Category Archives: Taiwan

1635: The village of Mattau

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On this date in 1635, Dutch soldiers occupying Formosa (Taiwan) massacred 26 people of the holdout aboriginal village of Mattau.

The Dutch had established themselves in southern Formosa from 1624 but their authority there was at first tenuous, and violently contested by some of the island’s natives. The Dutch spent the 1620s shoring up their Fort Zeelandia outpost and carefully noting the grudges to avenge.

Come 1635 the Europeans felt ready to deal out a little payback. First in line was a village some two or three thousand strong known as Mattau — today, the Madou District in the Tainan metropolis — whose people had bloodied the Dutch back in 1629 by repelling an expedition to the tune of 63 casualties.


Taiwanese aborigines, from Olfert Dapper, Gedenkwaerdig bedryf (1670)

The missionary Robert Junius left an account of how revenge was served:

It is well known to you all how some years ago the inhabitants of the village of Mattau most treacherously and shamefully killed sixty of your servants. On account of their great cunning they were most successful in their treachery, so that all of our people were killed without one of our enemies being even wounded. This was looked upon by them as a great unheard-of victory, and it filled them with pride. Not only Mattau but other villages, as Soulang and Bakloan, began to rebel against us, and matters took so serious a turn that we hardly ventured to set foot on Formosa. They even went so far as to hint that they would chase us from Tayouan. All this perplexed the Governor to such a degree that he scarcely ventured to leave the precincts of the Fort at night …

as long as Mattau remained unchastised the inhabitants showed a bold face, imagining that we had not the power, and did not dare to avenge the frightful crime that had been committed against us, by attacking their village. Consequently, we were regarded with very much contempt by all the people, especially by those of Mattau, who often showed how very little they were afraid of us, venturing not only to ill-treat the Chinese provided with our licences, but even tearing up Your Excellencies’ own passports and treating them with contempt. Governor Putmans, seeing how insolent these people had become, and that such conduct was no longer to be borne, very earnestly begged Governor-general Brouwer to send hither a sufficient military force to humble them and adequately defend the settlement. This enforcement of law and order was also very desirable on account of the Chinese residing here; because the security and prosperity of their sugar plantations required our protection against the natives, who were continually damaging them, as appeared from the many complaints that were made to us. Again, we who were occupied in the spiritual cultivation, with the conversion of these people of Sinkan — from time immemorial enemies of Mattau — foresaw that, if the people of Mattau were not humiliated, it was probable that one day this village would be fired by them and the inhabitants chased away; we then being left as shepherds without their flocks. In order that the foundation of our building might be rendered firmer in the future, the Governor-general was also requested by us to send a sufficient military force, and in the month of August 1635 the troops happily arrived.

After some deliberation about the place which should be first attacked, Governor Putmans decided to assault Mattau first and foremost; because the people there had done us most injury, and because victory could more easily be obtained by attacking a village in our neighbourhood than one village situated at a distance. Hence, on 22 November 1635 we received a communication from the Governor in which he desired us to meet him with some men of Sinkan. We resolved to do so next morning. We also told the Sinkandians what our plan was, and urged them to join us, so that the friendly relationship between us might thereby be rendered closer. To this they agreed.

We had not proceeded far on our march when the Sinkandians joined us, armed in their usual manner, thus proving their allegiance. They reported that one of the chief men of Mattau had been captured and put in irons in Sinkan. Soon after, we approached the village of Bakloan, very near which we had to pass. In order to prevent its inhabitants from taking flight, we endeavoured to calm their fears, assuring them that no harm would be done to them. Not far from Bakloan, we received tidings that the Sinkan men had already cut off a head, which they came to show while the blood was still flowing from it.

