Rebel Island - Jonathan Clements on the history of Taiwan - part 1

Jonathan Clements has written a number of histories of East Asia. His latest, Rebel Island, is a history of Taiwan from the earliest times up to today. If you have any interest in the history of the region this book is an absolute must read. And while it is a serious and meticulously researched history it is also genuinely gripping with 'Blimey! I didn't know that!' moments on every other page. Really terrific stuff.

We ran rather long so I split it into two parts. Part 1 takes us all the way up to the eve of the arrival of the Japanese who established it as a colony in 1895. Jonathan was a hugely entertaining and enthusiastic guest and the depth of his learning really shines through.

And do check out Jonathan's blog, the eccentrically named Schoolgirl Milky Crisis. Full of fascinating history and, indeed, reviews of Finnish cinema!

Transcript

Russell 0:04

Hello and welcome to Subject Exchange with me, Russell Hog. My guest today is Jonathan Clement. Jonathan is an historian who has written many highly acclaimed books, mainly centering on the history of East Asia. And he's written on a huge range of subjects. But I first came across him when I read his book, Rebel Island, which is a history of Taiwan from its earliest days, pre-colonial times, right up to the present day. And I think people should really seek it out because Taiwan is such an important country in the world today. And I think Jonathan's book is incredibly useful in understanding its history and the reviews in the press as well. They couldn't have been much more positive if they'd tried. Anyway, welcome Jonathan to the podcast. Lovely to be here. I feel my introduction really didn't do justice to the huge range of your work. Because once I'd finished Rebel Island, I enjoyed it so much that I rushed out and got some more books by you. And I got one on Japan's war in the Pacific, I got one on the first Emperor of China, and then there was a sort of a history of China which was explored through its cuisine. And I'm also an anime fan, so I got your book on that. So you seem to have just an incredible range of interest.

SPEAKER_00 1:24

Well, East Asia, luckily for me, is a very big place and covers a lot of areas. So over the years, I've kind of m my agent's very pleased I can handle China and Japan because sometimes China goes out of fashion for a while, and we and we can switch over to Japan for a bit until people uh get interested again. Um so in terms of book sales and in terms of interest, it's very interesting to watch kind of my my Amazon charts go up and down in terms of um you know what's on Netflix at the moment and what's in the news and so on. In in an academic sense, most of my books are about the same thing. They are about state formation. Okay. Uh you know, you mentioned the First Emperor, you mentioned Japan at War in the Pacific, you mentioned Rebel Island. These are all books about someone putting a nation together because you know that there's no safety net and there's no rule book. And but someone has to invent these things and make them work. Uh in the case of Taiwan, uh, I think well are there are there's a dozen chapters in the book, and pretty much a different polity is claiming Taiwan in every one of those chapters. Yeah. So state formation is something I really love. Technological determinism is something that I love, uh, which is this is this is probably this is probably way too deep for the start of the podcast. We've already scared everybody off. Go for it, go for it. So I'm also a technological determinist. I love the way that technology influences history. And so in my history of cooking, for example, uh in my history of Chinese food, you you can see the way that different technologies and different inventions and different um acquisitions of geographical areas, different foods, you know, change, transform what Chinese food is and how it can be made and what people can expect of it. So I do all those things. The other thing that's a really quite a recent interest of mine comes up in Rebel Island, it comes up in Japan at War in the Pacific as well, is songs. I am getting obsessed with not the way that history looked, but the way that history sounded. And so I often find myself asking, what do they sing in school assembly in Japan in 1941? Um, you know, what what's that song on the radio that you keep hearing in that movie? And so I do kind of delve around into um popular songs, you know, not just from the late 20th century, but you know, going way, way back into, you know, what Japan, for example, was completely transformed in 1927 by by you know the not only the arrival of uh the radio, but the arrival of the gramophone. And so you get these amazing pop culture outreach moments in Japanese propaganda history. Like there was this song about a wizard in the street in China, which the Japanese army they they they printed tens of thousands of copies of it on the gramophone records, and they basically strewed them across China to try and to try and encourage people to think of the Japanese as kind of friendly invaders. Um it didn't work particularly, but it's this really obscure song, which it which sounds like nothing unless you know the context it happened in. Um so so though those are all things that I find really interesting. And and and normally when you read one of my books, you find these these kind of topics starting to haunt whatever it is I'm supposed to be writing about.

Russell 4:29

One of the frustrating things uh in the book, uh well, uh which I sense you found frustrating is that you have all these songs and you think, oh, this is an ancient song, it goes back, and then you find it only goes back a couple of years, or at any rate the lyrics only go back a couple of years, and trying to trying to work out how old a song is is incredibly difficult.

