Southern Taiwan historical timeline

Southern Taiwan is where the island’s written history begins, and for three centuries it was the only part that mattered administratively.

The Dutch

The Dutch East India Company established itself at Anping in 1624, building Fort Zeelandia and a second fort, Provintia, inland. They ran a colony based on deerskin, sugar and rice, imported Chinese labour from Fujian on a large scale — which began the Han settlement of Taiwan — and converted some indigenous communities, leaving a romanised script for the Siraya language.

Koxinga

In 1662 Zheng Chenggong, a Ming loyalist commander known as Koxinga, besieged Fort Zeelandia for nine months and expelled the Dutch, establishing a kingdom at Tainan that held out against the new Qing dynasty. His family ruled for two decades until the Qing took the island in 1683. He is venerated in temples across the south as the founder of Chinese Taiwan.

The Qing capital

Tainan remained the capital and the largest city for two centuries, its wealth built on sugar and rice and visible in its temples and merchant guilds. Taiwan became a province only in 1885, and the capital moved to Taipei shortly after.

Japanese development

After 1895 the Japanese built Kaohsiung’s modern harbour, laid out the railway, and engineered the Chianan irrigation system under Hatta Yoichi, whose memorial still draws visitors. Sugar refining became the dominant industry.

Industry and democracy

Post-war Kaohsiung grew on steel, shipbuilding and petrochemicals. The Kaohsiung Incident of 1979, when a human rights rally was broken up and its organisers imprisoned, became a turning point in the democracy movement, and several of those tried later held national office.