🇹🇼 Taiwan

Human remains and Palaeolithic artefacts dating from roughly 20,000 to 30,000 years before the present have been found on the island, with study of the remains suggesting Australo-Papuan populations similar to Negritos in the Philippines. These earliest inhabitants establish Taiwan as one of the long-inhabited islands of East Asia and the ultimate base of its human story.

Taiwan had been joined to the continent during the Late Pleistocene until post-glacial sea level rise created the Taiwan Strait. The resulting insularity shaped all later settlement, trade and strategic geography, placing the island some 180 km from the Chinese coast.

Around 6,000 years ago farmers, most likely from what is now southeast China, brought agriculture to Taiwan. These cultures are the ancestors of modern Taiwanese Indigenous peoples and the point of origin for Austronesian languages that later spread across the Pacific.

Taiwanese jade circulated in the Philippine jade culture, evidencing durable maritime exchange from the early second millennium BCE. This marks Taiwan's earliest documented role in regional commercial networks.

Han fishermen were established in Penghu by 1171, and in 1225 the islands were administratively attached to Jinjiang. This was the first sustained Chinese presence in the archipelago that would later serve as the stepping stone to Taiwan.

In 1281 the Yuan brought Penghu formally under the jurisdiction of Tong'an County. It was the first formal imperial Chinese administration of territory now held by the ROC.

In his Daoyi Zhilüe of 1349 Wang Dayuan used the name Liuqiu for the island or the part nearest Penghu and recorded the earliest known eyewitness description. The text is the foundational documentary reference for Taiwan in Chinese sources.

As part of the Ming maritime prohibition, Penghu was evacuated in the fifteenth century, and the ban lasted until the late sixteenth century. The withdrawal left the Taiwan area outside imperial control for over a century, opening space for later European and Japanese interest.

From 1542 Portuguese charts recorded the island as Ilha Formosa, the beautiful island. The name displaced all others in European literature and remained in common English usage into the twentieth century.

By the 1590s a small number of Fujianese had started farming in the southwest, and by the early seventeenth century some 1,500 to 2,000 Chinese lived or stayed seasonally on the southern coast for fishing, subsistence farming and trade. This transient population laid the base for later mass Han immigration.

A Japanese mission arrived in 1591 with a letter requesting tribute but found no ruler to receive it and returned home. Further expeditions in 1609 and 1616 also failed, marking Japan's earliest, abortive attempts to bring the island into its orbit.

A Chinese expedition fleet anchored in 1603 at a place called Dayuan, a variant of Taiwan derived from the Siraya language, while pursuing pirates. Chen Di's resulting account is an early ethnographic record of the Taiwanese Indigenous population.

In 1624 the VOC built Fort Zeelandia on a coastal islet in modern Tainan, beginning European colonial rule over parts of Taiwan and bringing some lowland Indigenous chiefdoms under Dutch control. The company encouraged Chinese farmers to immigrate, and by the 1660s some 30,000 to 50,000 Chinese lived on the island growing rice for consumption and sugar for export.

Spain seized Keelung in 1626 and built Fort Santo Domingo at Tamsui in 1628. The colony lasted until 1642, when the last Spanish fortress fell to the Dutch, who then marched south and subdued hundreds of villages in the western plains.

Under mounting Qing pressure Koxinga transferred his army from Xiamen to Taiwan in 1661 and drove out the Dutch the following year, founding the Kingdom of Tungning. The Dutch briefly retook Keelung in 1664 but abandoned the island in 1668 amid indigenous resistance.

Proclaiming loyalty to the fallen Ming while governing independently, the Zheng regime created the first predominantly Han Chinese polity in Taiwanese history. Zheng Jing's departure to join the Revolt of the Three Feudatories opened the way for the Qing invasion of 1683.

An armada under Admiral Shi Lang defeated the Zheng forces in 1683, ending the Kingdom of Tungning. Most of its population was deported to the mainland, leaving an official count of only 50,000 including 10,000 troops.

In 1684 the Qing made Taiwan a prefecture of Fujian, keeping Koxinga's seat at modern Tainan as capital, and the present Chinese name Taiwan became official. Annexation began two centuries of Qing administration confined largely to the western plains.