SPEAKER_00 4:50

Absolutely. I mean the the concept of invented tradition is is you know very, very big in in modern uh historiography. There are all kinds of things, you know. For example, the history of the kilt, which we now know to to to have been something that was basically knocked off. I won't hear any of this. This is the first clan tartan that was sold in Edinburgh turned out to have been knocked off on a on a Jamaican loom uh for slaves. Correct. Uh and and was then palmed off on on some passing Scotsman. So um so so the invented tradition, it's not it's not necessarily a bad thing to discover that these things aren't as old as they are, but it normally turns out that that various things that we that we all assume that everything around us has always been that way, and it's not necessarily the case. And so, yes, there are some lovely cases in Taiwan of uh well, I mean, Annette Liu, who was uh the vice president of Taiwan for a while, she was at a conference in uh somewhere in Europe, I think, and she said, Oh, I'm gonna sing you a song about this this kind of love affair between a Dutchman and a and a and a Chinese girl, and it's an ancient song, and and it's very popular in in Taiwan, and it's it's come down to us over the last 300 years. Anyway, the the song she was ended up singing was eight years older than she was. That's all it takes. Yeah, but but she didn't know, but she didn't know because she assumed it was ancient, you know. You find these wonderful kind of doggeral songs among some of the indigenous peoples in Taiwan, which they assume to be older than time itself, which turn out to have been taught to them by Chinese uh by Chinese merchants fifty years earlier. It's a particular problem with indigenous studies. Yes, because there's nothing written down, there's nothing recorded. There's nothing written down, there's nothing recorded, and we have these you know oral traditions which may or may not uh stretch back a long way. I mean, I I one one of the opening uh elements in in Rebel Island in the history of Taiwan is the story of of the um of the pasta'ai ritual, which is this this amazing um biannual ritual that's conducted by the Siseat people in in Taiwan, and it and it celebrates or rather commemorates and and attempts to atone for uh a genocide they committed against another tribe. The the question is then you know, well, when when did this happen? Because they there's one argument that it happened 400 years ago, and there's one argument that it happened 4,000 years ago. And so uh so yes, uh I can't remember what the question was now.

Russell 7:11

Well, I slightly derailed us because I was I just got interested in the fact that songs were an interest of you, and I'd sort of picked it up in the book. But look, um you you open your book, so let's let's go to that because I thought it was quite well, it was a very arresting opening. Very interesting. Which is the wreck of the rover. And uh that was back in 1867, I think. And so that's sort of I don't know, that's sort of uh quite a long way into the history of Taiwan that you cover in the book, but but you sort of kick off with that. And my sense was that this was to introduce uh what I saw as one of the key themes of your book, which is the perpetual conflict in Taiwan between the outsiders and the indigenous peoples. Do you want to sort of tell the story of the rover? Because I think it's a good one.

