Fort Zeelandia: The Wall the Dutch East India Company Left Behind

The wall is the only part that is genuinely theirs. Everything else on the mound at Anping — the white lookout tower, the exhibition hall, the ticket booth — went up under Japanese and later Chinese administration. But the brick face on the south side, split open and held together by banyan roots, was laid by the Dutch East India Company.

The company had not planned to be in Taiwan at all. In 1622 it seized the Penghu islands, meaning to force trade with Ming China from a base in the middle of the strait. The Ming refused, blockaded the garrison, and after two years of pressure offered terms: leave Penghu, and Taiwan — which the Ming did not administer and did not claim — would be nobody's business. In late August 1624 the Dutch pulled down their Penghu fort and sailed east to a sandbar the locals called Tayouan.

They began with earth and planks and named it Fort Orange. In 1627 it was renamed Zeelandia and rebuilt in brick and lime mortar, the work finishing around 1634. For thirty-eight years this was the administrative centre of Dutch Formosa: the governor's seat, the customs house, the hinge through which Chinese silk moved to Japan and Japanese silver moved south to Batavia. A walled town grew below it. The company taxed the deerskin trade, sent missionaries into Siraya villages, and shipped in labourers from Fujian to plant sugar and rice — which is how large-scale Han settlement on the island actually began.

Almost none of the structure survived. The fort passed to Koxinga's regime in 1662 and then to the Qing, who let it decay and in the 1870s carted its bricks off to build the Eternal Golden Castle across the water. The lagoon it was built to guard silted up completely; Anping sits inland now, and the sea is a twenty-minute walk west.

What remains is one face of the outer curtain wall — a fragment of a fort that once stood three storeys and ran the better part of a kilometre around. Stand at the hedge and watch the banyans hold it up and pull it apart at the same time. That is the entire Dutch presence in Taiwan in a single object: thirty-eight years, and this much brick.

Where: Anping Old Fort 安平古堡, 82 Guosheng Road, Anping District, Tainan. The Dutch fabric is the Taiwan City Ruins 臺灣城殘蹟, a national historic site, on the south side of the compound.

Cover photo: Fort Zeelandia, Outer wall, Tainan City (Taiwan) by Mk2010, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.