Shelley Rigger

And then people said, well, actually, you know, I'm not panning for gold anymore.

I'm doing something else.

But this is pretty good.

So let me get me a wife from back east and settle down here.

So over those centuries, from about mid 1600s, when Taiwan really starts to kind of gel as a place for Chinese settlement,

the population of Taiwan, the Chinese origin population, increased very rapidly, and the place became a pretty important agricultural source, even for people back in the mainland.

And as those kinds of things developed, the Chinese government started paying more attention, sending administrators over to Taiwan to try to kind of calm the chaos, take a little sheriff to Deadwood,

turn it into more of a part of the empire.

So by the 1800s, Taiwan was pretty much governed more or less, and some days more and some days less, by the Qing Empire.

But in 1895, the Qing court ceded Taiwan to the Empire of Japan.

So in 1894, China and Japan started fighting, and they were mostly fighting in the Korean Peninsula, fighting in Korea, over Korea.

But then the Japanese started moving in on actual Qing territory, and the Qing, to settle that war, surrendered a lot of territory, including Korea.

They

accepted Japanese control over Korea, what we know as Korea today.

And they also ceded Taiwan to the Empire of Japan.

One of the motivations for Japan to ask for territory was that the Japanese also saw the Western powers leaning in in Asia.

You know, they had watched the colonization of Latin America, of Africa, of South Asia, of Southeast Asia.

So they're coming for us next, right?

That's the message.

And starting in the 1860s, the Japanese government did this huge campaign of modernization