Chapter XXIV

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?