Intertwined Narratives: A Survey of Books on Taiwanese History

This article is written by Jenna Lynn Cody and Brendan Cody.

When I first moved to Taiwan 15 years ago, I remember a night of pool and beer with my then-roommates, thrown together because we were all teachers at the same chain of cram schools. At one point, the conversation turned to the Grand Hotel (圓山大飯店). None of us had been there yet, but someone said he’d heard it “used to be a palace for a princess”. That seemed off to me — it was clearly newer than that, and what princess? In Taiwan? — but I didn’t know enough about Taiwan’s history to categorically state that he was incorrect (he was).

I myself didn’t learn the name of the party in power at the time (the Democratic Progressive Party, or DPP) for at least a month, and it was October before I realized the political situation was even more complicated than two parties battling it out, as I puzzled over the Red Shirts marching near Taipei Main Station in late 2006. I had only the vaguest notion that Taiwan had been a colony of Japan, which I imagined was fairly brief (it wasn’t). I was aware that the 228 Massacre had happened, but not the extent to which it formed a nexus around which already-extant Taiwanese identity would coalesce. And, naively, I assumed for a few happy months that justice had eventually prevailed (it hadn’t).

To put it mildly, all of us would have been better off if we’d read a clear history of Taiwan before arriving, or soon after landing. I picked up on this fairly quickly and began to do just that, although I mostly picked up history via references in current political affairs.

Fast forward a decade and a half, and I had morphed into a blogger focusing on Taiwanese politics, writer at Ketagalan Media and creator of the Books About Taiwan Facebook group (which, by the way, everyone should join). I had read some general history, and so had my husband, but a question posted in the early days of that group piqued our interest: what did everyone think of the available general histories of Taiwan? The discussion came to no clear answer.

It would be better for Taiwan and its foreign community if such books were more widely read, but which ones to recommend? We had no idea.

That’s when our plan was hatched: my husband and I, two avid bookworms, would systematically read every general history of Taiwan that we could find. We both read the most popular titles, and we split the rest of the work evenly: I took the fiery political manifestos, he took the drier, more scholarly work. Together, we felt we could take a clear look at all of the literature available and offer some clear recommendations on who should read what, and why.

These are the fruits of our labor — not just reading but hours of discussion — covering eight books: A New Illustrated History of Taiwan; Forbidden Nation; Taiwan’s 400-Year History; Taiwan: A New History; Taiwan: A Political History; A History of Agonies; and The Concise History of Taiwan: Chinese-English Bilingual Edition.

A New Illustrated History of Taiwan
Wan-yao Chou

Chou begins A New Illustrated History with a challenge: Isn’t the so-called “400 years of Taiwanese history” just the view of male Han as they retrace their history?

She is referring to Su Beng’s seminal work, discussed below, and she has a point. Most general histories of Taiwan begin as Su Beng did: with a brief mention of Indigenous Taiwan, the fabled Portuguese sighting of the island in the 16th century, and then straight on to the Dutch colonial era. They recount notable figures — “Great Men” — who are, indeed, almost entirely male. They may offer a Taiwan-focused perspective on Taiwanese history, but that focus always ends up being Han-centric. It seems to inevitably lead that way, when “notable figures” were so often male and Han (but not necessarily from Taiwan).

Chou sought to upend this tendency by writing a loosely chronological narrative that highlights the contributions of locals, including women and Indigenous Taiwanese. Chapters sprinkled throughout the book focus on other topics of interest, such as Taiwanese art and music, Taiwanese education and the ways that waves of settlers and colonizers impacted Indigenous communities. This is one of the only books to mention influential Taiwanese women such as Chen Chu and Indigenous historical figures such as Mona Rudo, and the only one to look at both Hoklo and Indigenous rebellions while deconstructing the influences behind them.

As a careful scholar, Chou does not make too many explicit political points: rather, she lets the facts of history speak for themselves. As a result, A New Illustrated History comes closer than other books to not being an explicitly anti-KMT, pro-independence work, but she is clear about the atrocities visited on Taiwan by successive colonial regimes: history as it is spelled out a clear path for Taiwan and she doesn’t shy away from that, either.

The book lives up to the promise of the title, as well: it is the only general history of Taiwan that is indeed richly and helpfully illustrated throughout, including full-color visuals.

