The earliest maps of Taiwan were made in the mid-sixteenth century--an age of exploration and maritime conquest by Europeans. The Portuguese, the first to include Taiwan on their maps, noticed the small island when their merchant vessels sailed between Macao (then under Portuguese control) and Japan. The Portuguese included it on a world map in 1554 labeled as J. Fermosa--the "beautiful island."
The Spanish, who sailed closer to the island than their Iberian rivals, charted both the east and west coasts. It appeared on their maps of 1597 as Isla Hermosa. These early European sailors, having not yet visited the island, sketched out their maps by sight-measuring the coastline from sea. As a result, J. Fermosa and Isla Hermosa appeared in an odd assortment of shapes and sizes on these Portuguese and Spanish maps. Some even managed to map the island as several separate isles.
It was not until the early 1600s that Taiwan's outlying islands and coastline itself came into focus on European maps. The Dutch, who occupied Anping (present-day Tainan) in southwestern Taiwan, began mapping the surrounding area in 1624, and the following year Formosa appeared on a Dutch map with a more accurate shape, though there was little detail except for a few towns on the western and northern coastlines. The Dutch were forced out of Taiwan in 1662 by a powerful admiral loyal to the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) named Cheng Cheng-kung. Cheng, also known as Koxinga, was forced in 1683 to surrender the island to the Ching court (1644-1911), which had overthrown the Ming rulers.
The Ching court, with the assistance of foreign missionaries armed with sophisticated surveying and mapping tools, produced a number of maps of Taiwan during the years between 1714 and 1895. The cartographers successfully used such techniques as triangulation, which allowed them to map areas expanding outward from a single line of known length, but much of the mountainous areas and the eastern side of Taiwan remained uncharted. The area was difficult to reach by land and sea, and it was feared that the inhabitants of the region would give the mapmakers a violent reception. As a result, eastern Taiwan remained largely blank on the European maps. One of the earliest maps to add more detail to eastern Taiwan was drawn by French mapmaker Nicolas Bellin, who, based on data from European missionaries, added some estuaries, rivers, and streams of the area around present-day Hualien in his map published in 1765.
The Japanese were the first to locate and map the distribution of Taiwan's indigenous peoples--or savages, as the Japanese called them. In 1874, more than 3,600 Japanese soldiers and some military mapmakers were given permission by the Ching authorities to conduct the survey. By 1878, the Japanese military was in possession of maps that detailed mountain trails in the interior and the settlements of indigenous tribes from Tainan eastward across the southern tip of the central mountain range to Taitung.
The Japanese, who already held the most-detailed maps of Taiwan, came into possession of the island itself in 1895 after victory in the Sino-Japanese war. According to the terms of the Treaty of Shimonoseki, which formally ended the war, Taiwan was ceded to Japan. Before the start of World War II in 1937, the Japanese, in order to have a full understanding of and control over its colony, conducted extensive surveys and produced a large numbers of detailed maps, including a variety of pictorial representations of military facilities, administrative districts, transportation routes, rivers, and agricultural distribution. Many of the maps produced at the time were kept in the Governor-General's Library, the official library of the colonial government, which had opened in 1914. In 1945, the collection of maps was turned over to the Nationalist Chinese administration along with the library, which was renamed the National Central Library, Taiwan Branch.
With data accumulated by triangulation, the Japanese had managed to amass a fairly accurate set of charts. Producing maps of even greater accuracy, however, was left to the Americans. In the last several years of the war, the US Air Force charted the entire island using the latest techniques in aerial photography. The data was later handed over to the Nationalist Government when it retreated to Taiwan in the late 1940s. But these maps were considered vital to national security and thus were out of the reach of the general public.
Today, old maps of Taiwan can be found in the collections of foreign and local libraries, museums, academic institutions, and private collectors, who often buy them at auction. Some of the oldest maps have been lost or destroyed and many more have simply disappeared over the years. Collectors tend to avoid the risks of presenting old maps at public exhibition because of their fragility. The Internet, however, has proven to be a good way to safely exhibit map collections and to put map collectors in touch with each other. There have also been some notable publications of old maps of Taiwan, including The Authentic Story of Taiwan: An Illustrated History, Based on Ancient Maps, Manuscripts and Prints published in 1991 by SMC Publishing.
Old maps are collected today as much for their peculiarities as for their accuracy. The surveying and mapping techniques, for example, tell something about the development of relevant sciences at the time. Maps of cities and rural areas made at different times can present important clues to the evolution and development of those places. Maps made for specific purposes also tell something about agricultural products, population, or distribution of resources. Yet for the handful of local collectors, these old maps simply represent a part of their homeland's history that they would hate to see disappear.