SPEAKER_00 7:56

I decided to kick off with the rover in part because it's a great story, and despite generations of of history professors trying to stop people using the mode of implotment to stop people telling stories in history and expecting them to have some kind of narrative force, the popular historian has to fight against that and try and entertain people as well. I think that the rover is a very entertaining story. And I I chose it partly because that the crew of the rover, when they're wrecked on the coast of South Taiwan in 1867, blunder into Taiwan in much the same way that the general reader will. They know nothing about it, they weren't ready for it at all, and they're just hit by all of these things. And I thought that would be a great way to start a book, which is designed people who know nothing about Taiwan whatsoever. I mean, yeah, you know, reviewers have very kindly said it has something to teach old Taiwan hands as well, but but you know, it's supposed to be for the general reader. So 1867, there's this American trading vessel called the Rover, and it's it's dealing with the Chinese. It's uh it's heading from uh Swato on the South Chinese coast, and it's going up to Manchuria. And it's the s the waters are very dangerous, um, both because of humans and because of rocks. So they decide to um go around the back of Taiwan, around uh on the eastern side of Taiwan. The mapping in those days was very poor. There were no lighthouses, they came way too close to um a load of rocks that they knew were there, but they they thought they could try and you know make it past them. Uh and they didn't, and they they smashed into these rocks and the ship foundered and it took on water and it started to capsize, and so they had to jump into their uh into the boats and and run for it. And they were at sea for about 17 hours, very, very strong currents in South Taiwan, but they eventually kind of sloshed ashore at the very, very um southern tip of Taiwan into native territory, into the the territory of the of the in fact it was a a tribe called the Koalit Paiwan. That area of Taiwan uh is a very, very tiny patchwork of different little tribal communities. If they'd been three hundred yards further down the beach, they would have come across uh come into the land of a completely different tribe. Uh but they found themselves in the world of the Koal at Paiwan, and as they sloshed ashore, Captain Joseph Hunt's wife, Mercy, saw a woman uh on the shoreline, uh, a native woman, so she she kind of ran over to her and she tried to say as best she could in sign language and gestures, you know, we're we're wrecked, can you help us? And this woman stared at her for a bit and then ran into the forest. And Mercy said, Well, I don't know if that's really worked, but we'll find out, I suppose. And then uh a while later, a bunch of coalit tribesmen come running out of the forest and kill them all. One of them gets away, uh one of the one of the sailors gets away um uh to tell this the tale, but the rest of them are all murdered by by coalit tribesmen. What the hunts didn't know was that they had very unluckily come ashore in the middle of this big coalit ritual where the local men had to win a head in order to win a wife. So that didn't help. Uh also the coalit were incredibly suspicious of foreigners because they had been uh raided in the past by uh by people from an unknown country, probably China, I expect. Um, but it could it could have been anyone in in South Taiwan. And this was a this is something that that's that happens dozens of times in in Taiwanese history. On this occasion, uh well, firstly there was a survivor, um, and secondly, the coalite were absolutely aghast um at what had happened themselves because they were only supposed to kill men. Um Mercy Hunt had normally wore these big Victorian dresses, but they got wet when they got off the ship, so she was wearing a sailor's clothes, they thought she was a man, and they killed her. They started to believe that there was a curse on their village and that all these various things that were happening to them, people being eaten by sharks, for example, were the result of um of this attack. Meanwhile, Mercy Hunt had a very wealthy family back home in America, and so they offered, her relatives offered twenty-five hundred dollars for the return of her remains uh for a Christian burial, which at the time was what a working man could expect to earn in a year. It was a lot of money. So suddenly you get all of these fortune hunters descending on the south of Taiwan, trying to deal with the tribesmen, saying, Hey, have you killed anyone lately that we could buy the body of you? We'll give you 15 bucks. That's one of one of them actually offered them $15 for it. Um, and and so the tribes are getting very nervous about this now and wondering what's going on. Um, meanwhile, in Amoy, uh across the water, the American consul decides that he's going to take matters into his own hands. And he's a fantastic historical character called Charles Legendre. He was born in France, but he um he emigrated to the United States uh just in time for the Civil War, uh, where he made a lot of money uh but also got shot in the face. He he only had he had a bit of his nose missing, he had only had one eye. Uh he was a real a real wreck of a human being. Uh but he had this idea in his head that he could really deal with the Chinese, and he felt that Taiwan was a as a was a a microcosm of China as a whole. He actually wrote a book called How to Deal with China, um which which which he framed as advice to the um Secretary of State. And the Secretary of State said, I want nothing to do with this, take it away. But but he printed up 200 copies of it and strewed it liberally around the overseas community, trying to make himself look like he knew what he was talking about. Um and he he had this real desire to make a name for himself. He'd been reprimanded repeatedly um by the American government for for taking matters too far into his own hands. But he did it again and he uh he uh managed to convince the Chinese that they were taking an expedition to punish the coalit Paiwan. He then climbed aboard the ship and went with them and and went into negotiations with the leader of the coalit, who was uh um uh a man called Toki Tok. His name was Guru Guj Tokitchok, but they they the Americans called him Toki Tok. And so the coalit uh explained why the the hunts had been killed. Legendre tried to explain why this wasn't a good thing, and the coalits tried to explain, well, this is our land, we didn't ask you to come here, um which is one of the big moments of self-determination, really. It's like it's all the the the Americans arrived with this assumption of salvage, with this assumption of rescue, with this idea of the law of the sea, which actually dates all the all the way back to Justinian, that people are obliged to help each other. And the coalit's like, nope, didn't get that memo. And any but anyway, Toky Tok was a very powerful leader. He he led a a confederation of 18 tribes uh in the south. He was impressed by the firepower the Americans brought with them, but he was also impressed by the genre who who did all these kind of parlor tricks. There's one moment when he said, If you don't cooperate, I'm gonna pull out my own eye and put it on the table to watch over us while we talk. And then and then he pulled out his own his fake eye and stuck it on the table, and they all they just weren't ready for that at all. Um, and so eventually they had a deal. Um they they did a deal. Um Tokitok said, Okay, next time someone's shipwrecked on on the shore, put up a red flag, we will take care of them. You know, you've got to reimburse us, you know, with some money and stuff. Um, but if you do that, we we we'll hand these people back because we don't want the trouble, we don't want foreigners coming here, we don't want the Chinese coming here, uh, we just want to be left alone, and if if this is what it takes, this is what we'll do. That brings me to one of the the the point I'm really making with the introduction, which is that at one level this is a dodgy American uh wide boy doing a handshake deal with a local gangster not to murder people. But at another level, it is a man with American consulate authority signing a treaty with a local ruler who is not Chinese. And the Chinese are uh on Taiwan are claiming to own the whole island. It sets a precedent for there being a multiplicity of views in Taiwan, a multiplicity of politicies. The idea that the Chinese didn't control it all, the idea that um this um thing called the Sekalu Confederacy in in South China, uh in South Taiwan, sorry, could be a nascent state, a primitive state, perhaps by the standards of the Americans, but nevertheless a state that they were dealing with at a consular level. There are also historiographical problems with this. I mean, while that's a really interesting argument to have, and it's one I have repeatedly throughout the book about various other um state entities in Taiwan, I'm also a little bit suspicious about the historiography because, as I point out in the book, so much of what I learned about Taiwanese history at university was completely overwritten in the last 25 years because the political situation changed in Taiwan, the uh the ruling Guomindang were thrown out, the Democratic Progressive Party came in, they promoted huge outpouring of um indigenous studies and revisionist history and revisionist approaches to history, all of which are very legitimate, but in the process of doing so they might have privileged certain narratives that didn't necessarily deserve that privileging. In the case of the word Sekalu, for example, the name of this Confederacy, if you poke around online, you can't find that word being used in Chinese uh before, I think, about 2016. Um before that point, the only time Sekalu turns up in Chinese is when they're disc is is is the name of the home planet of Doctor Who's Daleks. Uh Scaro. Skaro is Sekalu in in Chinese. So it could be a coincidence that it just doesn't get mentioned till 2016 in what passes for the online archive, or it could be that it was widely discussed in indigenous discussions and in indigenous publications and obscure books that never made it to you know a library in London, for example. But you know, what what that I hope establishes is that Taiwan is not just a Chinese state. It is also a state that has multiple indigenous communities within it. And and and although they've been pushed far, far into the hinterland and in and are now a tiny percentage of the population, they still nevertheless may have a say in how the future of the country looks.

Russell 18:10

I'm interested you say that it's that it's not just a Chinese state, because what very much surprised me was that you had the Dutch establish a colonial presence on Taiwan. And I'm kind of interested, you know, why were they there in the first place? You know, what were they what were they up to? But but the thing that really surprised me was that they were the reason the Chinese were there. At least they were the reason the Chinese were there in large numbers. What were the Dutch up to and and and and why are they linked with the Chinese like that?

