Glimpses of Japan and Formosa

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.