Han Settlement of Taiwan

From small Hokkien and Hakka footholds on the southwestern coast in the seventeenth century, Han Chinese settlement spread north along the western plains, then into the foothills and mountain interior held by Indigenous peoples after the shifting Qing border prohibition system was dismantled in 1875. The visible record reads at first as a chronicle of perseverance: irrigation canals, walled compounds, ancestor halls, ferry landings, frontier monuments. The same works trace a less visible history of dispossession: rivers diverted, lands acquired through marriage and debt or force, villages absorbed or emptied—precisely what the heroic register of “pioneering” tends to smooth over. This theme gathers the built remnants of the former frontiers up until the Japanese invasion in the Yiwei War of 1895.