SPEAKER_00 18:38

Uh well the Dutch were the Dutch East India Company, and as usual, they were up to no good. Um they uh their main interests uh in in Taiwan were they'd been kicked out of Macau uh by the Portuguese, and they were they were fighting for control of the trade routes with the Portuguese and the Spanish. As a technological determinist issue, their shipping was good enough to make it to the Far East now, and so they had the ability to trade in the Far East and the Chinese didn't want them to. And so, like all dodgy dealers on the on the seas, uh, from the Vikings onwards, they found an offshore bastion that they could control, which would allow them close access to the Chinese and to the Japanese, but also you know, not be on the mainland. Um the great thing about Taiwan is it's always been a backdoor to Japan. Back in the olden days, back in the Ming Dynasty, it was illegal to leave uh a Chinese port with more than two days food and water. And the idea behind that was that you could go fishing, but you'd have to come home again. Um and Taiwan was this fantastic thing just beyond the horizon because you could sail, you could go, I'm I'm leaving port now, I've just got my two days of water, see you, bye, and you'd sail out, you'd go over the horizon to Taiwan, it's only a day and a half away, you could restock on Taiwan and then sail leapfrog all the way up the Ryukyu Islands to Japan. Trade in Japan, offload your Chinese silk that you had in your hold instead of fish, buy a load of Japanese stuff, mainly swords, who are very keen on swords, come down the Ryukyu Islands and go back into port in Fujian in China, and no one was any the wiser. So it was always part of this kind of marine trade network, and the Dutch latched onto that as a great place to have a little base of their own. They were trading with the Chinese, uh, and they were trading um with the Japanese. Japan, at the time the Dutch arrived, was in the process of shutting itself down, uh shutting itself away from the outside world, and the Dutch were one of the few um foreign peoples who were permitted access um to Japan. And one of the things that Taiwan had that the Dutch really exploited was deer. Um because deer hides were an absolutely vital component in samurai armour and in samurai saddles. And in the course of 300 years of civil war in Japan, the the Japanese had pretty much killed all their deer. So so Taiwan, which was riddled with deer, uh, was this huge market in the 17th century uh for deer hides. And then the various bits and bobs of the deer, the giblets and the penis and everything, would be hacked off and dried and sold to the Chinese, uh, and the the meat was dried and and and sold somewhere else, the horn was used. It was a very lucrative trade for them. So the the Dutch did great on that, and also, you know, camp fur and a bunch of other things as well that the Dutch did very well with. Um but uh as you say, yes, I mean I mean one of the things that the Dutch wanted to do was to have a permanent colony and which required large amounts of manpower, and this is this is another controversial issue in in terms of historiography, because Chinese historians want to tell you that Taiwan and China have had incredibly busy trade contacts for hundreds and hundreds of years. But the evidence presented archaeologically and and also um in a documentary sense is that the Chinese presence on Taiwan was incredibly low until the Dutch showed up. When and when the Dutch started shipping thousands of Chinese settlers to Taiwan in In order to build farms and shops and so on, uh communities aro around Taiwan to create a colony, because the the Dutch were very, very low in number. There are only you know a few dozen of them at any point, so they they needed local manpower and they got that from China. So you get this huge influx of of Chinese settlers into Taiwan, which is which is largely Dutch created. Um the Dutch are basically responsible for that. Uh but you can quibble with that as well if you like, because the Dutch didn't have enough ships to move all those people, so they leaned on Chinese smugglers to bring those people over. And um Zhang Jelong, Nicholas Sequan, who was the uh who ended his life as uh well he ended his life. It's a long story how he ended his life. We'll maybe get to that. Yeah. Uh but but he he was he was probably instrumental in in shipping these people over. So they they used Chinese manpower, but there were Dutch people at the top making the decision to take those people there. And many of them were very grateful to go because China was in the middle of a of a very difficult climatic period, and also eventually invaded by the Manchus. So it was a very attractive proposition to run over the horizon and and settle somewhere else.

Russell 23:06

And as you say, the Dutch were up to no good. I mean, I don't have a rosy-eyed view of the British Empire, but but when I compare it to some of the other imperial projects, I'm sort of stunned by the massacres uh and barbarity that get carried out, say, by the Portuguese when they're conquering or when they're moving into the Indian Ocean. And and I sort of f feel the Dutch they are absolutely ruthless, aren't they? And and and you talk about the uh is it the Lamy Island massacre? I mean it was quite um it was quite shocking.

