MAPS OF HISTORY · HISTORY OF · Taiwan

ONE LAND · 6 ATLASES

Taiwan, on the map of history

What was Taiwan before it was Taiwan? Below, every era of this land in the Maps of History collection — who ruled it, what it was called, and when control changed — each line linked to the dated map that shows it. Modern borders stand in as an honest approximation; every atlas says so on the map itself.

Formosa (mod. Taiwan) · The Mongol Empire, 1206–1294

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Taiwan (Japanese colony to 1945) · China in Revolution, 1911–1949

Ceded to Japan in 1895, Taiwan spends this atlas as a colony — railways, sugar, schools, assimilation campaigns — and returns to China in 1945 as a stranger. Nationalist takeover administration is rapacious enough to ignite the February 28th rising of 1947, suppressed with thousands killed: a memory that shapes the island’s politics still. In 1949 it becomes the republic’s ark — government, gold, museum and two million refugees — and the last blue on this map. Its later story, land reform and boom and democratization, is the era’s great counterfactual: what the mainland regime could do when severed from the interests that had owned it.

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Taiwan · The Great War, 1914–1918

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Formosa (Japanese Taiwan) · The Road to War, 1931–1941

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Taiwan · The War Room — WW2, 1936–1945

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Taiwan · The Cold War, 1945–1991

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