Taiwan has been inhabited for perhaps 30,000 years, but until the 16th century, it was terra incognita. The island’s indigenous people occasionally traded with outsiders, but even the Chinese empire knew very little about this island, just a day and a half by sailing boat from China’s southeastern coast.

Portuguese.
In 1544, passing Portuguese seafarers dubbed Taiwan Ilha Formosa, ‘beautiful island’, bestowing a name which Westerners used until well after World War II.

Dutch
The Dutch East India Company founded a small colony on Taiwan’s southwest coast in 1624, at what’s now Tainan.
The Dutch called this spot Taijowan, a place name which evolved into the Mandarin term for the whole island, Taiwan. Some years later, they established another base in the north, at Tamsui. The Dutch traded in sugar, rice, pepper, silk and satin, porcelain, nutmeg, and cinnamon.

In the second half of the 19th century, Taiwan started to attract Western and Japanese interest for economic and strategic reasons. The first Christian missionaries since the Dutch era arrived in 1859, and a shipwreck near what’s now Kenting National Park in late 1871 led to a brief Japanese invasion. Keelung and Danshui near Taipei, Anping in Tainan, and Kaohsiung became ‘treaty ports’ where the citizens of the British Empire, Russia, Japan and some other countries enjoyed special privileges, such as immunity from arrest.


French
In 1884-1885, during the Sino-French War, French soldiers occupied Keelung and the Penghu Islands.