SPEAKER_00 23:39

I'm not going to get into relative arguments about who was the worst imperialist, mainly because I think uh it it takes us it down a road that no one wants to go to, which would be me pointing out that the most successful imperialist power in Asia in the eighteenth century was China, uh which doubled the size of its empire um in the 80 years after they took over Taiwan. But we'll get to that, I expect. Um Yes, uh the the Dutch, the British, the French, the Belgians have all been awful in the way they treat people. Um and it's often I'm not defending it in any way, but I think it's often a technological determinist issue. I mean, we we are bringing these people with vast firepower into places that don't have any, and so it becomes much easier to massacre entire communities uh when you have the technology to do so, um, even if you're not planning on doing so. Um in the case of the Lamy Island massacre, if you asked the Dutch at the time uh what they were doing, they would tell you that they were avenging an injustice against them. The exact wording is uh it was an example for their murderous actions against our people, because there was a a Dutch ship which disappeared uh in the Chinese Seas called the Beverwik, and it turned out it it it took it took about five years for them to work out what had happened to it, but eventually they worked out that it had run ashore on on a place called Lamy Island in in South Taiwan, and uh the survivors of the ship had come ashore, much like the people would do on the rover two hundred years later, and were massacred by the locals, uh much as the crew of the rover were. But unfortunately for the Lamy Islanders, they left evidence around of the of bits of the ship and stuff they'd stolen from the um crew of the Bevrowik. Uh and so when the Dutch found that out, they they sent a military party uh against them. Which it comprised uh there were a hundred Dutchmen in in the party, but they're also they were outnumbered by Taiwanese people, so a lot of the atrocities may have been committed by Taiwanese people against other Taiwanese people. But I think the real the really atrocious thing about the Lamy Island um incident was that the people where men, women and children tried to hide in caves, and and the Dutch lit fires at the caves and basically smoked them out, and those who wouldn't come out were suffocated, and those who did come out were killed. Um so it was uh it was a genocidal act against the Lamy the Lamy Islanders. I mean, some of them were enslaved, and at least one of them became a servant of the Dutch East India Company and ended up uh living in Amsterdam.

Russell 26:03

History is so strange that way. He ends up with a Dutch wife in Amsterdam, two Dutch wives, it's extraordinary.

SPEAKER_00 26:10

Hasn't he suffered enough? He's got two Dutch wives. Uh uh and they called it his his name is he's recorded on the the church list as Jacob um Lamy von Taiwan, uh Van Taiwan. Extraordinary. But but but anyway, yeah, so so the Lehmany Island Massacre was was was a horrible thing. Uh that um yeah, so uh it it's it's difficult to uh once you start talking about colonial history, you are always in this this this problem of uh of empire being a thing that turns people into terrible people because it it's not just the technology that allows you to kill, it's the vast amounts of money at stake for people, um, about being able to exploit um you know certain resources and and and then and not really caring about the people who have some kind of right on those resources.

Russell 26:57

Um okay, so so so we've established that the Dutch are not necessarily great people to have around, but you and and you've kind of foreshadowed it a little bit, um, because the um the Mings and the Manchus in China Well, the Manchus invade China and and are attacking the Ming who are being driven back and back and back, and that then has huge consequences for the history of Taiwan in due course.

SPEAKER_00 27:24

So what's happening somewhere else is Well Firstly, I think I should probably point out that saying that the Manchus invaded China is not permissible today. It's absolutely true. The Ming Dynasty's own records say, and then these foreigners called the Manchus showed up and invaded us. But one of the problems with writing history today about China is that the uh the People's Republic keeps changing the rules. Their own pursuit of a diverse nation, a nation with with over fifty ethnic minorities in it, is that Han people are not the only Chinese people. There are Mongols, there are Taiwanese, there are Zhuang, and and the Manchus are one of these peoples. Right. And this creates all kinds of trouble for historians. Um, to the extent that last month I was in Shanghai and I went down Fuzhou Street, which is the sheep which used to be the street of bookshops, and there's only a couple of bookshops left there now. But there's a massive place called the City of Books, and I went in there, and they had a huge history section, and I was very interested in the Chinese history section, um, and they had some very high-quality books in the Chinese history section, all of which I'd already read in English. Because it looked like the new Chinese history publishing, they've just given up. And so, you know, one of the most interesting new books about Chinese history was by Timothy Brooke, which two years earlier had already been published in English, but now it's in Chinese, um, because it's just too dangerous to say anything about um the closer you get to the to the present day in Chinese history, the more trouble you're likely to get into by saying, for example, the Manchus invaded China. Even though they came from north of the Great Wall, clues in the name, across that wall and attacked China and took it over and announced that they were the new rulers, they were very keen to establish themselves as legitimate inheritors of the mandate of heaven. One of the reasons that they they moved so fast was that the Ming dynasty was falling apart, uh, it was rotten from the inside, many people were very happily changing sides to the Manchus. Nobility retained their ranks even and just said, okay, well, you know, different hat on, different haircut, but you know, business continues as usual. And and this wave of of Manchu attacks came south south south very quickly. Within two or three years, the whole of China had been taken over, taking the Manchus themselves by surprise. But there was a kind of hotbed of resistance down in the southeast of China, uh, led by well, it wasn't led by anybody in i i uh initially, but there was a fugitive pretender, a fugitive Ming Emperor who who was supposedly the you know the the current candidate to to replace the the now dead last ruler of the Ming, and he fled to Fujian in search of help, and he got help from Nicholas Iquan, this smuggler that I mentioned, who was the was the uh master of this massive fleet. He was probably the richest man in the world at that time. That's how big a guy he was. And the Chinese had made him an admiral to stop him being a criminal. And so this this fugitive pretender leaned on Nicholas Iquan and and and said, You know, can you just help me? And then he had nothing to offer him except titles, so he was handing out titles everywhere. You're a duke, you're a prince, you're and he said to Nicholas Iquan's son, you have my surname. It was like a symbolic adoption of Nicholas Iquan's son. He said to this boy, uh, you are the bearer of the national name, you are the knight of the national name, Guo Xingye, which is where the name Kok Singa comes from. Uh Kok Singer, starstruck at this attention from this from this pretender, swore lifelong allegiance to the Ming. So even after his father switched sides, even after Fu Jen was conquered, Koksinger became the the leader of the Ming resistance, and he would he would continue to to fight the um the Manchus for twenty years.

