Tonio Andrade published a book titled How Taiwan Became Chinese, which primarily explores how the Qing empire eventually took over Taiwan and incorporated it into its imperial realm. However, territorial expansion by the Qing did not always mean that newly annexed lands became “Chinese” in any meaningful sense. For example, when the Qing conquered Junghar Khanate in northern Xinjiang, the Manchu court systematically exterminated the Junghar Mongols. Although a considerable number of Han settlers and other ethnic groups later moved into the region, the Manchu rulers chose to collaborate with the local Uyghur aristocracy (begs) in Kashgaria (southern Xinjiang) and promoted Islam as the dominant religion. In other words, Qing expansion did not necessarily result in Han demographic or Chinese cultural dominance.
In this short article, I briefly examine why the Qing felt compelled to annex Taiwan in 1684 and how Taiwan became “Chinese” in a very specific way: through the settlement and dominance of southern Fujianese.
In 1683, the Qing empire crushed the Ming loyalist naval forces at the Pescadores (Penghu) and seized the final major stronghold of the Zheng family’s Dongning Kingdom, a Ming loyalist regime, in southern Taiwan. Despite this victory, the Manchu court in Beijing was hesitant to formally incorporate the island into the Qing imperial order. The young Kangxi emperor, in particular, was unsure whether it was worth holding on to this “tiny speck of land” (彈丸之地). After all, the main objective of the Qing campaign had been to eliminate the Zheng family’s force. Now that the “rebel” regime had been extinguished, and with no historical precedent in Chinese dynasties for governing the island, the court saw little incentive to assume the immense financial and administrative burden of ruling a distant territory across the strait.
This reluctance persisted despite repeated efforts by high-ranking officials in Beijing to persuade the emperor to annex Taiwan. Kangxi rejected the proposal twice. It was only after Shi Lang (施琅) (1621-1696), the general who led the Taiwan campaign, submitted a memorial outlining the dangers of leaving the island ungoverned that the emperor reconsidered. Among Shi’s arguments, the one that likely struck Kangxi the most was strategic: “Taiwan, though made up of multiple islands, in fact commands key strategic points across four provinces.” These four provinces, Fujian, Guangdong, Zhejiang, and Jiangsu, were not only coastal but also the wealthiest in the Qing empire.
Shi Lang’s warning certainly evoked a terrifying memory in the Manchu court: Koxinga’s (Zheng Chenggong 鄭成功, 1624-1662) 1657 northern expedition, which nearly reached Nanjing, the economic heart of the empire, at a time when the Qing had only recently consolidated power after the 1644 conquest. In that campaign, Koxinga, based in southern Fujian, mobilized a massive force, reportedly over 100,000 troops, including both land and naval forces. Koxinga’s army advanced toward the Grand Canal, the economic artery of the Qing. His navy destroyed the Qing fleet at Dinghai in Zhejiang, then captured Zhenjiang, a critical canal city, effectively cutting off Qing logistical and military supplies. Koxinga’s forces besieged Nanjing for nearly a month. Although the siege ultimately failed due to a lack of land reinforcements and the Qing army’s flexible defense, the Qing’s ground forces suffered heavy losses, and their navy was completely destroyed.
This was not the last time Taiwan-based forces threatened the Qing. In 1673, the Revolt of the Three Feudatories (三藩之亂) broke out, led by Wu Sangui (吳三桂) (1612–1678), a former Ming general who had defected to the Qing in 1644. At the time, Koxinga had died, and his son Zheng Jing (鄭經) (1642–1681) had taken control of the Dongning Kingdom in Taiwan. Zheng allied with Wu and, in 1674, launched a massive expedition to Fujian, once again posing a serious threat to the southeastern coast. His forces used Taiwan as a logistical base to reinforce island positions along the coast, giving the Qing army a hard time in reclaiming the region. However, internal divisions among the rebel factions weakened their coordination. By 1676, much of Fujian had submitted to Qing rule, though Zheng’s forces continued to resist and inflicted heavy damage on coastal defenses for several more years. Ultimately, the Qing succeeded in cutting off Zheng’s supply lines to the mainland. As the other rebel forces were defeated or surrendered, Zheng had no choice but to withdraw back to Taiwan in 1680.