Officially recorded in 1712 though probably operating from 1684, the permit system admitted only migrants with mainland property and family in Taiwan, and barred wives and children. Despite the restrictions, officials solicited settlers and tens of thousands were arriving annually by 1711, with many male migrants marrying Indigenous women.

The 1722 settler rebellion led the Qing to make separation of Indigenous peoples and settlers official policy, marked by 54 stelae along a frontier boundary. The line was redrawn four times in the later eighteenth century as settler encroachment continued.

Recognising that migration controls were unenforceable, the Qing allowed families to move to Taiwan from 1732 and relaxed restrictions over the century. The change accelerated the growth of a settled Han society rather than a transient male frontier population.

In 1766 the Qing created dedicated sub-prefects for Indigenous affairs, one for the north and one for the south. It marked a modest step towards administering peoples whom the dynasty had otherwise largely left alone.

By 1811 more than two million Han settlers lived in Taiwan, sustaining profitable sugar and rice industries that exported to the mainland. The island had become a substantial agricultural economy within the Qing empire.

The 1874 Japanese incursion obliged the Qing to pay an indemnity for the withdrawal and exposed the weakness of imperial control. It triggered a more active colonisation policy, with new prefectures, sub-prefectures, counties and mountain roads.

Entry restrictions were ended in 1875 and settler recruitment agencies were opened on the mainland, though the promotion effort soon lapsed. The move completed the shift from containment to encouragement of Han settlement.

French troops took Keelung in northern Taiwan in 1884 but could not advance inland; their 1885 victory at Penghu was followed by disease and retreat as the war ended. The campaign underlined Taiwan's exposure to naval powers and spurred Qing defensive investment.

In 1887 Taiwan was separated from Fujian and made a province, with colonisation renewed under Liu Mingchuan and Taipei becoming the permanent capital in 1893. Provincial status marked the island's rise from frontier prefecture to a governed territory in its own right.

Liu's governorship brought electric lighting, a railway, telegraph lines, steamship service and industrial machinery, alongside a land reform that raised revenue but fell short of expectations. Several projects had mixed results and Liu resigned in 1891 amid criticism of their cost, after a campaign to subjugate Indigenous peoples cost a third of his army.

Defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 transferred Taiwan, its associated islands and the Penghu archipelago to the Empire of Japan under the Treaty of Shimonoseki, which ended the war in April 1895 and placed the island under Japanese colonial administration for the next 50 years. Residents wishing to remain Qing subjects had two years to leave; a few thousand went before the deadline and 200,000 to 300,000 more during the ensuing disorder, while local resistance briefly declared the short-lived Republic of Formosa.

Colonial rule expanded railways and transport networks, built an extensive sanitation system, established a formal education system and ended headhunting, while directing the island's resources to Japan's development. Cash cropping displaced rice acreage and by 1939 Taiwan was the world's seventh-largest sugar producer.

On 25 May 1895 high officials declared a republic to resist the handover, but Japanese forces entered the capital at Tainan and crushed the resistance on 21 October. About 6,000 inhabitants died in the fighting and some 14,000 in the first year of Japanese rule, with a further 12,000 'bandit-rebels' killed from 1898 to 1902.

The Beipu uprising of 1907, the Tapani incident of 1915 and the Musha incident of 1930 were all defeated but demonstrated persistent opposition to colonial rule. Japanese suppression of Indigenous mountain communities culminated in the bloody Musha campaign.

The ROC was proclaimed on the Chinese mainland on 1 January 1912 following the 1911 revolution that overthrew the Qing, taking a name derived from the Tongmenghui manifesto of 1905. The Minguo era calendar dates from this year, and the state would eventually relocate to Taiwan.

Founded in 1924 to reunify China under the Kuomintang, the NRA was the root of today's Republic of China Armed Forces. The 1947 Constitution reformed it into a national army rather than the army of a political party.

After 1928 most of China came under KMT control, ending the warlord fragmentation that had left Republican China without internal unity or a single legitimate foreign policy. Central authority weakened again with the Japanese invasion of 1937 and the Chinese Civil War.

