I asked my mother to write out the names of our family. On a scrap of paper, she shaped three names:
The first was my grandfather’s, Tsao Chung-chin, his name topped with 山 shan, the mountain radical. My grandmother’s name, Yang Kwei-lin, was replete with trees: the wood radical 木 mu stood scattered through its syllables. The third name was my own, my surname crowned with its arboreal root 李 li (for “plum”), and my Chinese name, Jie-ke. A stone washed clean by water.
THE STORY OF A PLACE—LITHIC, LIVING, AND forgotten—can be found in maps and what they include or leave out. Before the sixteenth century, Taiwan was considered by the Chinese to be a wilderness well beyond the bounds of their empire. Very little was known of the island across the treacherous Black Ditch, as the Taiwan Strait was affectionately called.
It has been said that the Portuguese passed the island on a journey to Japan in 1542 and dubbed it “Ilha Formosa.” In the years that followed, efforts to chart and colonize the landscape began in earnest, and maps of the region convey the history of those turbulent years. There are sixteenth-century Spanish maps, like the one produced by Hernando de los Ríos Coronel in 1597, intended to position the island among Spain’s colonial holdings in the Philippines. Taiwan on this map is not yet given true shape: it is a crude, rectangular-shaped thing, its northern bays exaggerated to emphasize their military and commercial import to the Spanish. The Dutch maps that followed in the seventeenth century detail the coastlines of their central island port and the Pescadores (now known as the Penghu Islands) off to the west.
In a 1700 Qing map, the perspective is tilted to the horizontal, drawn from the map reader’s view—the view of migrants leaving China for Taiwan—as if seeing the island from a lookout at sea. The green foothills and eastern peaks are hazed in blue in the distance. In the 山水 shanshui-style (literally “mountain water”) maps of this period, which take their cue from traditional landscape painting, the rivers run to sea like arteries, and the mountain spine forms a horizon. The world beyond those mountains remained unmapped. An eighteenth-century French map sums up the difficulty presented by Taiwan’s landscape: the flatlands of the west—by then colonized by the Spanish, Dutch, and Chinese—could be mapped, but the mountains of the precipitous east coast remained inaccessible. “Toute cette Coste est très peu connue” (“Of this coast, very little is known”), claims Jacques-Nicolas Bellin’s 1763 map. In all the colonial renderings, there is a common feature: the backbone range of mountains marked the edge of cartographic knowledge.
Little was known—but much, and little positive, conjectured—of Taiwan’s indigenous peoples, who had made their home on the island for some five thousand years until, with the arrival of foreign powers, many of them were forced into either assimilation or the difficult terrain of the high mountains. In leaving out the mountains and the eastern coast, the maps depicted both topography and a view that indigenous people remained outside civilization. Beyond these maps, such blinkered visions of the island’s past now exist mostly in the records of travelers.
I once spent a few weeks absorbed in reading about that washed-away coastline in Taiwan’s Imagined Geography, a 2004 visual-cultural history by the Taiwanese American academic Emma Jinhua Teng. Though small numbers of Han Chinese had fished or traded on the island since the early 1600s, it was only in the mid-seventeenth century that Taiwan became a frontier for the Chinese and an island in often violent contention. In 1661 and 1662, Ming loyalists forced from the mainland besieged and took the island from the Dutch East India Company, which had itself made efforts to domesticate the land and suppress the indigenous islanders. In the decades that followed, increasing numbers of Han Chinese came from the southern coast of the mainland, most settling land for agriculture. And in time, Qing troops arrived. In 1683, Taiwan was absorbed into the Chinese empire.
Perhaps it was the book’s title—its harkening of an imagined geography—that had caught my attention as I flitted through the stack of hardcovers the librarian had handed over. Taiwan and its past had inhabited my imagination for most of my life. My family had arrived there centuries after the period covered in the book, but still, ours and the island’s identity—and our relationship to China especially—was troubled. The past presented a mirror: much of Teng’s book focuses on the images and maps from when Taiwan transitioned from being cast as a miasmic wilderness beyond the seas of China to a valuable part of the empire. This shift was influenced in no small part by the wealth of natural resources on the island. It was the moment the Chinese first laid claim to Taiwan. Of course, as Teng is quick to note, the success of the current “One China” view claiming Taiwan as part of Chinese territory can be “measured by the disappearance from the Chinese collective memory of the pre-Qing conviction that Taiwan was ‘beyond the pale.’”
From Teng, I moved to the travelogues of Yu Yonghe. In 1696, the Qing imperial gunpowder stores exploded; the depleted stocks created enormous demand for the wealth of sulfur to be found in Taiwan’s volcanic north. In 裨海紀遊 Bihai Jiyou (Small Sea Travel Diaries) Yu documented his journey from Xiamen, on China’s southern shore, to what is now Tainan. From that newly claimed Chinese harbor, he traveled north in search of natural resources. Yu followed the coast, fording the wide rivers that ran down from the mountains to the strait, documenting the island’s flora and fauna, and gave troubling but detailed descriptions of Chinese colonial efforts to “subdue” the indigenous population.
Yu combined verse with prose narrative, flitting from the pearls of light and color splashed by an oar in a dark night’s sea—bioluminescent algae, I thought, reading on—to an account of how the Chinese had defeated the Dutch colonists at Tainan. The island was absorbed into the empire grudgingly—because it was needed—but remained, in every way, a remote place.
Today, maps continue to show Taiwan tangled in mystery. The nation occasionally wears a veil of gray; unrecognized by so much of the world, like many disputed places, its status is not a given. But it is as real a place as any. On survey maps—contour maps, seismic hazard maps, geological surveys, bird migrations, forest distribution, and vegetation charts—I’ve found its materiality set to paper.
In Taiwan, fault lines craze the ground. One map has a list of geohazards and a pile of statistics on Taiwan’s natural disasters; another—a seismicity map—has the appearance of a Jackson Pollock painting, only the splatters are denser, set to overwhelm. Having grown up in eastern Canada, where the greatest threat was usually a snowstorm, the turbulence of the island holds for me a certain macabre fascination. My mother’s childhood was punctuated by storms and quakes: the swell of the typhoon and an occasional rumbling beneath her feet. She has long repeated what I had believed to be hyperbole as if it were a mantra: “Every day, somewhere in Taiwan, there is an earthquake.” In fact, according to a study by the weather service, the island experiences more than fifteen thousand quakes a year, nearly a thousand of which can be felt by people. When I’m in Taiwan, I keep a tracking app on my phone, set to follow every quake above 1.0 on the magnitude scale. The dangers are many: earthquakes, landslides, coastal erosion, land subsidence, volcanic eruption. They are tensions that I cannot fathom.
When earthquakes come, or typhoons sweep across the island, landslides will often follow. Where humans have cleared the land for timber or mined the mountains for gravel, the slopes will flow freely. But in places and in time, their devastation is allayed by trees: the root structures of the forests help stitch the mountains back together. The earth and forest are concomitant things, the trees in need of the right altitude and soil, the ground holding itself together in a web of roots.
From a distance, Taiwan takes the shape of a sweet potato, growing long at its southern tip. On a standard