The history of Taiwan

Taiwan was home for thousands of years to Austronesian-speaking Indigenous peoples, whose ancestors are thought to have carried their languages from the island across the Pacific and Indian oceans. From the seventeenth century it was ruled in turn by the Dutch, the Ming loyalist Zheng family, the Qing dynasty and, from 1895, the Empire of Japan, while Chinese settlers from Fujian and Guangdong became the majority. In 1945 the Republic of China took over the island, and in 1949, after losing the Chinese Civil War, its government retreated there and ruled under martial law for 38 years. Since the late 1980s Taiwan has become a multi-party democracy with one of the world's most advanced economies, while its political status remains disputed: the People's Republic of China claims it as part of its territory, and only a handful of states formally recognise the government in Taipei.

Humans reached Taiwan during the last Ice Age, when low sea levels joined it to the Asian mainland. Stone tools from the Baxian caves on the east coast, part of the Changbin culture, date back roughly 30,000 years, and a jawbone dredged from the strait near Penghu has been identified as Denisovan. As the ice melted, the Taiwan Strait formed and the island was cut off.

By around 3000 BCE a new farming culture, the Dapenkeng, had appeared along the coasts, with corded pottery, polished stone adzes, rice and millet. Most scholars link it with speakers of early Austronesian languages. Austronesian is one of the world's largest language families, stretching from Madagascar to Easter Island, and all of its branches but one, Malayo-Polynesian, are found only on Taiwan. This is the main evidence for the theory that seafarers from Taiwan settled the Philippines and, over the following millennia, much of island South-east Asia and the Pacific. Jade from eastern Taiwan was traded to the Philippines from the second millennium BCE, and by around 400 CE iron was being smelted on the island.

When outsiders began to write about Taiwan, it was divided among many Indigenous peoples speaking different Formosan languages. The plains peoples of the west, such as the Siraya around modern Tainan, lived in large villages, farmed millet and hunted the vast herds of deer on the western plains. Mountain peoples such as the Atayal, Bunun and Paiwan lived in the highlands, and the Amis and others along the east coast. There was no unified state. Villages formed alliances and fought one another, and headhunting was practised by many groups. Today the government recognises sixteen Indigenous peoples, who make up about 2.5 percent of the population.

Chinese records mention islands to the east from early times, but it is not clear which accounts refer to Taiwan. By the time of the Yuan dynasty Chinese fishermen and traders were active on the Penghu islands in the strait, where the Yuan set up an inspection office, and under the Ming dynasty Taiwan's coasts became a haunt of Chinese and Japanese smugglers and pirates. Portuguese sailors passing in the 1540s marked it on their charts as Ilha Formosa, the "beautiful island", the name by which Europeans knew it for centuries.

The Dutch East India Company, the trading arm of the Dutch Republic, wanted a base for trade with China and Japan. Driven from Penghu by Ming forces in 1624, it built Fort Zeelandia on a sandbar off the south-west coast. In 1626 the Spanish Empire, worried for its colony in the Philippines, built forts at Keelung and later Tamsui in the north, but the Dutch expelled them in 1642. The Company subdued the plains villages by a mix of treaties and violence. In 1636 Dutch forces and their allies trapped some 300 people of Liuqiu island in caves and killed them with smoke, and deported the rest of its population. Missionaries wrote down the Siraya language in Latin letters and converted thousands. The Dutch also encouraged Chinese migrants to come as farmers, planting rice and sugar and paying a poll tax that became the colony's main revenue. When Chinese settlers rose under Guo Huaiyi in 1652, Dutch troops and Indigenous allies killed several thousand of them.

The Manchu conquest of China gave Taiwan a new ruler. Zheng Chenggong, known in the West as Koxinga, was the son of a Chinese pirate-merchant and a Japanese mother, and led a large fleet loyal to the fallen Ming. After a failed attack on Nanjing in 1659, he turned to Taiwan as a base. His forces landed in April 1661 and, after a nine-month siege, the Dutch surrendered Fort Zeelandia in February 1662. Koxinga died a few months later, but his son Zheng Jing ruled Taiwan as the Kingdom of Tungning, with Ming-style ministries, a Confucian temple and civil service examinations. Chinese settlement expanded, often by seizing Indigenous land, and the cultivated area grew several times over.

The Qing dynasty blockaded the coast and fought the Zhengs for two decades. After Zheng Jing's death a succession struggle weakened the regime, and in July 1683 the Qing admiral Shi Lang, a former Zheng officer, destroyed the Zheng fleet off Penghu. Zheng Keshuang surrendered, and in 1684 the Kangxi Emperor made Taiwan a prefecture of Fujian province.

