Taiwan travels: return to Tainan

I spent an enjoyable few days back in Tainan last week on a family trip. The city is celebrating the 400th anniversary of its founding by the Dutch East India Company, which established a trading settlement in what is now called Anping. I am not quite sure how this inflatable cat that has been installed at major sights like Confucius Temple and Fort Zeelandia became part of the festivities, but it certainly catches the eye.

In many ways, 1662 is a more significant date in Taiwan’s history, because it marks the defeat of the Dutch East India Company by the Koxinga, which paved the way for the subsequent Qing Dynasty rule of the island.

Also known as Zheng Chenggong, Koxinga was born on August 28, 1624, in Hirado, Japan, to a Chinese father, Zheng Zhilong, a powerful maritime merchant and pirate, and a Japanese mother, Tagawa Matsu.

Koxinga became a key figure in the resistance against the Qing dynasty after the fall of the Ming dynasty and built a formidable naval stronghold on the Fujian coast, using the islands of Xiamen and Jinmen as strategic bases. After a failed attempt to topple the Qing, he expelled the Dutch from Taiwan in 1662 with a fleet of approximately 400 ships and over 25,000 soldiers.

Koxinga died of illness in the same year at the age of 37 and is celebrated as a hero in Taiwan and China for initiating the development of the island’s social, economic, and agricultural infrastructure. Many people in Taiwan, including my wife’s family, claim him as an ancestor.

In 1683, twenty years after the death of Koxinga, Tainan became the capital of Taiwan under Qing dynasty administration. It remained the political, economic, and cultural center of Taiwan until 1894, when the capital was moved to Taipei. After over a century of relative obscurity, the city is now back in the limelight not just because of its four hundredth anniversary but also its rapid economic growth following the establishment of the Tainan Science Park in 1995.

With TSMC, UMC, Applied Materials, Tokyo Electron and other tech industry giants operating advanced R&D and manufacturing facilities there, Tainan is positively booming. The Dutch have even returned there in the form of ASML, the sole provider of the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines required for manufacturing the latest microchips and a key partner of TSMC.

Even as Tainan celebrates its rich cultural heritage, it can look forward to an even more inspiring future as it becomes a major global technology industry player.