Prior to standardisation in 1929 the Chinese calendar was in official use. Years are still often denoted by the Minguo era system counting from the republic's founding in 1912.

From around 1936 Chinese-language newspapers were abolished, State Shinto was promoted and traditional Taiwanese beliefs suppressed; by late 1940 native temples had fallen by a third. From 1940 families were encouraged to adopt Japanese surnames, though only some 2 per cent had done so by 1943.

Air attacks and the invasion of the Philippines were launched from Taiwan, the Imperial Navy operated heavily from its ports and its South Strike Group think tank sat at Taihoku Imperial University. Allied bombing of Kaohsiung, Keelung and other centres destroyed factories, dams and transport built by the Japanese, while over 200,000 Taiwanese served in the Japanese military with more than 30,000 casualties.

The 1943 Cairo Declaration specified the return of Formosa and the Pescadores by Japan to the Republic of China, terms repeated in the 1945 Potsdam Declaration which Japan agreed to carry out in its instrument of surrender. These documents remain the basis of the ROC's claim to Taiwan.

In October 1944 US carrier aviation clashed with Japanese air power based in Taiwan. The battle formed part of the campaign that stripped Japan of air cover in the western Pacific and left Taiwan's infrastructure heavily damaged.

Japan's 50-year colonial rule over Taiwan, ceded to it after the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki, ended with its surrender in August 1945, and on 25 October 1945 Republic of China forces took administrative control of the island, after which most Japanese residents were expelled. In the Treaty of San Francisco Japan renounced its claims without specifying a recipient, and a separate ROC–Japan peace treaty followed in 1952.

Following the 1945 Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Alliance the ROC recognised Mongolia as independent in 1946, but reneged after retreating to Taiwan in 1949 to preserve its claim over mainland China. The question was only settled decades later.

The constitution declared the ROC a democratic republic governed by and for the people, defined territory by existing national boundaries and provided for representatives from former Qing territories including Tibet and Mongol banners. It remains the foundation of Taiwan's government, heavily revised by the Additional Articles of the 1990s.

The shooting of a civilian on 28 February 1947 ignited unrest fuelled by exclusion from office, postponed local elections, government monopolies and the hyperinflation of 1945–1949; military force suppressed it, with mainstream estimates of 18,000 to 30,000 killed. Governor Chen was replaced by Wei Tao-ming, who re-appointed islanders and re-privatised businesses.

Gold brought from the mainland paid soldiers' salaries and backed the issue of the New Taiwan dollar to slow inflation. US foreign aid helped stabilise prices by 1952, ending the hyperinflation of the late 1940s.

Martial law was proclaimed in May 1949 and remained in force until 1987, providing the legal basis for suppressing political opposition. During the resulting White Terror some 140,000 people were imprisoned or executed as suspected anti-KMT or pro-Communist elements, destroying a generation of political and social leaders.

After Communist offensives took Nanjing in April and the PRC was founded on 1 October, Chiang moved his government to Taiwan on 7 December 1949. Some two million soldiers, party members and elites joined an existing population of about six million, becoming known as waishengren, and the regime brought national treasures and much of China's gold and foreign currency reserves.

Beginning in the 1950s the authorities gradually democratised and incorporated the local Taiwanese population within the governing structure, a process that expanded rapidly in the 1980s with the lifting of martial law in 1987.

The Communists took Hainan in 1950 and seized the Dachen and Yijiangshan Islands during the First Taiwan Strait Crisis in 1955, while ROC revolts in northwest China were defeated in 1958 and forces operating from Burma and Thailand were beaten by 1961. These losses reduced ROC control to Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen, Matsu and two South China Sea islands.

After the Korean War erupted Truman interposed the US Seventh Fleet to prevent hostilities between the ROC and PRC. American protection became the essential guarantee of Taiwan's survival as a separate polity.

Veterans cut the highway across the island's mountainous spine during the 1950s as part of wider military fortification. It opened the interior and became a landmark engineering achievement of the early ROC period on Taiwan.

