But it is not in her flat, thickly inhabited, modernized western plains
that the traveler looks for anything worth the trouble of coming to
Formosa to see; that lies rather up among the mountain ranges that bound
his field of vision wherever he looks eastward from along the railway.
Before we venture into the hills, however, whence we may never return,
the story of Formosa may be unfamiliar enough to those who have not been
there to be worth the sketching. When the Portuguese first caught sight
of the island they named it in an exclamation of admiration “Ilha
Formosa!” In earlier days the Japanese, too, called it Beautiful Island
(Takasagoshima); later they used the Western term, but finally came back
to the old Chinese title of Taiwan (Terraced Bay), which is the official
name to-day. Of those who inhabit it probably not one in ten thousand
has ever heard the Portuguese name by which the island is still known to
the world at large.
The Chinese “discovered” Taiwan during the Sui dynasty, about six
centuries after Christ. In those days there was no one to dispute
Celestial claims, and for a thousand years China more or less ruled over
it. Then the Spanish and the Hollanders respectively found it worthy of
their attention, and in 1624 the Dutch East India Company took formal
possession. Tradition records that when the Dutch first landed they came
upon a group of Japanese already established in the southern part of the
island and claiming full ownership. Rather than dispute with them, the
Hollanders, harking back perhaps to their school-day memories of the
history of Carthage, modestly asked for as much ground as they could
cover with an ox-hide, on which to build themselves a resting-place.
Perhaps the verb “to cover” is not identical in the two languages; or
possibly international honor was not so perfect during those dark days
as in the present model age. At any rate the Dutch took what must have
been the hide of a dinosaur, or at least of its modern prototype, a
water-buffalo, cut it as the Chinese to this day cut a hide, in one
narrow strip, and inclosed space for the building of Fort Zelandia.
Nemesis overtook the wily Dutchmen, however, in the shape of Koxinga,
and a few months after this piratical son of a Chinese father and a
Japanese mother drove the Hollanders completely off the island there was
scarcely a trace of their forts and “factories,” their schools and
chapels, to show that the West had ever set foot there. Eventually, in a
typically Chinese way, the island came back to China, but from Koxinga’s
death in 1663 to the Sino-Japanese War life in Formosa was one long
period of bloody struggles with the head-hunting aborigines and of
ceaseless rebellion among the Chinese settlers themselves, without
safety for any one anywhere in the island. It is not without interest,
though of no visible importance, that during one of those more than two
hundred troubled years, at about the time Admiral Perry was coaxing and
bluffing Japan to open her doors to the outside world, Formosa was under
American rule.
The present, and to all appearances enduring, status of Taiwan dates
from 1895, when a treaty was signed on a Japanese war-ship in the outer
harbor of Keelung, which forthwith became Kiirun. That part was easy; a
few presents to corrupt Manchu officials, according to the Chinese, and
the wicked deed was done. But the subjugation of the Formosans was
another matter. Enraged by what they considered a cowardly act of the
Peking Government, through its corrupt spokesmen, in turning them over
like chattels to a despised foreign race, they bade defiance to the new
claimants. The Japanese, however, were not dismayed by the general
uprising of “Formosan rebels”; they had been in the ring before and were
still in training. Within a year the Chinese population, commonly called
Formosans, though the self-sufficient mountaineers who have inhabited
the main portion of the island in almost complete independence as far
back as recorded history mentions it seem better entitled to the name,
turned in their arms and acknowledged themselves subdued.
So far so good; but behind these recent immigrants, mainly from Amoy and
vicinity on the neighboring mainland, who had run true to form in
settling on the fertile lowlands along the west coast, lived the Hakkas,
a foot-hill people who had crossed from the continent at an earlier
date. They, too, were used to fighting. For generations they had been
the buffer between the coast dwellers and the savages of the mountainous
interior, and their unremitting efforts to save their heads from
adorning the skull-shelves of the wild tribes had given them experience
in, and perhaps a taste for, warfare. At any rate the Hakkas had become
experts at the chief Formosan pastime. They also could stalk their
enemies night and day along the precipitous border-land. The incentive
to success was perhaps even stronger with them than with the
head-hunting aborigines, for whereas the latter were merely in need of
new skulls to prove their prowess, the Hakkas developed a taste for
savage flesh, under the belief widely current among slightly civilized
races that it is not merely a choice viand but that their own bodies
absorb the courage and the strength of the men they eat. Perhaps, too,
their commissary department was poorly organized or full of corruption
during these border raids. Whatever the origin of the habit, they had
long been accustomed to feast on a savage carcass with relish and
apparently without unpleasant after-effects.
Now they turned their attention around upon the Japanese. An impartial
observer might have foreseen the result. It was modern science against
primitive courage and weapons. General revolt dwindled at length to
local uprisings, the last of which, in 1913, resulting in the beheading,
this time by another type of head-hunters, of nearly a hundred Hakkas.
Since then the foot-hill dwellers have been more or less model citizens,
leaving the Japanese only the task of subduing the real Formosans, the
wild men of the mountains, a chore in which they are engaged to this
day.
Concurrently the efficient little men of Japan got busy in the lowlands
where they had already made their possession effective. They introduced,
at least in theory, the queer notion of general education; they
encouraged agriculture by taking land away from absentee owners and
turning it over in perpetuity to the actual occupants. Two decades of
their industry have brought great changes. The world at large probably
still thinks of Formosa, if at all, as a land of savages and jungles and
high, almost inaccessible mountains. These the island has to this day,
but it has also great modern buildings, fine streets, railways,
motor-bus lines, model schools, and departments of sanitation. Under the
Japanese it has developed from one of the most dangerous to one of the
safest dwelling-places on the globe—so long as one keeps out of reach of
the mountain-bound head-hunters. The contrast between modern comfort and
primitive man still hunting the heads of his neighbors, almost within
sight of each other on any clear day, will no doubt remain the chief
romance of Taiwan for some time to come.
Of late years there has been much more or less loose talk about the
probability—not a few call it the necessity—of some outside power taking
over China, either lock, stock, and barrel, or under the euphonistic
title of “protectorate.” Granting that such a thing were possible, and
after that desirable, in view of the semi-anarchy which reigns to-day
over that vast land, Formosa gives a fairly clear idea of what China
would become under the Japanese, as Indo-China suggests what it would be
under European “protection.” There can be no dispute as to the material
advantages which the Japanese have brought the Formosans; there remains
the question as to whether life as a whole is an existence more worth
living for these forced wards of alien guardians. For one gets the
impression that the Celestial, wherever he may be, loves dirt and
disorder and “squeeze” and constantly fluctuating currencies. Besides is
it not the very confusion of China, even the dangers of banditry and
undisciplined soldiery, which gives it much of its charm, and not merely
the saving sense of humor of the Chinese, their irrepressible
cheerfulness, and their several other un-Japanese characteristics?