Conclusion

1

When the defeated Dutch forces returned to Batavia, Governor Frederik Coyett was arrested and tried for treason for the loss of Formosa.1 He was found guilty. His sentence was death by beheading, but fortunately it was commuted to banishment to the Banda Islands, where he lived until 1674, when the Stathouder of the Netherlands, Willem III, allowed him to return home under the condition that he never again set foot in the East Indies. When he arrived in Amsterdam he published a book that purported to tell the true story of the loss of Formosa.2 It found a ready readership. People in the Netherlands and elsewhere were curious about how the Dutch East India Company had lost one of its most profitable colonies. Coyett's explanation was straightforward, if polemical: He blamed his superiors in Batavia. If, he said, they had listened to his repeated warnings about Chenggong and provided more resources for Formosa's defense, Taiwan would not have fallen.

2

Yet supposing that the Council of the Indies and the governor-general in Batavia had fully realized the dangers, would they have been able to prevent Zheng Chenggong from taking Formosa? Chenggong's armies were huge, well-armed, and battle-hardened, having fought for many years against powerful Manchu forces. At his apogee, he had more than one hundred thousand soldiers and three thousand sea vessels. Moreover, he was fighting close to sources of men and supplies on the mainland, whereas the Dutch colony was fifteen thousand kilometers from the Netherlands. It is doubtful that any Dutch response, even the complete overhaul of the company's defenses that some proposed, would have enabled the company to withstand a concerted attack by Chenggong. The company simply lacked the resources to oppose him.

3

Formosa was not the only European colony Chenggong considered attacking. In 1662 he sent an envoy to Manila with an ultimatum: If the Spanish did not submit and pay him tribute, the colony would be destroyed and replaced by one of his own. The Spanish governor replied with a defiant letter. We will never know how Chenggong would have responded, because he died on June 23, 1662. If he had not, or if his son and successor had followed up on his threat, Manila might well have fallen. The Spanish colony would perhaps have proved more resilient than Dutch Taiwan, but it is likely that the Zheng family could have destroyed it had they so wished. The Spanish, who had conquered the Aztec and Inca empires and now ruled over a colonial empire on which the sun never set, were the most successful colonialists in the early modern world. Yet their East Indian colony might well have been defeated by a Chinese force that was a smaller and weaker version of one that had recently been defeated by the Manchus.3

4

The fall of Dutch Taiwan and the vulnerability of the Philippines illustrate a general point about early modern European expansion in the Old World: European colonies were quite weak, especially in East Asia. Until recently, scholars have tended to view early modern European colonialism as more durable and influential than it really was, probably because they had in mind the Iberian colonization of the New World and the remarkable success of European imperialism after the mid-eighteenth century. The Spanish conquest of the New World was, however, an anomaly in the early modern period, for it was facilitated by disease.4 Outside the Americas, in places where native populations had resistance to Old World pathogens, territorial European colonies were fragile until the mid-eighteenth century, when European military and maritime technology began definitively to surpass the rest of the world's.

5

In early modern East Asia, where Europeans came into contact with the Chinese and Japanese, this weakness was particularly evident. The colony of Macao existed only thanks to Chinese permission. If the Portuguese did not behave themselves, an edict from the Chinese administrators in Guangzhou was enough to cut off food supplies to the port. The small outposts the Portuguese and Dutch were allowed to occupy in Nagasaki were similarly vulnerable. In fact, Dutch Formosa and the Spanish Philippines were the only territorial colonies the Europeans possessed in East Asia, and both were threatened during their early years by Chinese and Japanese competition: The Spanish colony nearly fell to a Chinese pirate named Lin Feng (林鳳), the Dutch colony to Japanese competition. Both were similarly vulnerable to the Zheng family in the 1660s.

