Erik Bethel

Eric's with a K. Yeah.

I'm not a historian, but I'll give you a rough outline.

We gotta go back way, way, way early.

So the Dutch arrived, well, the Portuguese discovered Taiwan.

They called it Ilha Formosa, which means beautiful island.

The Dutch arrived in the 1620s or so and formed little villages of sorts.

The people that were living in Taiwan were Austronesian tribes.

There were no ethnic Han Chinese living there at the time.

And the Dutch were at the time competing with the Spaniards.

The Spaniards had a settlement in one part of the island.

The Dutch had a settlement in the other.

And it was ironically the Dutch that began bringing in folks from mainland China into Taiwan.

They were typically from Fujian province, but some came from the south.

And over time, Taiwan was essentially a backwater.

Neither the Ming Dynasty nor the Qing Dynasty gave a rip about Taiwan.

And in, I want to say 1895, somebody will correct me on this, I'm sure, the Japanese took it over and it was a part of Japan until after World War II.

never in Taiwan's history was it a part of the Chinese Communist Party.

And so after the Chinese Revolution, as Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists were losing, they fled and they started the Republic of China in Taiwan.

So there were two Chinas.

There was the Communist China and then there was the Nationalist China.