begged him to stay (a big painting at today’s Anping Old Fort depicts the scene), but Hambrouck wanted to safeguard the lives of his wife and son and daughter, and returned to Koxinga’s headquarters at Fort Provintia, handing Koxinga the negative answer of Coyett. Koxinga subsequently had Hambrouck killed.
From the last quarter of 2001, research shows that real housing prices nearly tripled (before a 2012 law to enforce housing price registration, researchers tracked a few large real estate firms to estimate housing price behavior). Incomes have not kept pace, though this has not yet led to defaults. Instead, an increasing chunk of household income goes to mortgage payments. This suggests that even if incomes grow, the mortgage squeeze will still make voters feel like their paychecks won’t stretch to cover expenses. The housing price rises in the last two decades are now driving higher rents. The rental market
July 21 to July 27 If the “Taiwan Independence Association” (TIA) incident had happened four years earlier, it probably wouldn’t have caused much of an uproar. But the arrest of four young suspected independence activists in the early hours of May 9, 1991, sparked outrage, with many denouncing it as a return to the White Terror — a time when anyone could be detained for suspected seditious activity. Not only had martial law been lifted in 1987, just days earlier on May 1, the government had abolished the Temporary Provisions Effective During the Period of National Mobilization for Suppression of the Communist
Fifty-five years ago, a .25-caliber Beretta fired in the revolving door of New York’s Plaza Hotel set Taiwan on an unexpected path to democracy. As Chinese military incursions intensify today, a new documentary, When the Spring Rain Falls (春雨424), revisits that 1970 assassination attempt on then-vice premier Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國). Director Sylvia Feng (馮賢賢) raises the question Taiwan faces under existential threat: “How do we safeguard our fragile democracy and precious freedom?” ASSASSINATION After its retreat to Taiwan in 1949, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime under Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) imposed a ruthless military rule, crushing democratic aspirations and kidnapping dissidents from
Fundamentally, this Saturday’s recall vote on 24 Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers is a democratic battle of wills between hardcore supporters of Taiwan sovereignty and the KMT incumbents’ core supporters. The recall campaigners have a key asset: clarity of purpose. Stripped to the core, their mission is to defend Taiwan’s sovereignty and democracy from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). They understand a basic truth, the CCP is — in their own words — at war with Taiwan and Western democracies. Their “unrestricted warfare” campaign to undermine and destroy Taiwan from within is explicit, while simultaneously conducting rehearsals almost daily for invasion,