6

Most explanations for European colonialism have tended to focus on how Europeans established colonies, comparing Europeans' and Asians' military technology, economic organization, and technological prowess. But it is better to ask not how Europeans colonized but why they colonized. In an important but neglected essay, M. N. Pearson argues that Europeans were unusual not in their capacities as colonizers but in their very desire to colonize: Asian states tended to focus on overland expansion rather than overseas expansion, leaving the oceans open to Europeans.5 His nuanced argument can be distilled to one basic hypothesis: States that gain the great majority of their revenue from agriculture act differently from states that rely upon trade for a significant portion of their revenues. According to Pearson, during the early modern period most large Asian states belonged to the first category (that is, they derived most of their revenue from agriculture) and therefore tended to be indifferent to oceangoing trade. By contrast, the colonizing Western European states belonged to the second category and therefore tended to focus on oceangoing trade.6

7

Pearson supports his hypothesis with cases drawn primarily from his area of expertise: Indian history. When the Portuguese arrived in the Indian Ocean in the late fifteenth century, they found it remarkably easy to impose their control over the most valuable maritime trade routes. According to Pearson, this was because Indian states, being bound to agricultural rather than commercial revenues, tended to ignore the prospects for revenue from oceangoing trade. Gujarat was the most sea-oriented of these states, and its merchants dominated routes throughout the Indian Ocean region, from the Persian Gulf to the Strait of Melaka. Even so, one of Gujarat's kings felt that "wars by sea are merchants' affairs and of no concern to the prestige of kings."7 Its government gained only 6 percent of its income from maritime trade, and it was therefore not in the business of maritime adventurism.8 Later in the sixteenth century, the Mughals established their rule over India, founding a state an order of magnitude richer and more populous than the largest Western European states. They certainly could have challenged the Portuguese and their successors, but the Mughals, too, were focused on agricultural production as the basis of their tax revenues, and so they made little effort to subject the Indian Ocean region to their rule. Adages expressed by the elite of the Mughal era indicate this anti-oceanic perspective: "Merchants who travel by sea are like silly worms clinging to logs."9 And so, when the Portuguese arrived in the Indian Ocean, they found the seas open to naval power. The Asian traders of the Indian Ocean were accustomed to peaceful trade, and it appears that, in the century preceding the arrival of the Portuguese, no Asian state had tried to establish hegemony over the seas. The Portuguese, then, benefiting from strong state support as well as the absence of serious competition, were able to establish control over large sectors of the Indian Ocean trade.

8

To be sure, Portuguese incursions provoked reactions. Early in the sixteenth century, Gujarat and Egypt formed an alliance to reclaim sea routes from the Portuguese. They constructed an armed fleet, which was defeated by the Portuguese in a battle at Diu in 1509. This battle shows the importance of Portuguese naval technologies and strategies, but it is also telling that the arrival of the Portuguese provoked so few such naval reactions. The Ottomans made a half-hearted and desultory attempt to drive the Portuguese out of the Indian Ocean, but they too were more concerned with affairs on land.10 And in the seventeenth century, the Omanis succeeded in driving the Portuguese from Muscat and other coastal enclaves.11 The Omanis' success demonstrates how easy it might have been for a major Asian power to remove the Portuguese altogether. The surprising thing is that, as Pearson points out, no major Asian state seriously tried. According to Pearson's statist hypothesis, the Portuguese were able to convert a naval advantage into oceanic hegemony because they had the strong support of their state whereas Asian states were relatively uninterested in overseas mercantile expansion. The same was true of the Dutch, who arrived a century after the Portuguese.

9

Pearson's hypothesis appears reasonable: Asian states do appear to have been less likely than European states to foster overseas aggression for commercial purposes, leaving Asian seas open to European control. Thus, Europeans were simply able to exploit a maritime power vacuum. But many questions remain. For example, there were plenty of Asian states that did emphasize overseas trade. Perhaps the most important are the maritime states of Southeast Asia, such as Macassar and Aceh. These were quite dependent upon revenues from overseas trade and were also at times effective in challenging Portuguese and Dutch expansion. Yet they did not engage in overseas colonialism like the western European states, so there must be other factors at play. We must study these states, and the others throughout the world that might serve as counter examples.

10

How does Taiwan fit into Pearson’s hypothesis? In one sense the European colonization of Taiwan fits it neatly. Whereas the states of India that Pearson surveys were simply indifferent to overseas commerce, China and Japan actively discouraged it. The Dutch and Spanish were able to colonize Taiwan because of this vacuum of maritime power. Yet Taiwan's European colonies ultimately fell, replaced by a formal Chinese colony. What does the fall of European colonialism on Taiwan say about the statist model?

