In 1653, the Dutch built a new fort, Fort Provintia, in the Sakam area as a center for an agricultural colony. The Dutch encouraged Chinese farmers to migrate to Taiwan to grow rice and sugar cane. The Dutch settlement in southern Taiwan was so successful that, by the 1650s, it had overtaken Batavia.
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The courtyard at Fort Provintia in Tainan is lined with nine stone tortoises each carrying a 3-meter tall royal stele bestowed by the Qianlong Emperor to the general Fuk'anggan for suppressing the Lin Shuangwen rebellion. Inscriptions are carved in Chinese and Manchu The Manchu people in Taiwan constitute a small minority of the population of Taiwan.
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Koxinga then devoted himself to transforming Taiwan into a military base for loyalists who wanted to restore the Ming Dynasty. Koxinga set about making Taiwan a base for the Ming loyalist movement. Fort Provintia was renamed Tungtu, and Fort Zeelandia became Anping. Koxinga set up military colonies on the surrounding plains to help feed his forces.
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Sinshih District Office Sinshih District Library Sinshih District, United States National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (), alternatively spelled Xinshi, is a rural district in central Tainan, Taiwan, about 11 km north of Fort Provintia. As Sincan, it was one of the most important stations of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in the 17th century. Missionary work formally began and the largest amount of inland trade occurred at Sinkan.
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Supplied by Ho-Bin with maps of the island, Koxinga marshalled his forces, estimated at 400 ships and 25,000 soldiers, and seized the Pescadores (also known as Penghu Islands) so as to utilize them as a strategic staging point from which to invade Taiwan, at the time controlled by the Dutch. Koxinga receiving the Dutch surrender on 1 February 1662 Fort Zeelandia In 1661, Koxinga's fleet forced an entry to ' and made landing around Fort Provintia. In less than a year, he captured Fort Provintia and besieged Fort Zeelandia; with no external help coming, Frederick Coyett, the Dutch governor negotiated a treaty,"Koxinga-Dutch Treaty (1662)" Appendix 1 to Bullard, Monte R. (unpub.) Strait Talk: Avoiding a Nuclear War Between the U.S. and China over Taiwan. Monterey Institute of International Studies where the Dutch surrendered the fortress and left all the goods and property of the Dutch East India Company behind.
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Fort Provintia was built in 1653 by the Dutch during their colonization of Taiwan and was eventually surrendered to Koxinga. Since 1945, the site has been known as "Chihkan Tower", a phonetic derivation from "Sakam" (also spelled "Chakam" or "Sakkam"). In addition to the site's architectural and artistic significance, its library of dictionaries and business transactions documents the Siraya language spoken by the native inhabitants of the region during Dutch rule.
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Tainan has a tangible sense of history and is the site of several spectacular religious festivals. As well as its string of forts, the first capital of Taiwan has some 300 ancient sanctuaries, from the island's first Confucian temple to its first Taoist temple. Tainan's Taiwan Confucian Temple National Museum of Taiwan Literature Fort Provintia is located at West Central District. Bee hives shoot out rapidly in the downtown of Yanshuei District.
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By the late 16th century, Chinese merchants and fishermen had set up several bases along the west coast of the island, including a sandbar across the Taikang Inner Sea () off the bay of Sakam village (modern-day Fort Provintia). The Chinese adopted ' (modern-day Anping) as the name of the sandbar. Slightly north of Taioan, along the shoreline near Bassemboy (), Japanese traders established bases for trade with China. The early Chinese and Japanese also traded with the Sirayan people.
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This would allow direct access to the sea and with it, supplies and reinforcements from Batavia in event of a siege. Another smaller fort was built later, Fort Provintia, not far from Zeelandia. Both forts were at locally high elevations, which enabled the exchange of signals between them. While of solid construction, the fort and its siting were not so much for the purpose of defense against a major enemy as they were for defending against the islanders and for overseeing trade.
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This extended celebration is unique to Tainan: In the past, families with children working in the harbor took the advantage of this ceremony to show the employers that their children should be paid in adult rate after this day. Before any form of exam people visit a temple of Wenchangdijun, the literacy god, to pray for good luck. One of the Wenchang temples is on the top floor of the Fort Provintia. Many final year high school students preparing for university exams visit the temple in June, before the exam.
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Koxinga died in 1663, whereupon his son Zheng Jing succeeded him. In 1664, in support of the legitimacy of the Ming Dynasty, Zheng Jing invited the Prince of Ningjing to Taiwan. He built a residential mansion for the Prince in the district of Xidingfang, adjacent to Fort Provintia in the city of (now Tainan), and provided him with a yearly stipend. Taiwan was newly settled territory, boasting fertile lands, and Zhu cleared dozens of hectares of land at Zhuhu Village, Wannian Prefecture (modern-day Lujhu District, Kaohsiung) for farming.
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Remains of the wall of the original fort Fort Provintia or Providentia, also known as Chihkan Tower (), was a Dutch outpost on Formosa at a site now located in West Central District, Tainan, Taiwan. It was built in 1653 during the Dutch colonization of Taiwan. The Dutch, intending to strengthen their standing, sited the fort at Sakam, about due east from modern-day Anping. During the Siege of Fort Zeelandia (1662), the fort was surrendered to Koxinga, but was later destroyed by an earthquake in the 19th century.
