Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast, episode 557, The Gods March Overseas, Part 3.

In 2001, a Shinto shrine was erected in a very unusual place, Taipei, which is not, in fact, by the way, pronounced Taipei.

That's an artifact of an older system of romanizing Chinese.

Anyway, Taipei is the northernmost and largest city on the island of Taiwan.

Taiwan, of course, has a long and fascinating history all its own, very little of which has to do with Japan.

It had been a peripheral outpost of the once mighty dynasties of Imperial China, the last

marker on the road out of civilization and into the wide open ocean inhabited by barbarians.

It had also been the home of the last outpost of ethnic Han Chinese rule during the rise of China's last

imperial dynasty, the Qing, a dynasty formed by nomadic peoples called the Manchu, who

are more closely related to the Mongols than to the Han Chinese majority.

Taiwan had been the last outpost of the Ming Dynasty loyalists, loyalists to the previous

dynasty who held out for decades under the rule of the pirate turned General Koksinga,

who by the way was half Japanese on his mother's side.

Kokeshinga's government on Taiwan, one could perhaps even call it some sort of renegade province,

did eventually fall, and oh boy, let me tell you there are plenty of folks in Beijing today

who make great hay from that historical analogy.

Once Taiwan was returned to the rule of the new mainland dynasty of the Qing, it remained

a fairly sleepy backwater,

divided between a Han Chinese settler population living on the coast and an Aboriginal population

that was not at all Chinese. They were descended from Austronesian seafarers who arrived in

the area thousands of years earlier. The Han Chinese population would always remain very small relative to the size of the island

for the entirety of the Qing dynasty period.

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