11

It turns out that the fate of European colonialism on Taiwan was directly dependent upon the degree of maritime orientation of governments in China and Japan. So long as they were uninterested in maritime adventurism, as they usually were, European colonialism flourished in Taiwan. Thus, when the Dutch established their colony in 1624, there was no Chinese organization powerful enough to prevent them from gaining control over the trading infrastructure that Chinese traders had created on the island. To be sure, there was plenty of resistance: Groups of Chinese settlers defied or evaded Dutch control, such as those who apparently incited the people of Mattau to attack Ripon in 1623, and the smugglers who allied with the people of Favorolang to oppose the Dutch and the "Dutch Chinese." The rebellion of 1652 was also a response to Dutch policies: The leaders were probably upset about their debts to the Dutch; the followers were upset about the conduct of Dutch soldiers who enforced the head tax (hoofdgeld). Had the rebels been able to appeal to their home government for help, they might have mounted a severe challenge to the Dutch, but they could not. Chinese governments—central, provincial, and local—were not interested in Taiwan.

12

The Japanese merchants who operated on Taiwan were more troublesome to the Dutch precisely because they did have some support in the Japanese government. When Suetsugu Heizo Masanao, the regent of Nagasaki, got angry about Dutch interference in his trade on Taiwan, he arranged to close down Dutch trade in Japan. Fortunately for the Dutch, he died in 1630. Even more luck for them was the shogunal edict of 1635 that forbade Japanese subjects to travel abroad. With Japan removed from colonial competition, the Dutch had a free hand on Taiwan, allowing them to focus their attention on the aborigines and on the creation of a flourishing co-colonial system. With no East Asian state interested in Taiwan, the Dutch colony flourished.

13

But in the 1650s, the Zheng government emerged. It was quite unlike the Ming dynasty that it sought to restore in that it was highly dependent on seaborne trade, which provided almost two-thirds of its revenues.12 The Zheng state competed with the Dutch in Southeast Asia and Japan, and when the Dutch applied European rules—capture interloping ships—it levied a devastating economic blockade on Taiwan, causing, as we have seen, the collapse of the colony's economy. When the Zheng state needed a new base, it invaded Taiwan and ousted the Dutch. The state, as Pearson's hypothesis would suggest, is the key to the colonial history of Taiwan.

14

Recent studies also highlight a second phenomenon of European colonialism, what historian John Wills Jr. calls "the interactive emergence of European dominance."13 In an influential survey, he shows that throughout Asia Europeans depended closely on indigenous groups—usually merchants—to establish their colonies. In India, the Portuguese, Dutch, and British built their empires atop preexisting trading structures, in a complex symbiosis mixed with "contained conflict."14 In Southeast Asia, Dutch power was extended by means of alliances with certain native groups against others.15 In East Asia, Europeans established entrepôts only with the aid of local merchants and officials, such as the Cantonese officials who helped the Portuguese set up shop in Macao.16 Taiwan is a clear example of such "interactive emergence," but it is also unusual because the most important group of Asians who collaborated with the Europeans—Chinese from Fujian Province—were not indigenous to Taiwan but were themselves colonizers.

15

As we have seen, Taiwan presented significant obstacles to would-be homesteaders: the heavy investments needed to prepare its lands for intensive agriculture, the activities of pirate-smuggling groups, and, most importantly, the opposition of aborigines. The thousand or so Chinese who lived in Taiwan before the arrival of the Dutch were unable or unwilling to make the administrative and military investments necessary to make Taiwan amenable to intensive agricultural colonization, and so the Dutch East India Company played the part of their colonial government. By offering free land, tax breaks, and other subventions, it enticed pioneers to cross to Taiwan. By subjugating the aborigines, controlling pirates, enforcing contracts, and providing policing and civil governance, it made Taiwan a safe and calculable place to live and do business in. Without the Dutch East India Company, the Chinese colonization of Taiwan would have occurred much more slowly.

16

The company in turn was dependent on Chinese colonists, the "only bees in Formosa that give honey." They farmed the lands, hunted the deer, cut the wood, made the mortar, built the forts, constructed the roads, ran the ferries, and did the other myriad jobs that underpinned Taiwan's economy. The taxes and license fees that they paid—from the tax on rice wine to the head tax—constituted most of the colony's revenue. This Sino-Dutch interdependence allowed the colony to prosper. To be sure, not all the laborers and entrepreneurs were Chinese, but most were. Nor, as we have seen, were Chinese equal partners in the colony: They participated only indirectly in its government, having no representatives in the highest deliberative body, the Council of Formosa, and only two on the Board of Aldermen. Co-colonization was based not just on mutual interest but also on coercion. Dutch authorities tried to eliminate or coopt organizations they believed to be competitors, such as the pirates and smugglers who threatened its profits and undermined its authority. Settlers who followed the colony's rules could make a lot of money, but they had to give some of it to the Dutch East India Company. Others broke the rules and kept more for themselves, but they were always liable to suffer Dutch punishments.