There are only two real issues with this otherwise astoundingly good work. While we support the decision to veer away from pure chronology, this might prove confusing to someone who lacks any historical knowledge of Taiwan. And, towards the end of the book, Chou makes a few arguments we find questionable: for example, that it’s reasonable for an incoming regime to impose a national language policy, especially if that language is foreign to most residents of the country they’re taking over. We fail to see any reasonable defense of such a policy, which is colonial to its core.

Forbidden Nation
Jonathan Manthorpe

Published in 2007, this is a standard-issue national history. Although it begins and ends with incumbent President Chen Shui-bian’s shooting on the eve of his second election, it is more or less chronological. Manthorpe lays his gauntlet with a different, but equally compelling challenge than Chou: Taiwan is entering an era where its 400-year-old dream of the island’s 23 million people to be internationally recognized as sovereign masters of their own house will be won or lost.

With this, Manthorpe takes a clear political side. To be fair, almost every book on Taiwan’s history does; one is unlikely to choose to study and write about Taiwan in particular if they think of the country as merely an extension of a Chinese nation or outpost of Chinese culture. And Manthorpe makes good cases for his stance. His argument for the Qing era being a clearly colonial one, conferring no legitimacy on China’s so-called “historic” claim to the island, is especially sound: he goes into detail regarding what the Qing actually controlled, how they referred to it (as an eternal “other”, a ball of mud beyond their civilization, worth using as farmland for their own benefit but not developing further), how many Taiwanese entered the Chinese Imperial bureaucracy (almost none) and how many imperial officials of Taiwanese origin actually held office in Taiwan (none that we know of).

Despite being older than A New Illustrated History, Manthorpe’s book is probably easier to digest for the Taiwan neophyte. In fact, if more people read this book before offering opinions on Taiwan, many of the pointless arguments about what Taiwan is and what it stands for might be avoided.

However, he makes the mistake that Chou astutely avoids. By focusing on “Great Men”, he says very little about the culture or local life in Taiwan. He more or less ignores Indigenous Taiwanese for almost the entire narrative, and very few women are mentioned at all. In fact, most of the Great Men he highlights aren’t Taiwanese at all: they’re from China, Japan, or the West. For a book that aims to make the case for Taiwan as a sovereign nation, it’s odd that the Taiwanese are left out of so much of the narrative.

Taiwan’s 400-Year History
Su Beng

Some history texts function well as sources or clarify why one interpretation of history might be more accurate than another. Others might tell you about history but are better considered as objects of inquiry for other sources to interrogate. Su Beng’s telling of the story of Taiwan probably suits the latter.

The story around the story is certainly compelling: running a noodle shop in Tokyo, a political revolutionary turned exile realizes that there is no “history of Taiwan”, no written narrative that tells Taiwan’s story as its own. So he sets out to write one after days of slinging noodles; it took years and filled several volumes. It’s published first in Japanese, then smuggled into Taiwan from the US by none other than Nylon Deng, who would later go on to self-immolate rather than be arrested by the KMT. The books circulated underground in Taiwan for years, offering a fresh perspective that breathed life into what it meant to be Taiwanese. The end of Martial Law and democratization meant that Taiwan’s 400-Year History could finally be published openly, and it remains a document of historical interest.

The English edition is abridged from the original Mandarin, taking up one slim volume instead of several fat ones. Most of what remains is a standard chronological narrative, although as with Forbidden Nation, he gives Indigenous Taiwanese very little space. While it’s fun to see him call out compradores from several generations ago by name — those names of notable, wealthy men surely meant more to readers at the time than they do now — and talk of Taiwan’s rebellions against foreign rule, some analyses are highly questionable.

Most notably, as an avid Marxist at the time, Su Beng described Taiwanese society as Hoklo and Hakka settler farmers banding together with Indigenous Taiwanese due to their similar class interests, uniting against the wealthy compradore classes.

To put it mildly, this is not what happened. Hoklo settlers were just as complicit in the unjust treatment of Indigenous Taiwanese. To prioritize the desired narrative analysis over an honest discussion of events in those centuries is difficult to forgive. This is likely a key reason why Chou specifically called out Su Beng when she prefaced her own work as an upending of the Han male perspective on Taiwan.

