East Asia: Taiwan

Age of Exploration, a collection which explores five centuries of colonial expansion, scientific investigations and territorial conflict, includes significant material relating to East Asia. Records relating to Taiwan (Formosa) range from Dutch trading in the seventeenth century, to observational writings and sketches by western travellers in the nineteenth century.

This resource presents the archival records of the International Secretariat of Amnesty International from 1961-1991, which are held at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. Covering human rights concerns and issues worldwide, they highlight issues of concern in East Asia during this period. Please be aware that human rights abuses recorded here may include descriptions that are distressing and difficult to read. Sources include content on hunger strikes by Taiwanese independence activists (1976).

Spanning three centuries (c1750-1929), this digital collection makes available for the first time extremely rare pamphlets from the Charles W Wason Collection on East Asia, at Cornell University Library. Includes nineteenth-century British writings assessing the history and settlement of Taiwan, and the value of commerce there.

Documents relating to Taiwan range from an eighteenth-century British account of a trade voyage to China, to twentieth-century reports on political and economic affairs in the region.

Records from the British government’s India Office, held at the British Library and digitised for this collection, illustrate the history of the East India Company from 1599 to 1947. The global operations of this powerful trading force extended in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to include China, with a principal trading base first in Taiwan and later Canton.

This collection features thousands of audio field recordings and interviews, educational content, film footage, notebooks, correspondence and slides from locations worldwide.
The Catherine Stevens collection is the subject of an essay by Dr Helen Rees of the UCLA Department of Ethnomusicology, and includes recordings made in Taiwan in 1960.

An AM Archives Direct title, featuring formerly restricted British Foreign Office files relating to China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. The constant exchange of information between the British government and its embassies and consulates overseas is seen here in diplomatic dispatches, correspondence, newspaper cuttings, maps, biographies, and diverse other materials.

This collection consists of a varied array of records of traders, travellers, missionaries and diplomats, from the mid-seventeenth century to the late twentieth century, offering Western perspectives on all aspects of Chinese culture and society. Includes the papers of John Backhouse, chief clerk at the British consulate in Hong Kong in the 1840s and 1850s. A module on Asian Economic History (series two) contains UK government documents 1950-1980 relating to the economic stresses of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan as rapidly emerging and newly industrialised economies.

This is a rich repository of source materials on the work of this globally influential organisation, founded in 1799 as an Anglican evangelical movement and still active today. It records activities by groups such as the English Presbyterian Mission in Taiwan (Formosa).

Among the records of the Amnesty International movement are documents on hunger strikes by Taiwanese independence activists (1976): an unnamed university tutor was tortured after being charged with preparing seditious literature, and vowed to strike ‘to the death’ unless he and others received proper medical treatment.