17

Perhaps Taiwan's co-colonization is not such an unusual case of "interactive emergence," because Chinese settlement coincided with European colonization in other areas as well. Consider the Spanish colony of the Philippines. Fujianese had traded in the Philippines long before the arrival of the Spanish, bringing Chinese pottery, copper, and iron to exchange for Philippine gold, wax, and cotton. Indeed, just as the Dutch chose the Bay of Tayouan because it was a Chinese trading settlement, so the Spanish chose Manila partly because they found a hundred and fifty Chinese traders living there. Chinese traders soon became their lifeblood, providing food, clothing, sulfur, saltpeter, and iron. In the 1580s some thirty Chinese junks called there each year, ten times as many as had called before the Spanish colony was founded. In addition to food and supplies, they began bringing porcelain and, most importantly, silk. They also brought settlers. Manila's Chinese population statistics mirror Dutch Taiwan's. From a pre-Spanish figure of 150, the Chinese population in Manila grew to around 4,000 in 1589, to 15,000 in 1600, and to 23,000 in 1603.17 Although many immigrants came to trade, most came to engage in other kinds of work. Like their countrymen in Dutch Taiwan, they performed unskilled labor (digging ditches, working in the fields, building roads) as well as skilled (bricklaying, furniture-making, painting, carving, carpentry).18

18

The scale of Chinese immigration caused problems for the Spanish as it did for the Dutch. Like the Dutch, the Spanish had to fight Chinese pirates, and they too worried about the pirates' influence on the Chinese living in their colony. The Spanish experience was more traumatic. In 1574, three years after the founding of Manila, the pirate Lin Feng (林鳳, known in Spanish sources as Limahong) attacked the city with a fleet of sixty-two ships. Spanish forces fended him off, but with difficulty. Only after a year of inconclusive fighting did he give up and sail away. Fear of pirates and an increase in Chinese immigration led the Spanish to institute restrictions on Chinese settlements. In 1582 they decreed that the Chinese would be confined to a special area outside the city: the Parián, or Chinatown, which lay in convenient reach of the guns of the Spanish fortress. Moreover, whereas the Dutch did their best to promote Chinese immigration to Taiwan, the Spanish tried to restrict the Chinese population of Manila to several thousand, which proved impossible.

19

Sino-Spanish relations in Manila appear to have been more tense than Sino-Dutch relations in Taiwan. There was a mutiny in 1593, when the Spanish governor-general was killed by a Chinese crew who had been drafted as rowers for his galley. There were also huge massacres. In 1603 and again in 1639, around 20,000 Chinese were killed by Spanish troops and citizens and by the indigenous inhabitants of the Philippines. These were far bloodier than the massacre that followed the rebellion against the Dutch in 1652.

20

Although the poor state of Sino-Spanish relations in Manila was due in part to Spanish restrictions on immigration and to their Chinese-confinement policies, the institutional structure of the Spanish colony was also to blame. Spanish colonial laws and institutions had been forged in the crucible of the reconquista and had little place for heterodoxy. The preferred solution for dealing with stubbornly heterodox groups was expulsion, but in Manila, where the Spanish were dependent on Chinese settlers, this was impossible. Missionaries and clerics complained that the "pagan" Chinese, who were extremely difficult to convert, provided blatant examples of heathen practices and threatened the spiritual progress of new Philippine converts. And so, whereas the Dutch Council of Formosa generally allowed Chinese colonists in Taiwan to dress, behave, and worship as they pleased, the Spanish rulers of the Philippines enacted laws against Chinese marriage customs, sexual practices (such as sodomy), and religious rites. The Spanish colonists in the Philippines, then, found themselves living closely among a people whose beliefs and customs Church leaders condemned and with whom their institutions could not cope. This situation led to a tendency to view the Chinese as a moral menace, creating an atmosphere conducive to extreme anti-Chinese violence. To be sure, the Protestant missionaries on Taiwan also complained that the Chinese were a pernicious influence on their new Christians, but they, being far fewer in number and being employees of the Dutch East India Company, had much less in­fluence than their Catholic counterparts. Moreover, a background of religious toleration in the Netherlands, where the private practice of Catholicism was allowed, made the Dutch colonial administration more capable of accepting heterodoxy. At the same time, since the colony was administered by the Dutch East India Company, whose officers made decisions based on profit and loss to shareholders in the Netherlands, colonial rulers in Taiwan saw the Chinese far more as op­portunities for income than as a religious threat.