The Qing at first saw Taiwan as a troublesome frontier and tried to limit migration, but settlers from southern Fujian, speaking Hokkien, and Hakka from Guangdong crossed the strait in large numbers. Over two centuries the Chinese population grew to well over two million. The plains peoples lost much of their land, intermarried and were largely absorbed, while the Qing drew boundary lines to keep settlers out of the mountains, which remained under Indigenous control. Frontier society was violent: feuds between Hokkien and Hakka communities were common, and large revolts broke out, notably that of Zhu Yigui in 1721 and of Lin Shuangwen in 1786 to 1788.

In the nineteenth century foreign powers forced Taiwan open. Treaty ports opened in the 1860s, and exports of tea and camphor boomed in the north. After Paiwan villagers killed shipwrecked sailors from Ryukyu, Japan sent a punitive expedition to southern Taiwan in 1874, and during the Sino-French War of 1884 to 1885 French forces occupied Keelung and Penghu. Alarmed, the Qing strengthened their hold. Taiwan became a separate province in 1887 under governor Liu Mingchuan, who built a railway from Keelung, developed Taipei, which became the provincial capital in 1893, and pushed roads and military campaigns into Indigenous territory.

Defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War forced the Qing to cede Taiwan and Penghu to Japan in the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895. Local officials and gentry proclaimed a Republic of Formosa to resist, but Japanese troops took Taipei within weeks and conquered the south by October, against fierce resistance. Armed revolts continued for years, the last large one being the Tapani Incident of 1915, after which some 200 rebels were executed.

Taiwan became the first colony of the Empire of Japan, and was run as a model one. The colonial government carried out land surveys and censuses, built railways, ports and irrigation, expanded public health and primary schooling, and turned the island into a major exporter of rice and sugar to Japan. Political rights were limited, and the Taiwanese were second-class subjects. In the 1920s educated Taiwanese formed the Taiwanese Cultural Association and petitioned for a local parliament, without success.

The mountain peoples were brought under control by military force. Campaigns from 1910 onwards destroyed many villages, and in 1930 Seediq warriors led by Mona Rudao killed more than a hundred Japanese at a school sports day in Wushe. The uprising was crushed with aircraft and artillery, and hundreds of Seediq died in the fighting or by suicide. After 1937 the Kominka movement pressed Taiwanese to take Japanese names, speak Japanese and worship at Shinto shrines. During the Second World War Taiwan was a base for Japan's invasions of China and South-east Asia, and around 200,000 Taiwanese served in the Japanese forces. American bombing hit the island's cities in 1944 and 1945.

In the Cairo Declaration of 1943 the Allies stated that Taiwan would be returned to the Republic of China, founded in 1912 by the movement of Sun Yat-sen and governed by the Kuomintang (KMT). On 25 October 1945 the Japanese governor handed Taiwan to the ROC's representative Chen Yi, and nearly all of the island's Japanese residents were repatriated. Whether this transferred sovereignty is still debated, since the later peace treaties in which Japan renounced Taiwan did not name a recipient.

Hopes for the new government quickly soured. The incoming administration was widely seen as corrupt, mainlanders took the top jobs, and the economy was wrecked by inflation and the seizure of property. On 27 February 1947 monopoly agents in Taipei beat a woman selling cigarettes and an officer shot into the crowd, killing a bystander. Protests the next day were met with gunfire, and an uprising spread across the island, during which crowds also attacked mainland civilians. Taiwanese leaders formed committees and presented demands for reform, but Chen Yi waited for troops from the mainland. From early March soldiers carried out a crackdown in which local elites, students and many ordinary people were killed or disappeared. A government commission set up in the 1990s estimated the deaths at between 18,000 and 28,000, though some put the figure lower. The 228 Incident became a forbidden subject for four decades and a founding grievance of the Taiwanese independence movement.

Meanwhile the KMT was losing the Chinese Civil War to the Communists of Mao Zedong, who proclaimed the People's Republic of China (PRC) in Beijing on 1 October 1949. Martial law was declared on Taiwan in May 1949, and in December Chiang Kai-shek's government moved to Taipei, followed by perhaps one to two million soldiers, officials and refugees. The ROC also kept Kinmen and Matsu off the Fujian coast. The Communists were preparing to invade when the Korean War broke out in June 1950, and the United States sent its Seventh Fleet into the strait.

