TAIWAN

Taiwan is an island in East Asia. The main island of Taiwan, also known as Formosa, is located in East Asia off the coast of mainland China, southwest of the main islands of Japan but directly west of the end of Japan's Ryukyu Islands, and north-northwest of the Philippines. It is bound to the east by the Pacific Ocean, to the south by the South China Sea and the Luzon Strait, to the west by the Taiwan Strait and to the north by the East China Sea. The island is 394 kilometers (245 miles) long and 144 kilometers (89 miles) wide and consists of steep mountains covered by tropical and subtropical vegetation.

MISSIONARIES:

Green, David & Cherie
Homer, David & Candy

HISTORY:

The Han Chinese began settling in the Pescadores in the 1200s. In 1624, the Dutch established a commercial base on Taiwan and began to import workers from Fujian and Penghu as laborers, many of whom settled. Naval and troop forces of Southern Fujian defeated the Dutch in 1662, subsequently expelling the Dutch government and military from the island. In 1683 the Qing Dynasty formally annexed Taiwan, placing it under the jurisdiction of Fujian province.

Qing China was defeated in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), and ceded Taiwan and the Pescadores to Japan in perpetuity in the Treaty of Shimonoseki. Inhabitants wishing to remain Chinese subjects were given a two-year grace period to sell their property and remove to mainland China. Very few Taiwanese saw this as feasible.

Japan's rule of Taiwan ended when it lost World War II and signed the Instrument of Surrender of Japan on August 15, 1945. On October 25, 1945, Republic of China troops representing the Allied Command accepted the formal surrender of Japanese military forces in Taihoku.
In 1949, during the Chinese Civil War, the Kuomintang (KMT), retreated from Mainland China and moved the ROC government from Nanjing to Taipei. On the mainland, the victorious Communists established the People's Republic of China. During the 1960s and 1970s, the ROC began to develop into a prosperous, industrialized developed country with a strong and dynamic economy, while maintaining the authoritarian, single-party government.

On September 30, 2007, Taiwan approved a resolution asserting separate identity from China and called for the enactment of a new constitution for a "normal country" . It called also for general use of "Taiwan" as the island's name, without abolishing its formal name, the Republic of China

RELIGION:

The original Native Taiwanese tribes traditionally practice nature worship. With the arrival of the Dutch in 1624, Protestant Christianity was forced on all Taiwanese via missionaries. The first converts were Indigenous Taiwanese. Two years later, with the arrival of the Spanish, Catholicism was introduced into Taiwan. The Japanese brought Shinto to Taiwan during the Japanese colonial period which began in 1895. Chinese migrants brought Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism with them to the island over a few centuries of immigration and settlement. In the last half century, Taiwan has also been a safe haven for groups banned in neighboring People's Republic of China.