Though Zheng’s campaign on the mainland lasted only six years, his base in Taiwan had proven that any regime occupying the island could pose a serious threat to the Qing’s wealthiest provinces. These two episodes—the 1657 siege of Nanjing and the 1670s Fujian campaign—no doubt loomed large in Kangxi’s mind as he read Shi Lang’s memorial. It was primarily these strategic anxieties that finally persuaded the young emperor to incorporate Taiwan into the Qing imperial order, marking the first time a China-based dynasty formally brought the island under its control.
However, Shi Lang’s push to have Taiwan annexed by the recently established Qing empire was not entirely for the sake of the state. During the conquest campaign, he had already begun to accumulate substantial private holdings, eventually becoming one of the largest landowners at least in the Qing-controlled areas of Taiwan. Sources indicate that the Shi family came to control a large portion of land previously owned by the Zheng regime. Numerous surviving rent receipts and tax documents (figure 1) show that tenants consistently paid rent to the Shi family, which remained based in Quanzhou, southern Fujian, until Japan’s annexation of Taiwan.
Figure 1
Complaints about the Shi family’s land accumulation began early. Ji Qiguang (季麒光), the first Qing magistrate of Zhuluo (諸羅) county (which governed northern Tainan and parts of Yunlin and Nantou), submitted a memorial complaining that Shi Lang was illegally appropriating former Zheng regime lands that should have been reclaimed as imperial demesne (王田). Ji reported that Shi installed his own overseers to collect private rents and expanded cultivation by recruiting new settlers. In other words, even though the Shi family remained based in southern Fujian, they were able to profit from Taiwanese land for generations under Qing rule. Shi Lang’s insistence on annexing Taiwan, then, cannot be fully separated from his personal and familial interests.
Shi was not the only southern Fujianese general to follow this path. Another prominent example is Lan Tingzhen (藍廷珍) (1664-1730), a native of Zhangzhou of Fujian who helped suppress the large-scale rebellion in 1721. After the campaign, the Lan family founded their own land development company (墾號) called Lanzhangxing (藍張興), to expand cultivation into indigenous territories. They not only brought in militarized militia-tenants to seize indigenous lands but also introduced the worship of Mazu (媽祖), the southern Fujianese Sea Goddess, enshrined at the Lanxing Temple (藍興宮), known today as Wanchun Temple (萬春宮) in Taichung. Over time, southern Fujianese became the dominant demographic group in Taiwan.
In this sense, the Hanization of Taiwan began not with a grand imperial strategy, but because a southern Fujianese general, Shi Lang, made a compelling case that the Qing empire had to control the island for security and defense reasons. For the young Kangxi emperor, it was a true strategic concern. But for Shi Lang, the situation was more personal. His family had acquired a massive amount of land during the conquest. It was not in his interest to directly manage those holdings himself. The ideal scenario for him was to keep the land while the Qing state stationed troops and spent resources to secure the island.
Shi’s family was not the last to benefit this way. The Lan family, also from southern Fujian, gained a huge amount of land in central Taiwan after helping suppress a rebellion in the early eighteenth century. But these cases were only the beginning. The deeper story of “how Taiwan became Chinese” involves a much more complex process of institutional change—especially the creation and reforms of the “barbarian border” (番界) system.
In 2022, I launched a Chinese-speaking YouTube channel, 歷史衛視 History Channel. In 2025, thanks to the generous support of the Simpson Center and the Taiwan Studies Program at the University of Washington, I’m launching a new English-language YouTube channel, Chinese History Channel. As a historian of Qing China, I use these platforms to share historical stories and analysis grounded in my academic training. The first series on the new English-speaking channel, which is translated from my Chinese-language videos, will focus on Taiwan under Qing rule, spanning from the late 1700s to 1895. In particular, it will explore the creation of the “barbarian border” institution and how it became a flashpoint when Japanese forces invaded areas of Taiwan just beyond the border, where the Qing state was not directly governing. If you are curious about this crucial yet lesser-known history of Taiwan, be sure to check out my YouTube channel.