The sun was beginning to set when we reached the river near Mattau, and as the locality was quite unknown to us, many considered that it would be more prudent to pass the night on the bank of the river. But on His Honour receiving further information about the place, and hearing from the Sinkan men that the inhabitants of Mattau were preparing to flee, so as to leave us nothing but an empty village in the morning, he resolved to make victory all the greater by attacking Mattau that very night. Animated by the greatest courage, and heeding no obstacle whatever, we suddenly, to the great dismay of the inhabitants, appeared in the village, and the enemy did not venture to offer any resistance. Having passed along some of the streets, a rest was given to the men, a suitable place for passing the night was chosen, and the Sinkandians were securely placed in the midst of us. Next day the village was set on fire; and we found that in all twenty-six men of Mattau had been killed.

This demonstrative massacre, combined with the Lamey Island massacre a few months later, did vigorous work for the pacification campaign; not only the Mattau but other natives who heard news of the slaughter soon sued for peaceful submission to the Dutch hegemony — which in turn permitted the peaceable cultivation of Chinese sugar plantations most profitable to the Dutch East India Company.

That is, until a Chinese warlord chased the Dutch off Formosa in 1662.

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1661: Antonius Hambroek, defying Koxinga

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Missionary Antonius Hambroek was put to death on this date in 1661 as the warlord Koxinga wrested control of Formosa (Taiwan) from the Dutch.

In the 1620s, the running Dutch-Spanish war as projected into both countries’ colonial extrusions had resulted in the two dividing that South China island: the Dutch in the south, based at Fort Zeelandia, and Spain in the north. In 1641 the Dutch conquered Spanish Formosa to establish themselves as the apex predators on a rough and lawless island.


Fort Zeelandia.

But that’s before they ran into Koxinga.

Simultaneous with the Dutch advance on Formosa, China’s Ming dynasty was in the process of collapsing. From the 1640s, civil wars between the advancing Manchus (eventually victorious as the incoming Qing dynasty) and the remnants of the Ming would tear at the mainland.

Koxinga was the last great Ming commander. He’d been born on a Nagasaki beach to a Japanese mother. His family ran a commercial concern stretching across the South China Sea as far as Vietnam and the Philippines; its dubious legality confers the romantic sobriquet “pirate” upon Koxinga but think corporate raider here. “Some people call him a pirate, but he was a businessman,” said present-day Taiwan historian Chu Cheng-yi.

And in both commerce and war, Koxinga could flex.

The author of this book about Koxinga’s victory over Dutch Formosa describes his book in this video.

Paradoxically the Ming’s collapse launched Koxinga; his very name as history knows it derives from a title (“Lord of the Imperial Surname”) conferred by the executed Longwu Emperor in gratitude for staying loyal when even Koxinga’s own dad had gone over to the Qing. In one cinematic moment, with the Ming looking toast, Koxinga torched the scholarly robes he had earned studying for a respectable court career and swore he would don nothing but armor until he’d expelled the Manchus from China.

This “Badass of the Week” post chronicles his scintillating military career; in the twilight of the Ming, Koxinga’s victories gave the foundering dynasty its last legitimate cause for hope and in the course of the 1650s his sword-arm established a Qing-defying state in the southerly province of Fujian. From this base in 1659 he launched a proposed history-altering attack on Nanjing that only narrowly failed.

Win or lose on terra firma, the pirate was nails on the waves. “Never before nor since was a more powerful and mighty fleet seen in the waters than that of Koxinga, numbering more than 3,000 junks,” Jesuit missionary Vittorio Ricci wrote of the armada he had once assembled to attack Xiamen. (Source) “The sight of them inspired one with awe. This squadron did not include the various fleets he had, scattered along neighboring coasts.”

In his reduced circumstances post-Nanjing, Koxinga managed “only” 400 ships to launch from Fujian with 25,000 souls … to arrive at Formosa and set up shop there. “Hitherto this island had always belonged to China, and the Dutch had doubtless been permitted to live there, seeing that the Chinese did not require it for themselves,” he remarked. “But requiring it now, it was only fair that Dutch strangers, who came from far regions, should give way to the masters of the island.”