Russell 31:01

But it doesn't go terribly well in China, does it? So he ends up having to having to hop over to Taiwan.

SPEAKER_00 31:07

It it it doesn't go very well for him. He takes so long. Uh I mean, basically he's the inheritor of a marine empire, of his father's coastal empire, and he can't really get off the coasts. He's got a lot of support on the coast, but but nothing going on further inland. And as a generation passes, there are people growing up now who don't even know what the Ming dynasty is. They've grown up in this Manchu state and they don't know what the Ming, they don't know what they would be fighting for. In the 1650s, he makes a uh uh I think 1657, he makes an assault on Nanjing. He goes up the uh the river to Nanjing, um, but refuses to attack it because Nanjing switched sides without a fight when it was invaded by the Manchu. So he wants it to switch sides without a fight um uh to him and it doesn't do it, and he's eventually beaten back. And the Manchus are so angry with this continued needling at their sides that they um proclaim uh an edict that the coastline is to be depopulated 20 miles in land. So a thousand miles of coastline, basically from Hong Kong to Shanghai, is entirely raised to the ground, depopulated, uh the people are thrown out, their livestock's killed, salted land, no one, nothing can live there. And and so left with very little option, Coxinger moves to Taiwan. He moves his army, which is a huge army, to Taiwan. Unfortunately, the Dutch are already there. Um and so we have the siege of Fort Zalandia in what is now Tainan, where Coxinger takes on the uh the Dutch and after a long siege um defeats them uh and and throws them um out of the country. Uh uh off the island. Uh he dies soon afterwards, but for the next 20 years, his family is basically running this resistance operation from Taiwan, which isn't very successful. Basically, it's it's going to take them a generation to grow the food and breed the soldiers to to to stake this comeback. So basically, they're on Taiwan in their own little private kingdom, running a kind of zombie Ming dynasty. They keep the Ming calendar, they report to an empty throne because the Ming and the Ming Emperor's not there. And and they've they refuse to give up on the idea of being the Ming dynasty. And there's quite strong evidence that if they'd have just knuckled under and said, fine, okay, we're not the Ming dynasty anymore, they would have been treated like Korea. Right. They would have said, okay, well, you know, you're not part of China, but you're kind of a tributary nation. Send us a few presents once a year, and we'll send you some stuff back, and and you know, we we'll just, you know, use our calendar, everything will be fine. But they just clung, they just clung to this this this think Ming was their uh um Ming was was was their um that was the name of Coxinger's base uh on on the mainland for a long time. And and and the big the big kind of slogan for them was Han Qing Fool Ming, uh resist the Qing, the Manchus, uh restore the Ming, uh, which was a kind of watchword. It was a sort of um a shibboleth among the the triads and the secret societies that they all they all pretended they were Ming uh revolutionaries kind of undercover for the next 200 years.

Russell 34:09

The Chinese are terribly good. The Chinese are terribly good at these punchy slogans. Chairman Mao had some great ones and uh sort of He he did have some very good ones. I can see where he got his examples from.

SPEAKER_00 34:20

As my as my Chinese teacher once said, the the great the way to make a four-character phrase is to get four characters and bung them together. Um and and and and and and this is something that I think a lot of foreigners don't appreciate. One of the reasons that that Weibor, um Twitter, uh uh you know, the Chinese version of Twitter is so big in China is that 120 characters in Chinese is a short essay. So you can say so much more in Chinese with with a more limited amount of data because the characters can be so expressive and so poetic.

Russell 34:50

Well we better we better not go down Twitter. So so so the Manchu that's the Qing dynasty now. They've now somehow lost the name Manchu and become the Qing dynasty. So they're they're fed up with uh with these Ming pretenders. I think that's where we've gotten to.