For the next decades Taiwan was a one-party state. The KMT claimed to be the government of all China and planned to retake the mainland, and the national assembly elected in 1947 on the mainland stayed in office without new elections. Under martial law, in the period known as the White Terror, around 140,000 people were imprisoned for suspected communist or pro-independence views, and thousands were executed. Mandarin was imposed in schools and public life, and Hokkien, Hakka and Indigenous languages were discouraged.

During the Cold War the ROC was an American ally, with a mutual defence treaty from 1954 to 1979, and it survived PRC bombardments of Kinmen in the Taiwan Strait crises of 1954 to 1955 and 1958. Land reform in the early 1950s transferred land to tenant farmers, and American aid, investment in education and export-processing zones from the 1960s drove rapid industrial growth. Taiwan became one of the "Four Asian Tigers", moving from textiles and plastics to electronics.

Internationally, the ROC's position weakened. In October 1971 UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 gave China's seat to the PRC, and the ROC withdrew. Most countries then moved their recognition to Beijing, and on 1 January 1979 the United States did the same. Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act, which kept unofficial ties and arms sales.

Chiang Kai-shek died in 1975, and his son Chiang Ching-kuo became president in 1978. Opposition activists, known as the Tangwai, or "outside the party", were jailed after the Kaohsiung Incident of December 1979, but pressure for reform grew. In 1986 they founded the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which Chiang chose to tolerate, and on 15 July 1987 martial law was lifted. Chiang died in 1988 and was succeeded by Lee Teng-hui, the first Taiwan-born president. After student protests in 1990, Lee ended the emergency provisions of the civil-war era in 1991, the old national assembly was retired, and full elections to the legislature were held in 1992. In 1995 Lee became the first president to apologise publicly for the 228 Incident.

In March 1996 Lee won the first direct presidential election, despite PRC missile tests in the waters near Taiwan. In 2000 the DPP's Chen Shui-bian won, ending more than half a century of KMT rule in a peaceful transfer of power. The KMT's Ma Ying-jeou, elected in 2008, sought closer economic ties with the mainland, but in 2014 students occupied the legislature in the Sunflower Movement to block a trade agreement with the PRC. The DPP's Tsai Ing-wen, elected in 2016 as Taiwan's first woman president, held office for two terms. In 2019 Taiwan became the first place in Asia to legalise same-sex marriage. By then its semiconductor industry, led by TSMC, made most of the world's most advanced computer chips.

The status of Taiwan is one of the world's most sensitive disputes. The PRC holds that Taiwan has been part of China since ancient times and is one of its provinces, that the 1943 and 1945 Allied declarations returned it to China, and that the PRC succeeded the ROC as the sole legal government of China. It seeks what it calls peaceful reunification under a "one country, two systems" model, but its Anti-Secession Law of 2005 authorises force if Taiwan moves towards formal independence. It refuses diplomatic relations with any state that recognises the ROC.

Taiwan's government, still formally the Republic of China, has held since 1991 that it no longer contests Communist rule of the mainland, and it insists that the ROC is a sovereign state that has never been ruled by the PRC. The two main parties differ in emphasis. The KMT accepts the "1992 Consensus", under which both sides agree there is one China while differing on its meaning, and favours closer cross-strait ties. The DPP rejects that formula, stresses a separate Taiwanese identity and holds that Taiwan is already independent. Opinion polls show that most people in Taiwan prefer to keep the status quo, and a growing majority identify as Taiwanese rather than Chinese.

Most countries recognise the PRC as the government of China, and as of 2026 only eleven UN member states and the Holy See maintain formal relations with Taipei. Many others, including the United States and Japan, keep unofficial offices there. The United States acknowledges, without endorsing, the Chinese position that there is one China and that Taiwan is part of it, and continues to sell Taiwan weapons. Taiwan is excluded from the United Nations and competes in the Olympics as "Chinese Taipei".

Tsai Ing-wen was re-elected in 2020. Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 sharpened debate in Taiwan about defence, and after a visit by the US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in August 2022 the PRC held large military exercises around the island, including missile launches. In January 2024 the DPP's Lai Ching-te won the presidency, but the party lost its majority in the Legislative Yuan, where the KMT and the smaller Taiwan People's Party together held more seats. Clashes between the president and the opposition-controlled legislature led civic groups to organise a mass recall campaign against KMT legislators, but in votes held in July and August 2025 every recall was rejected. PRC military pressure around the island continued.