To make the argument persuasive, Koxinga delivered his ultimatum via this post’s principle, Antonius Hambroek (English Wikipedia entry | Dutch), a missionary whom Koxinga cautioned not to return with a displeasing answer at the risk of his life.

On May 25, 1661, Koxinga sent Hambroek to Fort Zeelandia with one of the Chinese leader’s letters demanding surrender. Hambroek had to leave his wife and children behind as hostages to assure his return. When Coyett refused to surrender, Hambroek was urged to stay at the fort as he and his family were bound to be killed because of the failure of his mission. The emotional pull to remain was intensified by the discovery that two of his daughters from whom the family had been separated during the chaos of the invasion were among the refugees in the fort. But Hambroek decided his duty was with his wife and other children. The two daughters, says, the fort daybook, “hung about his neck, overwhelmed with grief and tears to see their father ready to go where he knew he must be sacrificed by the merciless enemy.” The fate of Hambroek is recorded by Caeuw, the commander of the relief fleet. Two native boys got into the fort in October and said they had seen Koxinga fly into a rage the previous month and order the decapitation of all the Dutch male prisoners, Hambroek among them. The wives were given to Koxinga’s captains as concubines and the small children were sent to China. Koxinga himself took one of Hambroek’s teenage daughters — “a very sweet and pleasing maiden” according to Caeuw — as one of his concubines. In August there was also a killing of captive Dutch from the hinterland and Fort Provintia [a lesser outpost opposite Fort Zeelandia -ed.]; Koxinga believed they had been inciting the aborigines against the Chinese. The Dutch reports say five hundred men were either beheaded or “killed in a more barbarous manner.” Many women and children were killed too, but others were “preserved for the use of the commanders, and then sold to the common soldiers. Happy was she that fell to the lot of an unmarried man, being thereby freed from vexations by the Chinese women, who are very jealous of their husbands,” says the fort’s daily journal.

The results of these incidents are still evident in some parts of southern Taiwan. There are areas where the people have decidedly European features and even occasionally the red or auburn hair common among seventeenth century Dutch.

-Jonathan Manthorpe, Forbidden Nation: A History of Taiwan

Koxinga’s siege delivered him Fort Zeelandia by February of the following year.


Antonius Hambroek taking leave of his daughters, by Jan Willem Pieneman (1810)

The fate of Hambroek, Zeelandia, the women, and all the rest make for literary pathos in Joannes Nomsz’s Anthonius Hambroek (1775). Koxinga lives on as an iconic hero celebrated in China and Taiwan and Japan, which is a complicated trick indeed. (A refugee prince from the ancien regime setting up a holdout state on Taiwan made him an obvious propaganda reference for Chiang Kai-shek.) For all his legend, his life remains a bit of a what-might-have-been: a few months after taking Fort Zeelandia, Koxinga died suddenly, perhaps of malaria, still well shy of his fortieth year. His son Zheng Jing, whom the violent-tempered Koxinga had nearly executed in his last hours, maintained an independent Formosa-Fujian kingdom that held out against the Qing until 1683.


Statue of Koxinga at the present-day remains of Fort Zeelandia.

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1950: Chen Yi, 228 Massacre author

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On this date in 1950, Taiwan’s former nationalist governor Chen Yi was shot for a dalliance with the Reds.

A Kuomintang officer since China’s 1920s Warlord Era, Chen Yi was from 1934 Chiang Kai-shek’s governor of Fujian province — the mainland territory directly across from the island of Taiwan. Chen had the honor at the end of World War II of accepting Japan’s surrender of Taiwan — the occasion commemorated by Taiwan’s unofficial October 25 holiday, Retrocession Day. Postwar, he became governor of that island, back before it was synonymous with nationalist China itself.

His life ended in 1950, when Chiang suspected him of negotiating with the Red Chinese who had overrun the mainland. By that point, however, Chen’s political career was already history, courtesy of the most lasting of his legacies, the 228 Massacre (or more diplomatically … “Incident”).

