Status Updates From Forbidden Nation: A History...

Done. Sometimes the book was difficult to read completely. But mostly the author wrote well.

Did Minnan really suplant Mandarin in the 90s as this says?

I am not surprised that this chinese general considered the Taiwanese a degraded people outside pure chinese civilization and that the KMT troops considered Taiwan conquered territory to be looted. No wonder some preferred the Japanese after a while.

Ironic, the Japanese basically made the Taiwanese, along with their colonial masters, the most highly educated people in Asia.

So Goto created a japanese youth corps for the boys to spy on the population, his actions ruffled Tokyo's feathers because of his violence and the japanese wanted to develop Taiwan to get profit out of it, for that the people needed to stay healthy and only be able to read what was necessary, not make them too smart.

So Liu strengthened Taiwan militarily not simply for defense against outsiders but against the Taiwanese who are known to rebell at the slightest provocation. But building a railway was difficult because of bribery and workers not having the jobs explain and so taking railway pegs for fires.

His writing about the reasons the court rejected trains for China sound really like stereotypes, all this writing about mother earth and feng shui is ridiculous. By that logic they should have never built any dams or roads.
And apparently it was this Liu who renamed Taiwanfu to Tainan after naming the island Taiwan and moving the capital to Taipeh because of the japanese threat after Taichung proved too costly.

I think I read about this guy who led to th first modernization of Taiwan.

Was the Japanese court really that much looking inside before Matthew Perry came along? Was there no one being interested in the outside world?

Hm, I wonder why thee foreigners backed the Qing in those few examples. What was different there?

Oh, that George Psalmanazar fraud, who claimed to be "Formosan" while being in England and France. Did he really have such a big impact on keeping the interest in Taiwan alive in England and France as the book claims?

Triads, family loyalties, craft and trade guilds, combine that with Qing corruption, plus forbidding iron to be sent to the island, and this sounds like an area for a good few thriller shows/movies.

If all Taiwanese products were considered to go to the mainland before the opening of the empire, I wonder how the Taiwanese managed to smuggle it to other destinations and if the sugar trade developed rapidly with freer trade later, I wonder whether that sugar was sent to Japan, the phillipines and australia before already. And the Taiwanese seem almost to have been discouraged from taking the civil exam.

Conquest and empire building in the european style were not the chinese way? In what way exactly? And why bring that up with the Kangxi emperor? The guy was a conquerer and not even chinese, he was a Manchu, and their dynasty conquered and colonized huge parts of east asia. This author had a serious tendency to sugarcoat the chinese. After all, I hear nothing about woman and drug trafficking in china.

So the Cheng regime kept the dutch taxes almost unaltered and supported trade. But what is the author going on about linking kidnapping of women as wives for taiwanese men to what happened in the early 2000s? he says young women are still induced to come to Taiwan as wives for wealthy businessmen working in China and talks about Taiwan being a hub for woman and drug trafficking.

Did he mean to be sarcastic when he claimed that the Dutch never appreciated the honor of being in the Manchu tributary system? After all, what was this giving presents and receive presents supposed to be good for, for the Dutch? Is the author sugarcoating China?

So the Manchus ordering the evacuation of the southeast coast caused a lot of people seeking their fortune in Taiwan despite its reputation of barbarians and disease then stay in Fujian.

Interesting to read about the differences between Koxinga's reception in Taiwan and China at the time but I did wonder whether the author's statements about chinese leaders had any actual relevance back then. He comes with the whole "we need to feed our people" again and it sounds quite romanticized. And I noticed that he accused the Dutch of racism but never the Chinese.

I disagree with the author in 2 points here:
1) Simple meritocracy did not and does not simply lie at the heart of chinese government and administration past or present. Back then big parts of the population were barred from either rising in the ranks.
2) Even back in 2005 when this came out was the chinese leadership not really concerned with the welfare of the people.

I wondered what would have happened if the Siamese authorities had imprisoned this one Dutch captain for having so many armed bodyguards.

well, Koxinga did not play around when rooting out Dutch in the hinterlands and threaten the natives. Usually the Dutch were crucified to frighten the aborigines and later the dutch men were killed and their wives given as concubines to his soldiers and officers. The author stated that some areas in Taiwan bear a physical resemblance to the Dutch in having red and auburn hair. I wonder if that is correct.

hm, I can believe that conviction in dutch superiority of their musketeers was a factor in their eventual defeat.

So the Dutch accepted the influx of people even if outside their control because of their growing sugar cane industry, Cheng might have brought "fighting men" as a reservoir for later troops and he de facto set up a 22 year old puppet emperor on the Ming throne to oppose the Qing.

So it was Cheng who suggested to the government of Fujian that thousands of people should be brought from the famine stricken province to Taiwan to help in the Dutch agriculture. Also, the author mentions the Mandate of Heaven and I noticed that no one seems to bring that up for modern Taiwan, but I hear it for China.

This Li Tan (also called Captain China) seems to have been quite a capable man with how he managed to get to much profit out of them all. And apparently he suggested that the Dutch should go to Taiwan instead of Penghu as they originally wanted.

Are these big numbers of Hakka onm Taiwan in the 13th century supported by evidence? And is he sceptical of the claim of Chinese vassal system being "profoundly different from the aggressive imperialism then beginning to reach out from Europe" or is he supporting it? Plus, what imperialism in the 13th/14th century from Europe? Is he referring to the crusades?

I do wonder how he can be so sure that Taiwan was not confused with Ryukyu Islands now if it happened back then. And he makes it sound as if there was a big Hakka presence on Taiwan even back in the 11th century and I wonder how he knows that. I cannot remember other sources state this.

The author definitely knows how to write that is for sure. Telling a history so gripping is a valuable skill to have.

I did not expect this book to start with an assassination attempt in the early 2000s.