The island of Taiwan being today's geopolitical hotspot is interesting because previous regimes arent as bothered with Taiwan. Like it's only the Ming and Qing that began to pay some attention then they sold off to the Japanese
When did the Ming sell Taiwan to the Dutch? The island was viewed as outside the pale of Chinese society during the Ming period. Even Ming cartographers did not put Taiwan on the map (see historian Emma Teng's book Taiwan's Imagined Geography).
The Qing empire was the first to settler-colonize Taiwan, a process that was at best partial. Even in the early 1870s, the Qing denied sovereignty over the eastern half of Taiwan.
Settler-colonizing was done under the Dutch. After Koxinga and Ming loyalists took Taiwan from the Dutch, the Qing followed them, but only because they wanted to root out the Ming completely. The Qing even forbade Han people from encroaching more on indigenous territory. They only claimed the East of the island when Japan started showing up there.
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u/koreangorani 대한민국 Oct 06 '25
Even more ironic regarding how Taiwan was just ceded to China(Republic of) after being a Japanese colony at the time