page_title: Dutch Formosa
section_title: Demographics
hierarchical_section_title: Dutch Formosa / Demographics
caption_attribution_description: Illustration from Olfert Dapper (1670): Gedenkwaerdig bedryf der Nederlandsche Oost-Indische Maetschappye
context_page_description: The island of Taiwan, also commonly known as Formosa, was partly under colonial rule by the Dutch Republic from 1624 to 1662. In the context of the Age of Discovery, the Dutch East India Company established its presence on Formosa to trade with the Ming Empire in China and Tokugawa shogunate in Japan, and also to interdict Portuguese and Spanish trade and colonial activities in East Asia.
  The time of Dutch rule saw economic development in Taiwan, including both large-scale hunting of deer and the cultivation of rice and sugar by imported Han labour from the Ming Empire. The Dutch also attempted to convert the aboriginal inhabitants to Christianity, and suppress aspects of traditional culture that they found disagreeable, such as head hunting, forced abortion and public nakedness.
  The Dutch were not universally welcomed, and uprisings by both aborigines and recent Han arrivals were quelled by the Dutch military on more than one occasion. With the rise of the Qing dynasty in the early 17th century, Dutch East India Company cut ties with the Ming dynasty and allied with the Qing instead, in exchange for the right to unfettered access to their trade and shipping routes.
context_section_description: Prior to the arrival of the Dutch colonists, Taiwan was almost exclusively populated by Taiwanese aborigines; Austronesian peoples who lived in a hunter-gatherer society while also practicing swidden agriculture. It is difficult to arrive at an estimate of the numbers of these native Formosans when the Dutch arrived, as there was no island-wide authority in a position to count the population, while the aborigines themselves did not keep written records. Even at the extent of greatest Dutch control in the 1650s there were still large regions of the island outside the pale of Dutch authority, meaning that any statistics given necessarily relate only to the area of Dutch sovereignty.
caption: Taiwanese aborigines, from Olfert Dapper (1670): Gedenkwaerdig bedryf
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