21

Another European colony to which the model of co-colonization might be applied is Batavia (present-day Jakarta), headquarters of the Dutch East India Company. It was founded in 1619, fifty years after Manila. By then western Java was a major terminus for Chinese trade. After the Portuguese seized Melaka in 1511, Bantem, located slightly west of Batavia, had become a central node of the valuable Sino-Indian trade.19 Indeed, one of the reasons the Dutch decided on northwestern Java as a location for their Indonesian headquarters was that it was already known and accessible to the Chinese. The Dutch worked hard to attract Chinese trade to Batavia, although that trade grew slower than had Chinese trade to Manila. Indeed, until 1680 or so, only five or six Chinese junks called at Batavia per year. The main reason that figure was so low is that Batavia was still competing with Bantem, which drew large numbers of junks from its rival. But after 1683, when the VOC conquered Bantem, the junk trade in Batavia grew rapidly. By the late 1680s the number of Chinese ships calling per year had jumped to around twenty, remaining at this level until the mid-eighteenth century.20 As in the cases of Taiwan and Manila, one of the major cargos carried by the junks was people, and Batavia's Chinese population grew nearly as quickly as did that of the other colonies.21 Chinese went to Batavia for the same reasons they went to Taiwan and Manila: to escape economic hardship and find work.22 And the immigrants did the same types of jobs: stonemasonry, canal- and ditch-digging, contracting, etc.

22

The institutional structure of Sino-Dutch interaction in Batavia resembled that in Taiwan, but whereas there were ten Chinese cabessas in the Bay of Tayouan, there was only one Chinese headman in Batavia. And whereas in Taiwan the cabessas were selected by the Chinese community itself, in Batavia the headman was appointed by the company.23 His job was to act as a representative of the Chinese population in discussions with the Dutch leadership in Batavia, to execute the company's instructions among the Chinese community, and to administer justice among the Chinese. In theory, civil cases involving Chinese were resolved according to Chinese law. But in practice the Dutch frequently intervened. Chinese inheritance laws often made it difficult for Dutch creditors to collect from heirs, in which cases Dutch laws were often applied to Chinese. But the Dutch could not afford to intervene too heavily or too unfairly. The Chinese had strong pull in Batavia and could protest unpopular decisions or legislation. Indeed, Dutch "freeburghers" (citizens not employed by the company) in Batavia often complained that the company discriminated against them in favor of the Chinese. As in Taiwan, Chinese in Batavia had seats on the Board of Aldermen (schepenbanck). In 1678 the office of Chinese Captain was replaced by the Chinese Council (Chineze Raad), which consisted of the office of Chinese Captain plus a subcaptain and a lieutenant.24 Chinese in Batavia, like those of Taiwan, also held a majority of the company's tax-farming leases. Although in 1650 the VOC began to try to counter Chinese dominance of the tax-farming leases in order to increase the role therein of the Javanese and Dutch, the Chinese maintained their hold until 1670, after which their share of the leases declined considerably. Even after this date, however, Chinese still held at least half of the total tax-farming franchises.25 This is significant, since at that point the Chinese comprised only 20 percent of the total population.

23

Relations between the Dutch and the Chinese in Batavia seem to have been relatively smooth. Since Batavia was far from centers of Chinese pirate activity, its rulers had fewer worries about men like Lin Feng and Zheng Zhilong. Moreover, no powerful Chinese group claimed sovereignty over Batavia, as Zheng Chenggong did over Taiwan, or demanded tribute from them as he did from the Spanish. Beginining in 1670, however, Sino-Dutch relations in Batavia began to deteriorate. Part of the reason is what one scholar has called a battle for the vital economic sectors of the city, a battle between a newly emergent "bourgeoisie hollando-mardrucker" and the Chinese.26 Another reason is that in 1683 the VOC conquered their rival Bantem and became a Javanese territorial power. Batavia's transition from trade capital to territorial capital went poorly. Like Dutch rulers in Taiwan who began having troubles when the Zeelandia outpost became a territorial colony, the VOC in Batavia failed to adapt its institutions to its new governing role, and Sino-Dutch relations soured.27 In 1740 there occurred a Chinese uprising quite similar to the 1652 rebellion in Taiwan and the revolts that occurred in Manila.