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Located about north of Sakam (see Fort Provintia), Sinkan was one of the most important stations of the Dutch during the 17th century. Sinkan was the smallest of four main aboriginal villages near the Dutch base at Tayouan, with around 1,000 inhabitants. This fact led them to seek friendship and protection from the Dutch; Sinkan was the VOC's closest ally. In 1861 Consul Robert Swinhoe arrived at Taiwan-fu (modern-day Tainan) and became the first European writer to come into contact with the Taiwanese aborigines after Maurice Benyovszky in 1771.
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Over the following days, the remnants of Guo's army were either slaughtered by aboriginal warriors or melted back into the villages they came from, with Guo Huaiyi himself being shot, then decapitated, with his head displayed on a spike as a warning. In total some 4,000 Chinese were killed during the five-day uprising, approximately 1 in 10 Chinese living in Taiwan at that time. The Dutch responded by reinforcing Fort Provintia (building brick walls instead of the previous bamboo fence) and by monitoring Chinese settlers more closely. However, they did not address the roots of the concerns which had caused the Chinese to rebel in the first place.
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The fugitives, who had to wade up to their > throats in water, were conveyed to Tayouan. > But it was observed that the greatest part of the hostile army—which, > according to one of the prisoners, amounted to twenty thousand men, Koxinga > himself being present—had already landed on the Sakam shore. To all > appearance they would probably resist, pursue, and defeat us, seeing that > they had a large force of cavalry, and were armed with rifles, soapknives, > bows and arrows, and such like weapons, besides being harnessed and provided > with storm-helmets. On April 4, Valentyn surrendered to Koxinga's army after it laid siege to Fort Provintia.
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The revolt was led by Guo Huaiyi (; 1603–1652), a sugarcane farmer and militia leader originally from Quanzhou known to the Dutch by the name Gouqua Faijit, or Gouqua Faet. After his planning for an insurrection on 17 September 1652 was leaked to the Dutch authorities, he decided to waste no time in attacking Fort Provintia, which at the time was only surrounded by a bamboo wall. On the night of 7 September the rebels, mostly peasants-farmers armed with bamboo spears, stormed the fort. The following morning a company of 120 Dutch musketeers came to the rescue of their trapped countrymen, firing steadily into the besieging rebel forces and breaking them.
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From 1623 to 1624 the Dutch had been at war with Ming China over the Pescadores. In 1633 they clashed with a fleet led by Zheng Zhilong in the Battle of Liaoluo Bay, ending in Dutch defeat. By 1632 the Dutch had established a post on a peninsula named Tayoan (now Anping District of Tainan), which was separated from the main part of Formosa by a shallow lagoon historically referred to as the . The Dutch fortifications consisted of two forts along the bay: the first and main fortification was the multiple-walled Fort Zeelandia, situated at the entrance to the bay, while the second was the smaller Fort Provintia, a walled administrative office.
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Fort Anping. Fort Anthonio today. Today their legacy in Taiwan is visible in the Anping District of Tainan City, where the remains of their Castle Zeelandia are preserved; in Tainan City itself, where their Fort Provintia is still the main structure of what is now called Red-Topped Tower; and finally in Tamsui, where Fort Antonio (part of the Fort San Domingo museum complex) still stands as the best preserved redoubt (minor fort) of the Dutch East India Company anywhere in the world. The building was later used by the British consulate until the United Kingdom severed ties with the KMT (Chinese Nationalist Party or Kuomintang) regime and its formal relationship with Taiwan.
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Frederick Coyett, the governor of Taiwan for the Dutch East India Company, was stationed in Fort Zeelandia with 1,800 men, while his subordinate, Valentyn, was in charge of Fort Provintia and its garrison of 500 men. In 1659, after an unsuccessful attempt to capture Nanjing, Koxinga, son of Zheng Zhilong and leader of the Ming loyalist remnants, felt that the Qing Empire had consolidated their position in China sufficiently, while his troops needed more supplies and manpower. He began searching for a suitable location as his base of operations, and soon a Chinese man named He Bin (), who was working for the Dutch East India Company in Formosa (Taiwan), fled to Koxinga's base in Xiamen and provided him with a map of Taiwan.
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On arriving in Formosa, Junius took up residence in the village of Sakam, in the vicinity of Fort Provintia in present-day Tainan City. Described as more energetic than his contemporary, George Candidius, Junius was involved in the pacification of Taiwanese aborigines following the slaughter of sixty Dutch people by the natives of Mattau. This took the form of a short punitive war against the offending villages by Dutch forces, resulting in the killing of "a few dozen" aborigines and a Pax Hollandica which followed after the recalcitrant tribes had been cowed. Following this campaign, Junius continually urged the authorities in Batavia to send more clergymen to Formosa to assist in the instruction and conversion of the now amenable natives, something in which he was supported by the governor of the time, Hans Putmans.
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Chihkan Tower stands at the site of Fort Provintia, which became Koxinga's office after he took over the former Dutch post The most immediate problem Koxinga faced after the successful invasion of Taiwan was a severe shortage of food. It is estimated that prior to Koxinga’s invasion the population of Taiwan was no greater than 100,000 people, yet the initial Zheng army with family and retainers that settled in Taiwan is estimated to be 30,000 at minimum. To address the food shortage, Koxinga instituted a tuntian policy in which soldiers served the dual role of farmer when not assigned active duty in a guard battalion. No effort was spared to ensure the successful implementation of this policy to develop Taiwan into a self-sufficient island, and a series of land and taxation policies were established to encourage the expansion and cultivation of fertile lands for increased food production capabilities.
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