Taiwan

An Austronesian island colonised in turn by Dutch, Spanish, Ming-loyalist, Qing and Japanese hands, and now the seat of a self-governing polity at the centre of an unresolved cross-strait dispute.

Taiwan is a mountainous island off the southeastern coast of the Asian mainland, first home to Austronesian-speaking peoples whose language family is generally traced to the island itself. From the seventeenth century it passed through Dutch and Spanish trading outposts, the Ming-loyalist kingdom founded by Zheng Chenggong (Koxinga), more than two centuries of Qing administration, and fifty years of Japanese colonial rule after the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki. Republic of China (ROC) forces took control in 1945, and the ROC central government relocated to the island in December 1949 after its defeat in the Chinese Civil War, since when it has governed Taiwan while the People's Republic of China (PRC), founded that same year, claims the island as a province but has never controlled it. After decades of martial law, an export-led economic miracle and democratisation produced Taiwan's first direct presidential election in 1996; its de jure international status remains contested and unresolved.