Taipei has committed to reducing emissions 20 per cent by 2030 and 50 per cent by 2050 relative to 2005, although emissions rose 0.92 per cent between 2005 and 2016. Average temperatures in Taiwan have risen 1.4 °C over the last century, twice the global rate.

President Lai landed in Eswatini on 2 May 2026, completing a trip delayed by repeated refusals from African states to grant his aircraft transit rights through their airspace. Eswatini is one of Taiwan's few remaining formal diplomatic allies.

Taiwan's ocean affairs minister made a rare visit to the island on 23 April 2026 to observe exercises by the Coast Guard Administration. Taiping, the largest of the Spratlys, is administered by Taiwan and also claimed by China and several South-East Asian states.

The court sentenced five people, including a former employee of both companies, to up to 10 years in prison on 27 April 2026, and fined Tokyo Electron NT$150 million (US$4.8 million). The case centred on the transfer of semiconductor manufacturing secrets between the two firms.

The Taipei District Court convicted the former Taipei mayor and 2024 presidential candidate on corruption charges dating to his time in office, in a ruling on 26 March 2026. Ko founded the Taiwan People's Party in 2019 and had led it since.

Under the deal signed on 16 January 2026, Taiwanese semiconductor and technology companies committed to invest US$250 billion in the United States, in return for a cut in US tariffs on Taiwanese exports from 20 to 15 per cent.

The government said on 4 December 2025 that it would block access to Xiaohongshu, known internationally as Rednote, citing cybersecurity risks and fraud cases linked to the platform. The app had been used by an estimated 29 per cent of the population, and the ban drew public disapproval.

Opposition lawmakers initiated the proceedings on 26 December 2025, an unprecedented move against a sitting president. It followed a year of conflict between Lai's government and the Kuomintang-led legislative majority, including the premier's refusal earlier that month to enact a local revenue-sharing law passed by the legislature.

The two-day exercise on 29 and 30 December 2025 disrupted more than 100,000 travellers, affecting 857 international flights and blocking routes to Kinmen and Matsu. President Lai Ching-te called the drills a cognitive-warfare campaign and said they were not something a responsible power should do.

China's third and most advanced carrier transited the strait on 13 September 2025, accompanied by two guided-missile destroyers en route to the South China Sea for training and scientific experiments.

The Matai'an Creek barrier lake in Hualien County overflowed on 23 September 2025 as the typhoon passed nearby, sending floodwater through Guangfu Township. The storm caused further deaths elsewhere in the region as it crossed the Philippines and southern China.

Total trade in 2025 hit US$1.12 trillion, with record exports of US$640.75 billion and imports of US$479.4 billion, making Taiwan the world's 22nd largest economy by nominal GDP. Agriculture had shrunk to under 2 per cent of GDP since 2001, from 32 per cent in 1951.

Lai of the DPP won the January 2024 presidential election, but no party secured a majority in the simultaneous legislative election for the first time since 2004, with 51 seats for the DPP, 52 for the KMT and eight for the TPP. The outcome produced divided government in Taipei.

After China tightened control over Hong Kong and curtailed free speech and protest, 36,789 Hong Kong residents moved to Taiwan between 2019 and 2022, roughly 9,000 a year, compared with 4,000 in 2018. The influx reinforced Taiwan's standing as the freest Chinese-speaking society.

On 24 May 2017 the Constitutional Court ruled that marriage laws denying same-sex couples the right to marry were unconstitutional and gave lawmakers two years to act; a 2018 referendum registered overwhelming opposition but could not override the ruling. The Legislative Yuan approved the enabling legislation on 17 May 2019 and the law took effect on 24 May 2019, with thousands registering marriages on the first day, making Taiwan the first place in Asia to legalise same-sex marriage.

From 2016 Taiwan pursued closer economic ties, investment cooperation and people-to-people exchanges with South and Southeast Asia despite the region's lack of formal relations with Taipei. The policy sought to diversify away from dependence on the mainland market.

Tsai and the Democratic Progressive Party won the January 2016 election by a wide margin, also taking control of the Legislative Yuan for the first time. She was re-elected in 2020, before Lai Ching-te succeeded her in 2024.

