The first words at the entrance to a new history exhibit read like a line from leaflets passed out by today's radical Taiwanese independence groups: "To the east of the sea is a large island, which the Chinese have never claimed." (
But the small print shows the words come from a 17th century poem, The Eastern Capital by Lu Juo-teng (
Did Taiwan always belong to China, as the regime in Beijing argues? Or were European trading powers, like the Dutch, the first to really value and develop the island?
Portuguese sailors were the first Europeans to come to the island off China's southeastern coast in the 16th century but they did not pay it much heed.
It was the Dutch who really put the first foreign imprint on Taiwanese soil while running the island from 1624 until they were driven out by a Chinese army in 1662.
"The Dutch opened the literal history of Taiwan," says Ang Kaim (
It's no surprise the exhibit emphasizes links between Taiwan and anyone but China. The show's host, the National Palace Museum, is an institution whose director is appointed by the government.
The exhibit has moved to Taiwan's fourth-largest city, Tainan, which was the trading base for the Dutch, and will be on display there until Aug. 31.
While the Dutch ruled Taiwan for just four decades, the exhibit argues they had a lasting influence.
"Although they invested some capital to develop Taiwan during their occupation, they were not goodwill economic reformers," Ang says.
The Dutch held a monopoly on trade between China, Taiwan and the rest of Asia, and used the island as a trans-shipment point to exchange Chinese gold and raw silk for silver from Japan, spices from Indonesia and cotton cloth from India.
That lucrative business became the focus of conflict with China.
Cheng Cheng-kung (
But Ang says Cheng was not really the Taiwanese independence hero he is sometimes made out to be.
"I don't even think he ever tried his best to strive for Taiwan independence in his life, but the irony is that many Taiwanese admire him as the founder of Taiwan," the historian says.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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