1830 Chinese Manuscript Map of Taiwan-fu (Tainan), Taiwan

A remarkable find, this unrecorded c. 1830 manuscript map presents a detailed catalog of Tainan, Taiwan, when the city served as the Qing administrative capital of the island, known as Taiwan-fu.

A Closer Look

This view is oriented towards the east, with a series of large (大門) and small (小門) gates around the city wall providing geographic orientation (though the city's north, south, east, and west gates did not perfectly align with cardinal directions). The city seen here bears little resemblance to modern Tainan, which was comprehensively transformed during the Japanese colonial period (1895 - 1945), with the city walls, streets, and waterways demolished or paved over and replaced with more 'rational' modern development.

In the view, government offices, temples, schools, and other public institutions are illustrated and labeled throughout. Buildings with a wide variety of governmental functions reflect the city's centrality in the Qing administration of Taiwan, including the prefectural office near center (臺灣府), a county office (臺灣縣) towards bottom-left, and several policing (the city guard and a jail), military (coastal defense), and bureaucratic offices (a granary, currency office, and circuit intendant). Tainan is well-known today for its rich array of Confucian, Buddhist, Daoist, and folk religion temples and shrines, some of which have survived from the Qing period and can be seen here, including a large Mazu Temple (two appear here, in fact, 媽祖樓 and 媽祖宮) and a city god temple (城隍廟), which was built in 1669 and is the oldest city god temple in Taiwan.

The 'House of the Red Hairs', (紅毛樓) at center towards bottom-left, is Fort Provintia, the remains of a Dutch East India Company outpost built during their brief colonization of Taiwan, based at nearby Fort Zeelandia (in Anping, now a district of Tainan), in the mid-17th century. The Dutch were expelled in 1662 by the charismatic pirate king Zheng Chenggong (Coxinga, 1624 - 1662), whose descendants were, in turn, conquered by the Qing in 1683.

Tainan's City Walls

The Qing initially placed prohibitions on building city walls on Taiwan, no doubt anxious about their possible use by rebels in the far-flung territory. However, following an uprising in 1721, this rule was fudged, and a bamboo palisade was built around Taiwan-fu. When this began to decay, it was replaced in the 1780s by an earthen wall. Additional gates were added following another uprising in 1832. The earthen wall was badly damaged by heavy rains in the 1860s, leading to the construction of a stone wall in 1875. The city wall was demolished in the Japanese colonial era, though four of the city's gates still survive (including the Great East Gate, Great South Gate, and Small West Gate seen here).

Taiwan-fu - the Qing Dynasty's Administrative Center in Taiwan

As the Manchu Qing Dynasty moved to replace the Ming Dynasty in the 1660s, they were presented with two interrelated problems, Ming Loyalists and the independent pirate-trader kingdom on Taiwan led by Zheng Chenggong. Zheng's extended family, which included several prominent Ming officials in Fujian, operated a semi-independent trading empire in the last years of the Ming, profiting from trade networks stretching to Japan, the Philippines, and Southeast Asia, and alternately fighting and trading with Europeans. Under Zheng Chenggong, the family reached its apex, resisting the ascendant Manchus and briefly besieging Nanjing before retreating to Taiwan, where they expelled the Dutch from Tainan (Fort Zeelandia). Soon afterward, Zheng Chenggong died of malaria, and his forces were weakened in their battle against the Qing. Still, it took more than 20 years for the Qing to decide what to do about the Zheng family, amass a fleet, defeat the remnant Zheng forces, and establish a new administration.

Having eliminated the Zheng, the Qing aimed to exert control over Taiwan to prevent a similar force from emerging again. Subordinated to Fujian Province, the new Taiwan Prefecture (Taiwan-fu) was designated and divided into three counties. Both Taiwan Prefecture and Taiwan County (Taiwan xian) were based at the city seen here, also called Taiwan-fu, which emerged as the cultural, administrative, and economic center of the island. Still, the Qing were bedeviled by conflicts and uprisings on the island, often driven by ethnic tensions between Chinese settlers and aboriginal Taiwanese and between earlier Chinese settlers and more recent arrivals.

Following the Opium Wars, and especially after the Japanese established a de facto protectorate over the Ryukyu Islands in 1872 and launched a military expedition to Taiwan in 1874, the Qing realized the vulnerabilities that would be created if Taiwan were captured by foreign powers (the French also tried to invade Taiwan in 1884). They established a more direct administration of the island, eventually making it a province in 1887, and appointed a modernizer governor, Liu Mingchuan (劉銘傳). Liu oversaw the construction of schools, fortifications, and a railway connecting many of the island's cities. As part of the reorganization that made Taiwan a province, the administrative capital was moved to Taichung, and the old Taiwan-fu was renamed Tainan.

Publication History and Census

This view provides no publication information, and it is unrecorded in institutional collections with no known history on the market. It is undated, though the pastedown at top-left records a series of years between 1879 (光緒五年) and 1891 (光緒十七年) with brief astronomical observations on other notes, including 'many fires everywhere' (各處多火災) in 1882, perhaps as a result of a large earthquake that year. However, this pastedown appears to have been added later and is therefore not helpful in dating. In any event, the view must predate the 1887 administrative reorganization, which moved the provincial capital to Taichung. However, the view does not include the still-extant Duiyue Gate (兌悅門) or other new city gates built in the mid-1830s and thus must date from before that time. It is similar, though not identical, to a map that appeared in an 1807 text by Xie Jinluan titled 'Updated Chronicle of Taiwan County' (謝金鑾《續修臺灣縣志》) and is most likely an updated separate issue of Xie's map.