Announced in 2015, the mainland initiative was followed by aggressive recruitment of Taiwanese semiconductor talent, costing Taiwan over 3,000 chip engineers. The losses raised concerns about a brain drain in the island's most strategic industry.

In 2014 students occupied the legislature and blocked ratification of the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement. The movement produced youth-based parties such as the New Power Party and is credited with helping the DPP win the 2016 presidential and legislative elections, its first legislative majority.

University entrance rates rose from around 20 per cent before the 1980s to 49 per cent in 1996 and over 95 per cent from 2008, among the highest in Asia. Taiwanese students placed seventh in the world in the 2015 PISA assessment and literacy stood at 99.03 per cent in 2020.

Ma's 2008 victory on a platform of growth and better relations under mutual non-denial produced direct flights and shipping, and Beijing dropped its objection to Taiwan's presence at the World Health Assembly. Ma also issued an official apology for the White Terror, though closer economic ties raised political anxieties.

From 2005 the government added Taiwan next to Republic of China to avoid confusion, and the Executive Yuan also switched official documents from vertical to horizontal writing on 1 January 2005. The naming change reflected the consolidation of a distinct Taiwanese identity.

In 2005 the National Assembly, previously a standing constitutional convention and electoral college, was abolished, with constitutional amendment power passing to the 113-seat Legislative Yuan and to voters via referendum. The reform completed the streamlining of the ROC's constitutional structure around Taiwan.

There were 347 confirmed SARS cases in March 2003 and full containment by July, with no case since. The lessons led to the National Health Command Center in 2004, including the Central Epidemic Command Center.

After accepting Mongolian passports and removing Outer Mongolia clauses from cross-Strait legislation in February 2002, the ROC recognised Mongolia in October and excluded it from official maps. The Mainland Affairs Council clarified the position in 2012 and the Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission was abolished in 2017.

In 2002 mainland China became Taiwan's biggest export destination for the first time, and it was the top destination of Taiwanese investment from 1990 to 2020. Deep economic integration became both an engine of growth and a political vulnerability.

Chen's 2002 formulation undercut cross-Strait relations; he pushed the first national referendum on the issue, sought to end the National Unification Council, and state firms began replacing China with Taiwan in their names. Referendums in 2008 on joining the UN alienated status-quo voters and strained ties with Beijing and Washington.

Taiwan acceded on 1 January 2002 under the name Chinese Taipei, shortly after China's own accession the previous month. Membership formalised Taiwan's integration into the global trading system despite its lack of full diplomatic recognition.

Chen Shui-bian's victory in the March 2000 election ended more than 50 years of Kuomintang rule and made the Democratic Progressive Party the first opposition party to win the presidency, a milestone in Taiwan's democratic consolidation. Chen nevertheless lacked a legislative majority, as the KMT-led Pan-Blue Coalition held a slim edge over the Pan-Green camp, entrenching polarised politics between eventual unification and eventual independence.

A magnitude 7.3 earthquake on 21 September 1999 killed more than 2,400 people. It remains the benchmark disaster shaping Taiwanese building codes and emergency management.

From the 1990s the armed forces were scaled down, falling from 450,000 in 1997 to 380,000 by 2001 and capped at 215,000 by 2021 with a largely volunteer force. Defence spending fell below three per cent of GDP in 1999 and trended downwards, with 2.45 per cent of projected GDP proposed in 2024.

Lee Teng-hui won the March 1996 election as China fired missiles into waters near Taiwan's coast in an attempt to intimidate voters, prompting the United States to send aircraft carrier groups to the region. The episode became known as the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis.

The single-payer NHI launched in 1995 promised equal access to healthcare for all citizens and had reached 99 per cent population coverage by the end of 2004. Facing losses, the payment system shifted from fee-for-service to a global budget in 2002.

From 1993 Taipei has repeatedly applied to rejoin the United Nations without any application passing the committee stage. Parallel efforts to join the WHO from 1997 succeeded only in 2009, as an observer under the name Chinese Taipei, before exclusion resumed in 2017.

Created in 1993 to resolve constitutional disputes, regulate political parties and accelerate democratisation, the court declined the same year to define the ROC's national boundaries, treating it as a political question. The court was downsized in 2019 amid calls for its abolition.

