Zeelandia, a Dutch Colonial City on Formosa (1624–1662)

Abstract

In 1670, eight years after the conquest of Zeelandia by the Chinese, the Dutch geographer Olfert Dapper wrote that this city was “… as perfectly and beautifully built as any city in Holland, although in part not so magnificent in houses. The streets had been paved with square bricks, kept very fine and clean by our people. At that time there were about ten thousand Chinese … mostly supporting themselves with trade, besides our Christians and the heathen or Formosans, the natives of the country”.1 The history of this city, once a flourishing Dutch colonial town on Formosa, may clarify Dutch trade policy and the process of colonization in the 17th century. At the same time it provides an example of a colonial city that grew from nothing to a population of several thousand and was then taken over by the formerly subject people. It can thus serve as a paradigm for the development of colonial cities, in which the processes that elsewhere took centuries were condensed into a few decades.2