Taiwan’s new managers — the place had been in Japanese hands since 1895 — made an immediate mess after 1945. Taiwan’s productive economy was essentially siphoned for the civil war the KMT had underway against the Communists, as well as for the venal enrichment of various well-connected mainlanders who hopped over to Formosa for plum assignments that displaced Taiwan’s own local elites.

Billowing inflation fed ethnic resentments, and the whole situation boiled over, as the name implies, on 2/28 of 1947.

On that date, frustrations boiled over* in island-wide protests that turned to riots and even took over administration of Taipei and many other cities. Chen, on whose watch the many grievances had accumulated, suppressed those with enormous violence. Chen regained control of the situation only with considerable violence: well over 10,000 are thought to have been killed in suppression during early March, many of them executed in cold blood by mainland military reinforcements.

An American who had just arrived in China from Taihoku said that troops from the mainland arrived there March 7 and indulged in three days of indiscriminate killing and looting. For a time everyone seen on the streets was shot at, homes were broken into and occupants killed. In the poorer sections the streets were said to have been littered with dead.

There were instances of beheadings and mutilation of bodies, and women were raped, the American said.

Two foreign women, who were near at Pingtung near Takao, called the actions of the Chinese soldiers there a “massacre.” … people were machine gunned. Groups were rounded up and executed.

The man who had served as the town [of Pingtung]’s spokesman was killed. His body was left for a day in a park and no one was permitted to remove it.

While effective in reasserting political power, this didn’t exactly bury the animosities between Taiwanese and mainlanders. It did put an end to Chen Yi’s governorship, however, since it was on his watch that things came to this pass in the first place. Given he then doubled as the author of the bloodbath, he assured himself a place of opprobrium in Taiwanese history.

In 1949, the Kuomintang nationalist government fled rout on the mainland and holed up on Taiwan, implementing an authoritarian state under martial law with a running “White Terror” against dissidence, often broadly conflated with communism. Until political liberalization in the late 1980s, public discussion of 228 was strictly taboo.

Today, there’s enough distance that the event is openly commemorated; indeed, Lee Teng-hui, the politician who embraced Taiwan’s democratic transition around the end of the Cold War, was himself a participant in the 228 protests. There are a variety of memorials and parks remembering 228 in present-day Taiwan … but you’d have to look very hard to find one for Chen Yi.

* The specific boiling point for the protests was a violent confrontation on February 27 when state agents had seized the unlicensed cigarettes of a local peddler. The way things were going, however, there was always going to be something like this to catalyze Taiwanese anger.

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2008: Wo Weihan, spy?

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On this date in 2008, Chinese biochemist and businessman Wo Weihan was shot for espionage along with his alleged co-conspirator Guo Wanjun.

Wo had been resident in Austria since 1990, and his daughters Chen Ran and Chen Di were Austrian citizens. In 2004, he returned to his native soil to launch a medical equipment firm in Beijing.

Wo was arrested in China in January 2005 and accused of passing “state secrets” to Taiwan and the U.S. He didn’t have a lawyer until 2006 — by which time he had produced a coerced confession that he tried in vain to retract — and the 2007 trial took place in secret, so the case against him was troublingly opaque at the time of his execution. The verdict publicly released in March 2008 even included such trifles as “discussing the health of senior Chinese leaders” — an actual crime in China but awfully difficult to accept as a factor in a capital case.

“The lack of transparency does nothing to reassure us that the court’s conclusion was the right one,” said a Dui Hua Foundation spokesman.

Allegedly, Wo got information about Chinese ICBMs from missile expert Guo Wanjun, and passed drawings to Taiwanese and American intelligence. Chinese state media have claimed that Wo’s wife was able to open a restaurant in Austria with the payoffs.

His daughters mounted a last-ditch clemency campaign involving European Union officials, Austrian President Heinz Fischer, and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, all to no avail.

