Word: formosans
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...Dutch and the Spaniards arrived in Formosa in the 1620s. They fought the head-hunting Formosan aborigines and each other. In 1644 the Dutch captured the Spanish stronghold of La Santissima Trinidad at Keelung, but their victory was short-lived. Formosa was being inundated with South Chinese fleeing before the Manchu invaders of China. In 1661 one refugee, the pirate Koxinga, turned up at Formosa with a fleet and an army of 25,000 men, overwhelmed Formosa's small Dutch garrison and proclaimed himself king of the island. Though he ruled for only a year before his death, Koxinga...
...after its defeat in the Sino-Japanese War, China was forced to cede Formosa to Japan. Admiral Viscount Kabayama, appointed Japan's first governor general, sailed down to Formosa in triumph, released from his flagship as a sign of victory a pair of crows. Their descendants still make Formosan daybreaks raucous...
...Formosan Chinese proclaimed a "Republic of Formosa" which the Japanese defeated in three weeks. The aborigines were harder to handle. To isolate the aborigines up in the mountains, the Japanese built what they called the Savage Guard Line, 360 miles of barbed wire fence, 230 miles of which were electrified in the 1920s. Along the Guard Line the Japanese maintained a force of 5,000 men who, as late as 1930, were besieging the aborigines with field guns, land mines and bombing planes...
Gold Teeth & Electric Lights. Fifty years under Japan's wing has given Formosans attitudes and habits rare on China's mainland. Nearly every Formosan sports one or two gold teeth, the badge of Japanese health-consciousness. About 10% of Formosans are industrial or communications workers. Even the 71% of Formosans who are agricultural workers have electric lights in their huts, a luxury possessed by no other Asian peasants except the Japanese...
World War II shattered Formosan's secure and, by Oriental standards, abundant life. U.S. bombers hit all of the island's 42 sugar mills, put almost all of the rest of its industry out of commission. The bombers won the U.S. great face in Formosa by leaving the Japanese quarter of Taipei in rubble, damaging the Formosan section of town far less...