English Open Forum |
Treasure of Taiwan?
Treasure of Taiwan? A better term for that is the Treasure of Artifact
Collection in Taiwan. Return these artifacts to China in hoping to cut off
Taiwan's relation to China? Don't be a fool. The only alternative condition
Taiwan may consider giving those artifacts to China is to demand China not
to interfere the STATE status of Taiwan, to assure Taiwan's INDEPENDENCE, to
give up their claim for Taiwan and to respect Taiwan's separate identity
from China, to name but a few.
Concerning the exhibition, "Formosa: Taiwan, Holland, and East Asia in the
17th Century": We know half of the collections used in the exhibition came
from Holland, and the other half, from Taiwan. Taiwanese must ask If China
and Chinese claim their strong influence on Taiwan even before Chen Di（鄭王朝）came
to Taiwan in 1602（?）, why no China artifacts could be located and added to
the exhibit? Many locals（Taiwanese） were not very happy about the exhibit
that lacked any China related remains for the obvious reason; they are
either thoroughly brain-washed Taiwanese, or China chauvinists who were
anxious to see China remains to boost their ego how much China influenced
Taiwan. Do they know the fact that the lacking of China artifacts is because
China and Chinese had no influence on Taiwan's affairs during that period?
There is a good book called "The Formosan Encounter" written by a Dutch
missionary in a diary format between 1623-1645（published by Shung-Yi Museum
of Formosan Aborigines, 1999.） Taiwan society before 1662 was controlled by
Formosan Aborigines, Dutch, and at a slightly less than dominant position by
Japanese. Except for a few merchants and a few married to the Taiwan
natives, Chinese on the Island were all Ro-Han-Kas（羅漢腳）（hard laborers）. They
were mostly lazy bums（and I-so-ro 居候 in Japanese）, instigators trying to
agitate conflicts between the natives against Dutch or to urge the native to
unite with Japanese to go against Dutch.
In the early part of that period, there were about 1000 Chinese according
to the native in the vicinity. Those China fables about Chinese Hans helping
the natives in the culture development were mostly fabricated China
fictions. Formosan aborigines were still in semi-hunter-gatherers' society,
but they already knew rice, sweet potatoes, wine making, low-grade sugar
cane harvest, domesticated hogs and dogs, pottery industry and many other
technologies used in the primitive agriculture society. Chinese did not
import those technologies. In those days Chinese even did not want to teach
the native how to produce salt by simply drying seawater under Taiwan's hot
tropical sunshine. Instead, Chinese collected the naturally produced salt in
a sand mound off shore around Tayoun（near Tainan）, and sold to the native
by deceiving the latter that the salt was imported from China.
Tu Tsung -Sheng（杜正勝院長）and his associate Lin Tien-Jen did really a nice work in
carrying out the exhibition, although I do not know whether the unexpected revelation
on Taiwan's true past history that Chinese hate to expose came asintentional or coincidental.
台灣獨立建國聯盟網站／WUFI Web-site
WUFI Open-Forum is open to anyone who wishes to express his/her viewpoints,
Jim Cheng／前北米台灣人教授會會長 2003/06/11
World United Formosans for Independence
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