Taiwan Outlying Islands historical timeline

The outlying islands have histories quite separate from Taiwan’s, and in two cases they are among the most consequential places of the Cold War.

Penghu first

Penghu was settled by Chinese fishermen and traders well before Taiwan proper, with records from the Song dynasty and a Yuan administrative office by the thirteenth century. The Tianhou Temple at Magong dates from 1592 and is the oldest in Taiwan. The Dutch occupied the islands briefly in the 1620s before being pushed on to Taiwan, and the Japanese took Penghu in 1895 shortly before the rest.

The civil war front line

When the Nationalists lost the mainland in 1949, they held on to Kinmen and Matsu just off the Chinese coast. The Battle of Guningtou in October 1949 saw a communist landing on Kinmen destroyed in three days, and the islands were never taken.

The shelling

In the 1958 crisis, Kinmen was hit by some 475,000 shells in six weeks in one of the heaviest bombardments in history. Afterwards the two sides settled into a bizarre arrangement of shelling on alternate days, largely with propaganda leaflets, which continued until 1979. The population lived underground, tunnels were cut through granite, and the spent shell casings became the raw material for a knife industry that still operates.

Green Island

From 1951 the island held a prison camp for political prisoners of the White Terror, with thousands detained over four decades. It closed in 1987 and is now a national human rights memorial.

Opening up

Military rule on Kinmen and Matsu ended in 1992, and direct ferry links to Xiamen and Fuzhou opened in 2001.