On 30 April 1991 Lee renounced the claim to be the sole legitimate government of all China, recharacterising the Chinese Communist Party as the authorities controlling the mainland region and declaring that Taiwan would no longer seek unification by force. The move ended the formal state of civil war and reframed cross-Strait relations.

Both semi-official bodies were founded in 1991 to handle contacts in the absence of state-to-state relations. Their November 1992 meeting produced what became known as the 1992 Consensus, which the Pan-Blue camp supports and the ruling DPP has rejected since early 2019.

Although Mandarin remains the language of instruction and dominates broadcasting, other Chinese varieties revived in public life after restrictions were lifted in the 1990s. Earlier reforms in the 1970s had already shifted official documents from Classical Chinese towards a vernacular style.

On Chiang Ching-kuo's death in 1988 Lee succeeded to the presidency and oversaw democratisation, abolishing the Temporary Provisions and introducing the Additional Articles of the Constitution. Congressional representation was confined to the Taiwan Area and a process of localisation promoted Taiwanese culture and multiculturalism over a pan-China outlook.

Established on 21 February 1987, TSMC grew into the centre of Taiwan's chip industry; by December 2021 its market capitalisation equalled roughly 90 per cent of the country's GDP. The company anchors Taiwan's strategic importance in global technology supply chains.

President Chiang ended martial law on 15 July 1987, permitting opposition parties, a free press and public assembly after the longest continuous period of martial law in the world at the time. Full democratisation followed over the next decade.

The DPP was founded in 1986 in defiance of the ban on new parties, prompting Chiang Ching-kuo to announce that party formation would be permitted. It became the principal vehicle of Taiwanese identity politics and eventually a governing party.

The 1979 resolution allowed the ROC to compete internationally as Chinese Taipei. The compromise became the template for Taiwan's participation in bodies including APEC from 1991 and the WTO from 2002 under alternative names.

A Human Rights Day protest in Kaohsiung in 1979 was rapidly crushed by the authorities but is considered the event that welded Taiwan's pro-democracy opposition together. It set the stage for the founding of the Democratic Progressive Party.

Premier from 1972, Chiang Ching-kuo became president in 1978 and sought to move authority towards bensheng ren, residents of Taiwan before Japan's surrender and their descendants. His policies began the political and social reforms that would transform the ROC into a democracy.

Tax incentives and a cheap, well-trained labour force attracted more than 1.9 billion dollars in 1978 from overseas Chinese, the United States and Japan. Capital inflows underpinned the shift into technology-oriented manufacturing.

On 25 October 1971 the General Assembly voted 76 to 35 with 17 abstentions to recognise the PRC as China's sole representative, expelling the ROC from the seat it had held as a founding member on the Security Council. Most states subsequently switched recognition to Beijing, and Taiwan today keeps official relations with 11 UN members and the Holy See.

Prioritising agriculture, then light and heavy industry, the state used export tax rebates, removal of import restrictions, a single exchange rate and currency depreciation to drive growth averaging over 10 per cent in real GDP in the 1970s. Infrastructure such as the Sun Yat-sen Freeway, Taoyuan International Airport, Taichung Harbor and the Jinshan nuclear plant accompanied steel, petrochemical and shipbuilding industries, and by 1980 foreign trade reached 39 billion dollars a year, making Taiwan one of the Four Asian Tigers.

During the 1958 crisis Nike Hercules missiles were added to batteries across the island. The deployment marked the modernisation of Taiwan's air defences under American patronage.

The 1954 treaty, reinforced by the Formosa Resolution of 1955, committed the United States to Taiwan's defence and established the United States Taiwan Defense Command, with about 30,000 US troops stationed on the island. Substantial American aid flowed to the KMT regime between 1951 and 1965 until Washington recognised the PRC in 1979.

Land reforms never implemented on the mainland, together with the Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction and American aid, raised agricultural output by an average 4 per cent a year from 1952 to 1959. Import substitution promoted textiles, food processing and other labour-intensive industries, turning agriculture into the basis of later growth.