SPEAKER_00 35:07

Yeah. And so the Manchu's uh as you say, but they proclaim themselves as the Qing dynasty. They they say, no, we we are the legitimate inheritors, we're just a new dynasty, we've come along, the Ming have lost the mandate of heaven, we have been chosen to take over, and this means that everyone on Taiwan is a rebel and they have to be put down. And so eventually um they send a fleet to to Taiwan, which uh is led by a man called Shulang, uh uh who's who was a former officer in in Coxinger's army, but defective, and um they they take Taiwan, they get all of they round up all of the Ming soldiers and they they give them a job. Like they send them off to the Mongolian border. Um a lot of the Russian fights with so-called Chinese soldiers were actually with these former Ming loyalists who'd been sent to Albazin and kind of left there as kind of cannon fodder on on the borders. And the the leader of the of the the j the um Coxinger's forces on the Panghu Islands, he ended his days as um as the captain of the guard at one of the gates of Beijing. It was understood that they were uh they were loyal for the right reasons and they they weren't necessarily punished for it. I mean, you you could get into trouble for all kinds of things in Manchu, China, but but being a Ming loyalist who surrendered was not one of them. But then the Manchus have got this island, which they never wanted. Um The Manchus are um they're they're Jurchen people. They are they are step riding nomads. They're some people talk about them being afraid of the sea. Uh and I think fear might be too strong a word, but they certainly weren't used to it and and didn't really have any any trap with it or any understanding of how the sea might work. They didn't want to trade with other countries, they didn't want to have a marine presence, they didn't want to have a fleet. And so the the the the emperor at the time just says, Well, what are we doing with this? It's just a ball of mud, let's just, you know, leave it. We've we've got rid of the Ming people, we can just leave it. And Shilang says, no, no, no, no, no, no, we we we have to hang on to it. And I think partly that's Shillang having fought for years to gain this island, not wanting to just walk away from it. But also with a real strategic understanding, he knew that if they abandoned Taiwan, the Dutch and the English and the Portuguese would all be back. Um I mean that the the the English were already sniffing around. You know, the the the Opium Wars are still 150 years in the future, but the the the you know the European powers and and and subsequently the Americans are all poking at the edges of China, interested in trade, wanting to deal with the Chinese and on equal footing, which the Chinese refuse to do because they are an empire and their ruler is the ruler of the world, so you can't just you know establish a treaty with them. So Shulang goes, No, no, no, we have to hang on to Taiwan. So with great reluctance, the Manchus keep Taiwan, and it becomes a relatively lawless place. I mean they don't have very good control over it, they don't have uh any real interest in it particularly, so it gets colonized by a lot of uh wheeler dealers, a lot of merchants coming over from China to offload dodgy goods on the natives and exploit the natives as well. I mean, one of the things uh, for example, that that really causes trouble uh and continues to get worse and worse as time goes by is camphor, because camphor is a vital ingredient in various medicines, but as time goes on, it also is a vital ingredient in early plastics, in photography, and in smokeless gunpowder. So Taiwan, this stupid little island that no one wants, which is full of these ancient camphor trees, and so the Chinese are coming into the woods and chopping them down. The thing is, is that uh lumber is technically owned by the Chinese Navy, it's a Navy purview, so the the Navy says don't do that, that's native land, stay away from it. But nevertheless, there's a lot of money in campfor, so these traders come in to get it. And and the way that you get camphor from a tree is you have to cut the tree down, you have to hack it up into wood chips, and then you burn them to create this kind of smoke, and you kind of siphon off the the whatever the camphor juice is uh as it comes off the wood chips. So you destroy the tree to get your harvest, then you need another tree. So these um settlers are going further and further inland into Taiwan, running into native tribes who don't know what they're doing there and want to get rid of them. And so you have these re repeated incidents of what is described as native rebellion, but is actually Chinese traders going into an area, pushing too far, getting murdered, and then the uh a punitive expedition setting out. So much like the Rover incident again, um, but with a lot more malice of forethought on the part of the Chinese.

Russell 39:40

There was an interesting incident as well. I thought there's a theme of shipwrecks in your book. I guess this is again getting getting a bit later on. But these are the British ships, I think they're called the Nurbuddha and the An, which end up being uh which which end up being shipwrecked uh during the time when the Manchus are in charge. I didn't quite understand why exactly, but they're all executed.

SPEAKER_00 40:04

The the Nurbuddha and the An are two very different ships. Um the Nirbuddha is a transport ship um carrying workers, Indian workers actually. Probably for the military. I mean, let's not forget, by s by 1841, which is when this happens, um Britain and China are at loggerheads uh with the Opium Wars. Right. So so a British transport ship sailing close to Chinese territory with a bunch of uh personnel on board is a uh is a difficult matter. And so the Nurbuddha it founded on the rocks um near near Tainan. The crew uh the the the top crew, so basically the white men on board took to the lifeboats and ran for it. Yeah and they and they abandoned they abandoned the Indians, uh the Indian workers on board. Um there were 240 of them, and 90 of them either died on board or drowned attempting to evacuate the ship, which which it it it didn't sink. It it it eventually kind of came off the rocks and just drifted without a mast for five days, and they ended up so close to the coastline they could kind of put these rafts together and and and get to the coast. So 150 of them made it to the um to the coast, and then they were captured by the Chinese. And the authorities reported back to Beijing. They said, Yep, our coastal cannons did a number on the British. Yeah, we uh we uh we sunk their ship and we've captured their men. What do we do with these men? And they go, ah, you better kill them, I suppose. Which which is not true. Their coastal cannons were terrible. Yeah. Uh they they they just rounded up some starving men on the shore. Um, but but um, and of course, because they'd done that, a month later the uh HMS Nimrod arrives and says, We're gonna give you a hundred dollars per captive if you just give these men back. And the Chinese go, Well, we're not giving them back. So Nimrod just destroys the forts at Geelong, takes out 27 Chinese cannon. So that didn't go down very well. And the the following year there's another ship which is wrecked, uh which is the An, but that's not a military ship, that's uh that's an opium dealer's ship. Um let's not forget that you know we're war. Yeah, we are busy selling crates, crates of opiates to the Chinese, addicting their population, um, dragging them down into this kind of vicious circle of addiction and and and crime. And the An is absolutely full of money from a drugs deal at the mouth of the Yangtze, and it ran aground off Taiwan. And and and the captain kept on there were all these junks going past, and the captain's going, come on, take us to safety, take us to safety, but no one would take them away. So th it was seized and it had all this money from an illegal drug deal and had all these crew members on board. And uh I think there were about 40, I think, surviving on the an and while they were kind of being held captive uh and then executed, the opium war ended, the first opium war ended, um so Hong Kong was handed to the British, and extraterritoriality, the safety of British subjects in China was guaranteed, which of course is bad news if you're the magistrate in Taiwan who's just executed 187 British subjects. So it became a huge cause celebre um among um the overseas communities, and it was covered up uh by the Chinese and the Europeans.