24

Thus, Sino-European co-colonization is not limited to Taiwan. Indeed, it can be seen as part of a more general phenomenon in East and Southeast Asia. Historian Leonard Blussé, writing about trade relations in the eighteenth century, has coined the term "Sino-Western port settlement," but he also notes that European colonial rulers were not the only ones who depended on Chinese merchant sojourners: Southeast Asian rulers did too.28 But Taiwan was different in one key way: Being so near China, its Chinese colonists were in close contact with their families in Fujian. The Zheng regime therefore found it easy to keep tabs on the colony, and when Zheng Chenggong needed a new base, his choice was clear. When he invaded in 1661, he had already prepared the way: Thousands of Chinese settlers helped his men ashore. Sino-Dutch co-colonization had created a Chinese colony on Taiwan, but the company could not be sure of its colonists’ loyalty. Once Zheng presented a compelling alternative, the Dutch could not maintain their hold over the "bees of Formosa."

25

With the Zheng invasion, Taiwan gained its first Chinese government, but the route to becoming Chinese was not over. The Zheng regime lasted only until 1683, when a Qing invasion force, led by one of Zheng's own former generals, the admiral Shi Lang (施琅), successfully occupied Taiwan. When the emperor of China heard about the victory he said, "Taiwan is no bigger than a ball of mud. We gain nothing by possessing it, and it would be no loss if we did not acquire it."29 He wanted to remove the Chinese settlers and abandon Taiwan, a proposal that most of his officials supported. According to scholar Emma Teng, officials were reluctant to incorporate Taiwan into China because of a deep seated traditional idea that China was bounded by the seas.29 So powerful was this idea that some pre-Qing maps represented China's southern land borders as stylized ocean waters.30 So, even though Taiwan lay only 150 kilometers from mainland China, it was described in Ming and early Qing texts as "hanging alone beyond the seas" and "far off on the edge of the oceans."31 But General Shi Lang argued forcefully for Taiwan's inclusion in the Qing empire: The island could not be left to its own devices because it would be used by pirates or foreign powers, who were "drooling" over it. It was, moreover, a bounteous place: "Fish and salt spout forth from the sea; the mountains are filled with dense forests of tall trees and thick bamboo; there are sulfur, rattan, sugarcane, deerskins, and all that is needed for daily living. Nothing is lacking. . . . This is truly a bountifully fertile piece of land and a strategic territory."32 Thanks to Shi Lang's arguments, the emperor decided to make Taiwan a prefecture attached to Fujian Province.

26

Even so, Taiwan was incorporated into China only slowly. The Qing were reluctant colonizers. By the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth, the western coasts of Taiwan came to be called by some the "granary of China," but the mountains and the east coast remained "off the map." In the second half of the nineteenth century, Taiwan began to export items produced in the mountains, such as camphor and tea, and the formerly off-the-map areas began to receive more attention. At the same time, the Western powers and Japan began poking around in off-the-map areas, prompting China's rulers to try to integrate all of Taiwan. Yet even during this, its stage of fullest integration, Taiwan was still considered an outlying and peripheral part of China.33 It was, ironically, only after Taiwan was ceded to Japan after the Sino-Japanese war of 1894–95 that the island was considered an essential part of China.

27

After more than fifty years of Japanese occupation, Taiwan became the headquarters of the Republic of China, whose ruling party, the Guomindang, vowed to reassert its control over the mainland. Today, with Taiwan a prosperous and democratic polity, people are calling for Taiwan to become a sovereign state rather than remain a nominal province of China. The debates will continue, and Taiwan may achieve status as an independent nation, or it may become part of a larger and, one hopes, more democratic China. Either way, it will remain, in culture and social structure, deeply Chinese, the result of the long-term process of colonization and sinification that began in the odd but instructive Sino-Dutch colony of the seventeenth century.

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Notes:

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