However, Taiwan’s 400-Year History is itself a piece of history. I would not read it to actually understand Taiwan’s historical timeline better, but I recommend it as a way of understanding a certain kind of document that clarifies the beliefs and biases of 20th Century Taiwanese identity from a leftist perspective.

Taiwan: A New History
Edited by Murray A. Rubinstein

This compilation of seventeen articles by various authors covers the political, economic, social, and literary developments in Taiwan from before the Dutch colonial period to the end of the 20th century; an additional chapter in the expanded edition takes us up to the year 2007. The multiple authors bring different perspectives to the collection, but together the articles form a fairly comprehensive history of the country. While some chapters provide the backbone historical narrative from the 17th to the 21st century, others focus on particular topics such as literature, religion, and Indigenous peoples.

The coverage is a bit idiosyncratic, and there’s a whole chapter on economic conditions in Fujian in the 1600s that barely mentions Taiwan (the significance is that these were the economic conditions that spurred much early Han migration). Taken as a whole, this collection provides a good overview of Taiwanese history, one of the best I’ve seen within a single volume. It does suffer a bit from being dated; in his introduction, editor Murray A. Rubenstein describes Taipei as the “stronghold of the ‘ethnic’ mainlander population that still dominates the central government” and goes on to refer to the Taipei suburbs (before the MRT) as “choking sprawl” (p. ix-x), which probably seemed fairer in the late 1990s than it does now.

Some particular highlights from my perspective include Michael Stainton’s overview of various theories of the origin of Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples, with emphasis on how the issue has been heavily politicized in the twentieth century, Robert P. Weller’s fascinating look at Taiwanese religion, and the chapters by Rubenstein and Cal Clark dealing with Taiwanese politics and diplomacy towards the end of the twentieth century. There is no mention of the infamous 1992 Consensus, but to be fair the relevant chapter was completed in the year 1999, when the 1992 Consensus did not exist yet.

Attention is paid to the development of Taiwanese society during the late twentieth century, although some topics that could have merited their own sections get little or no treatment; there are a few pages on Taiwanese feminist movements in the chapter on Taiwan’s socioeconomic modernization, but there is nothing at all on the LGBT community, which is another way that the book comes across as somewhat dated now. But on the whole there is still a lot to recommend in this 539-page collection; a reader with an interest in Taiwan can turn to any chapter that seems of interest and potentially learn something new.

Taiwan: A Political History
Denny Roy

This 2003 book does what it says on the cover: provide a relatively brief (246 pages) overview of Taiwan’s political history, particularly its post-1945 history. I wouldn’t recommend it to a Westerner as the first book they read about Taiwan, but it is an engaging and readable look at the evolution of Taiwanese politics during the second half of the 20th century.

Although pre-1945 Taiwan is covered in its first two chapters, the coverage (42 pages in all) is too scant to be satisfying. I wonder if the book would have been stronger if the first two chapters had been condensed into a prelude and the book was explicitly focused on the post-1945 era. The editing of the early chapters can be confusing, as well. On page 21, Roy writes of “a total of 159 sizable rebellions during the period of Qing rule, including three particularly large ‘Great Rebellions’ in 1714, 1787, and 1833”. He then never again refers to rebellions in any of these three particular years, although in the very next paragraph he describes an uprising in 1721 that was so large that it sent panicked Qing authorities fleeing Taiwan for a time.

Fortunately, once Roy reaches 1945, the narrative is able to slow down and breathe. With over three-quarters left to go, the book gets its chance to shine. Considering the book’s relatively short length, Roy covers a considerable amount, from ROC foreign policy to democratization, and there is no particularly clear political bias. That being said, social and economic issues are largely beyond the scope of this political history, which means he also includes little about marginalized voices, apart from some short sections on Indigenous activism.

If you are already aware of the broad strokes of the history of the ROC on Taiwan and would like to know more but don’t want to wade through too much turgid academic text, you could do a lot worse than Taiwan: A Political History, at least for the period up to the 2003 publication date. Just enough time has passed since publication that the description of some figures is quite time capsule-like, most notably Taipei mayor Ma Ying-jeou as an anti-corruption crusader.