Russell 43:10

As I understood it, the uh the Chinese you know punished uh punished the officials you know severely and uh let them go pretty much the next day.

SPEAKER_00 43:18

And uh the Chinese uh position was the officials shouldn't have lied about the effectiveness of their cannon. Uh so they were slapped on the wrist and sent away uh you know on some kind of you know uh cannon awareness course or whatever it is. And and then a couple of days later were were just you know back at their jobs as usual. It just looked good on paper for them to be shown to be punished.

Russell 43:40

And uh But I thought it was interesting that the British decided that they really didn't want the general public to know about this because the last thing they needed was you know some sort of a newspaper campaign that action must be taken. They just wanted to Absolutely, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 43:55

I I think part of the uh issue was was that the legal argument would be made on behalf Of subjects of the Raj. They didn't want to go to war on behalf of Indians. I think was probably the racist excuse. Gosh. But I think generally they didn't want to go to war anyway. I mean the opium war was very costly, incredibly embarrassing. I mean, um, the more you know about the opium war, the more horrifying it is to see. If you look at Hansard, at the time, there are members of parliament saying this is the most shameful thing the British have ever done. Um and and here we are just signing off on it, and now we've got an island called Hong Kong for it. Well done. Um yeah, I it it was covered up, it was not widely discussed. Uh James Davison, uh, who was a journalist in Taiwan at the time, he's he's he said if this made it out, it will it would be the cause of another war. You know, you you don't kill 187 British subjects with impunity just after a treaty's been signed guaranteeing their safety and not expect to get bombed back into the Stone Age. But nevertheless, they did cover it up. Not that it did much good, because there was another Oakland War after that. So um even worse.

Russell 45:03

It all kicked off again. Yes, I was uh uh your reference to Hong Kong reminded me of a line in the book where where somebody in China said, Well, in order to punish the the British for stealing Hong Kong, why don't we give them Taiwan as well? Because they found it such a difficult place to manage.

SPEAKER_00 45:20

I mean, Taiwan was a real albatross around the necks of the Manchus. They they never wanted it in the first place, it was always causing trouble for them. Um it it completely unbalanced the Chinese sense of themselves, the acquisition of Taiwan, because until until Taiwan, the Manchu's concept of what China was was established by geographical limits. It's like, well, there's you know, there's there's tundra in the north, and there's the coasts on the east, and there's jungles in the south, and then there's a big desert in the west, and and so China is the bit you can live in in the middle of all that. And when they acquired Taiwan, they that completely wrong footed their their kind of sense of what China could be. And as I said, in the 80 years after they acquired Taiwan, they actually advanced west and doubled the size of their country. Inner and outer Mongolia, Tibet, uh Xinjiang, these were all acquired in the 80 years after the acquisition of Taiwan. And so the the modern borders of Taiwan, as we of China as we know them, were established then. Um and so you know that that's why you have this kind of inner and outer China. You have this kind of the the the the areas um around in in the West which are always so politically problematic, were were acquired at that time. So the Manchus didn't really want Taiwan, it kept on causing trouble. So they said, you know, it I I should have to look at my own book to see what the what the governor said about it, but it's the epigraph I begin the book with, every three years an uprising, every five a rebellion. So Taiwan was always causing trouble for them, hence hence the title Rebel Island. And so, yes, someone did say, well, you know, let's let's get them back for Hong Kong, let's make them take Taiwan as well. That'll learn 'em. Um and and there were several attempts to offload Taiwan on on passing nations. Like they said, we could sell it to the French during the Sino-French War. There was this suggestion, maybe we could just give them Taiwan, they'll go away. And of course, eventually um it was offloaded on the Japanese. There was uh the the Sino-Japanese War of uh 1894 to 5 was mainly fought in Korea, as most Sino-Japanese wars are, but right at the end of the war, in fact, during the negotiations for the the Treaty of Shimon or Seki, the Japanese fleet just raced south to Taiwan and and and uh um took it over. The the Chinese, the the the Man Chus in in Beijing said, Yeah, okay, fine. I mean, if that's what we have to do, take Taiwan. I mean, we never wanted it, who cares? Turned out a lot of the Chinese people did care. It turned out that the you know that there there were protests in the streets about betraying sovereign Chinese territory. This is protests in the streets of mainland China. Protests in Beijing saying, What this this is not right. What are you thinking? You're just giving this away. You can't just give away haven't we given away enough? Um and a lot of those people protesting have never been to Taiwan, and you know, possibly, you know, um sure, but I haven't been to I haven't been to the Falkland Islands, so if we know exactly exactly so so th there there there were some kind of hawkish Chinese or or if you like patriotic Chinese saying that's our island, fair and square, we shouldn't just hand it to the Japanese. There were very mixed feelings in in Taiwan about it. You have people in in the capital city, the merchants in the capital city, desperate for the Japanese to arrive, really looking forward to having someone who knows what they're doing in charge. And but the further south you go in Taiwan, the larger the um the anti-Japanese feeling is, and the the larger the sense of a resistance there is, to the extent you actually get several groups within Taiwan proclaiming that if the Chinese have let them down, they have to stand up for themselves and proclaiming a republic of Ormosa.

Russell 48:52

Okay, well let's close part one of our podcast there, um, because I think we've reached a sort of a a sort of a key inflection point in in the history of Taiwan, and next week we'll pick up the story of the Japanese colony and taking it down into the present day. So uh so Jonathan Clements, thank you very much indeed. Thank you.