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1997: Chiang Kuo-ching, Taiwan wrongful conviction

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On this date in 1997, Taiwanese airman Chiang Kuo-ching was shot for the rape-murder of a five-year-old girl the previous September.

Chiang was nominated as a suspect by a fellow enlistee just a day after the little girl’s body was found in a privy gutter.

So, he and three other early suspects were given “lie detector” tests. Because Chiang was the only one of these who “failed” to acquit himself by this ludicrous mummery, he became the subject of implacable official tunnel vision.

The case was referred — illegally and arbitrarily — to the country’s intelligence services, who subjected Chiang to 37 hours of torture in order to extract a confession: beatings, threats, sleep deprivation, and private screenings of “his victim’s” autopsy.

Chiang broke, and admitted to the crime.

That admission was the star witness against him in his ensuing military trial. Chiang had retracted it by then — but that was much too late to help himself, especially since potentially exculpatory forensic evidence was intentionally withheld from his defense.

As it turned out, the bloody handprint and the DNA trace recovered from the scene didn’t match Chiang at all. No evidence connected him to the crime, except the evidence of truncheons.

Another airman, Hsu Rong-chou, eventually admitted to the killing. (He’d already been convicted in two other child molestation cases, in 1997 and 2003.) In 2011, Hsu received an 18-year prison sentence for the crime that took Chiang Kuo-ching’s life. Chiang was posthumously acquitted that same year.

The latter-day reversal of the sentence was so sensational that Taiwan’s legislature enacted a special law to increase the compensation Chiang’s family received. The family also got an extraordinary televised apology from President Ma Ying-jeou, who bowed three times before an image of the wrongfully executed man.

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1999: Chen Chin-hsing, Taiwan’s most notorious criminal

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On this date in 1999, Taiwan put to death a man who, as the Reuters story about his case led it, “shook public confidence in law and government with the kidnap-murder of a TV celebrity’s daughter and a string of subsequent gun battles, killings, rapes and a hostage drama.”

Dramatic enough for you?

This operatic crime spree was the work of three men, Chen Chin-hsing, Lin Chun-sheng, and Kao Tien-min.

They punched their ticket to popular infamy when they snatched 16-year-old schoolgirl Pai Hsiao-yen in New Taipei City on April 14, 1997.

Her family received terrifying photos of the girl stripped naked and bound, a severed pinkie finger, and a demand for $5 million U.S. And they were in a position to get it, because Pai’s mother was celebrity singer and TV personality Pai Ping-ping. (Alternatively: Bai Bing-bing.)

However, despite multiple attempts to drop the ransom, the kidnappers kept not showing up, and the captive, who’d been brutalized and raped during her captivity, was eventually murdered and dumped in a drainage ditch.

Pai Hsiao-yen’s murder not only captivated media but crystallized public backlash against politicians and police who showed as ineffective in the midst of a massive crime wave. It helped cave in the government of Taiwan’s first democratically elected president.

The criminals themselves magnified the case by drawing out the initial public horror into a seven-month drama as they eluded police manhunts. At one point, they forced a plastic surgeon at gunpoint to alter their appearances, then murdered him after he was finished.

Chen Chin-hsing was finally captured (after the other two had judiciously committed suicide when about to be apprehended) after a televised standoff wherein Chen gave self-valorizing media interviews while holding a South African ambassador’s family hostage.

All this made Chen a dead man, and few in the Republic of China much pitied the serial rapist and spree killer’s fate of taking a magazine of automatic rifle ammunition in the chest. (Several others in this dreadful affair also got non-capital sentences for various forms of aiding and abetting.)

It also made Pai Ping-ping into a tough-on-crime social activist. Taiwan’s death penalty has been in the news recently with the government’s admission that it executed an innocent man in an unrelated case. Pai vehemently opposes the resulting abolition efforts that other case has helped along; in 2010, she helped to break a 52-month death penalty moratorium and force a resumption in executions when she threatened to commit suicide if Taiwan went through with abolition. That would be operatic indeed.

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