Taiwan: A History of Agonies
Ong Iok-tek

Written by another Taiwan independence activist and in the same vein as Su Beng’s work, A History of Agonies is yet another interesting read as an object of inquiry. While Ong doesn’t go after as many compradores by name as Su Beng, his detailing of the various rebellions against Qing and Japanese rule resembles full-blown spreadsheets. He speaks plainly of the KMT’s brutality as well and pulls no punches. He de-centers as many non-Taiwanese as possible, including notable figures such as George Leslie Mackay, Robert Swinhoe, and the various Dutch, Qing and Japanese leaders, including the influential Liu Ming-chuan.

However, as with Su Beng’s work, this is more of a political manifesto than a source text for history. In addition to centering male, Han activists, as Su Beng does, Ong’s description of Indigenous Taiwanese is overtly racist, recycling several tired and offensive stereotypes that we will not repeat here. One saving grace is that the editors of the latest edition are aware of this and take pains to clarify that they are attempting to preserve Ong’s original wording for the sake of historical accuracy, almost admitting within the preface itself that this book is an object of inquiry: worth reading if you are curious about how that perspective portrayed itself at one point in history, but not as a reliable general history text itself.

The Concise History of Taiwan: Chinese-English Bilingual Edition
Tai Pao-tsun, translated by Ruby Lee

This book is indeed concise: at about 200 pages, half of which are in English and the other half Mandarin, this bilingual beginner’s guide to Taiwan can be easily read in an evening. It fully abandons a chronological narrative, instead focusing on topic areas: Indigenous Peoples, Immigrants, Colonization, Towards a National State and Taiwanese and World Citizens. The chapter on colonization was also the book’s weakest: it discussed every colonial regime except the Chinese ones — the Qing and the ROC — implying that those regimes were somehow less colonial simply because they came from China.

However, there is an explicit understanding that Taiwan is, indeed, a nation, and Tai astutely avoids arguing that forcing Mandarin to become the national language was a reasonable move. The chapter on immigrants talks about every type of immigrant from China, including Hoklo and Hakka settlers as well as the 1949 KMT diaspora and the more recent influx of Southeast Asians. Tai neglects Western immigrants in Taiwan, which may be understandable as we are a small community, but perhaps deserved a few sentences.

This book’s biggest flaw is its imperfect translation. Some areas cohere poorly, and other translation issues (such as calling the DPP the “DDP”) come across as unprofessional. In one instance, the narrative calls Taiwanese people “tolerable” rather than “tolerant”. This speaks to the lack of funding for good editors — even native-speaker translators can benefit from having a dedicated editor on the team.

The Concise History of Taiwan offers one major benefit: it’s bilingual. Those looking for Chinese reading material for language learning with English support might find this a useful book to check out, or even use in Mandarin classes as a pedagogical text.

Recommendations

It is difficult to recommend a particular title from the books above: almost all are approaching outdatedness, as all were published before 2014. The Sunflower Movement in that year and the Tsai administration following it have played a vital role in changing notions of what it means for Taiwan to have its own cultural and national history, and what it means to be Taiwanese. Hopefully, new editions and titles in the coming years will weave contemporary events into the fabric of Taiwanese history.

For now, the optimal general Taiwan history book would both offer a clear timeline for neophytes as well as dive into local culture and achievements rather than focusing on “great men” who might not even be local, let alone relevant to the everyday lives of those who lived in these eras and their cultural touchstones. Forbidden Nation offers the former: although it’s not perfectly chronological, the arc of time is clear. However, its focus on mostly foreign, mostly male notable people is its fatal flaw. A New Illustrated History of Taiwan offers the cultural deep dive in spades, although someone new to Taiwan would have a hard time following any sort of timeline of key events, and attempts at political neutrality are questionable in a few places, such as endorsing the enforcement of a “national language”.

Our recommendation, then, would be for those who know the path of Taiwan from Indigenous land through various eras of colonialism to read A New Illustrated History of Taiwan. Newcomers might prefer to start with Forbidden Nation, but move on to Chou’s book to fill in the gaps Manthorpe leaves in his narrative.

For those seeking other types of work, other titles provide interesting fodder. Taiwan: A New History offers an academic dive into specific issues, Taiwan: A Political History provides a focus on the postwar era, The Concise History of Taiwan would be a good choice for Chinese reading practice, and Taiwan’s 400-Year History as well as A History of Agonies are fascinating objects of inquiry in their own right.

Whichever you choose, a deeper knowledge of the history of Taiwan will certainly be beneficial to anyone who seeks it.

(Feature photo from Jenna Lynn Cody)