The Japanese invasion of Taiwan, also known as Yiwei War in Chinese (Chinese: 乙未戰爭; 29 May–18 November 1895), was a conflict between the Empire of Japan and the armed forces of the short-lived Republic of Formosa following the Qing dynasty's cession of Taiwan to Japan in April 1895 at the end of the First Sino-Japanese War. The Japanese sought to take control of their new possession, while the Republican forces fought to resist Japanese occupation.
The Japanese landed near Keelung on the northern coast of Taiwan on 29 May 1895, and in a five-month campaign swept southwards to Tainan. Although their advance was slowed by guerrilla activity, the Japanese defeated the Formosan forces (a mixture of regular Chinese units and local Hakka militias) whenever they attempted to make a stand. The Japanese victory at Baguashan on 27 August, the largest battle ever fought on Taiwanese soil, doomed the Formosan resistance to an early defeat. The fall of Tainan on 21 October ended organised resistance to Japanese occupation and inaugurated five decades of Japanese rule in Taiwan.
Early invasion
Japanese occupation of the Penghu Islands
In 1894, China and Japan went to war, and in a few months, the Japanese defeated China's Beiyang Fleet, routed the Chinese armies in Manchuria, and captured Port Arthur and Weihaiwei. Although nearly all the fighting took place in northern China, Japan had territorial ambitions in southern China. As the First Sino-Japanese War approached its end, the Japanese took steps to ensure that Taiwan would be ceded to Japan under the eventual peace treaty and that they were well placed militarily to occupy the island.
In March 1895, peace negotiations between Japan and China opened in the Japanese city of Shimonoseki. Although hostilities in northern China were suspended during these negotiations, Taiwan and the Penghu (Pescadores) Islands were specifically excluded from the scope of the armistice. Possession of the Penghu Islands, lying midway between mainland China and Taiwan, was the key to a successful occupation of Taiwan.
A rumour was widely circulated at this time that the Chinese authorities, realising they were powerless to prevent Taiwan and the Penghu Islands falling into the hands of Japan, had offered to cede them temporarily to Britain, presumably on the understanding that they would be returned at a later date. According to this rumour, the Chinese proposal was discussed by the British cabinet, and the British prime minister Lord Rosebery and the foreign secretary Lord Kimberley refused even to consider it. Apparently, the British cabinet's reluctance to accept the arrangement was based not, as has sometimes been suggested, on the fear that accepting Taiwan would immediately embroil Britain in a conflict with Japan, but rather on the calculation that if Taiwan became a British colony, even temporarily, a wholesale partition of China would have followed.
Although the Penghu Islands were garrisoned by 15 Chinese regular battalions (5,000 men) and defended by the recently-completed xidai coastal defence battery (built in the late 1880s in response to the capture of Penghu Islands by the French during the Sino-French War), the Japanese met very little resistance during the landing operation, as the defenders were demoralised: it took the Japanese only three days to secure the islands. After a naval bombardment of the Chinese forts, Japanese troops went ashore on Fisher Island (modern-day Xiyu) and Penghu Island on 24 March, fought several brief actions with defending Chinese troops, captured the key xidai battery, and occupied Magong. In the next two days, they occupied the other main islands of the Penghu Islands group. Japanese combat casualties were negligible, but a cholera outbreak shortly after the fall of the islands killed more than 1,500 men from the Japanese occupation force. The soldiers of the defeated Chinese garrison of the Penghu Islands, most of whom surrendered without a fight, were repatriated by the Japanese to mainland China.
The Japanese occupation of the Penghu Islands was of considerable strategic significance, preventing China from substantially reinforcing its garrisons in Taiwan. Having made it almost impossible for China to fight successfully for Taiwan, the Japanese pressed their claims to the island in the peace negotiations. The Treaty of Shimonoseki was signed on 17 April 1895 and contained a clause requiring the cession of Taiwan and the Penghu Islands. On 10 May, Admiral Kabayama Sukenori was appointed the first Japanese governor-general of Taiwan.
When the news of the treaty's contents reached Taiwan, a number of notables from central Taiwan led by Qiu Fengjia decided to resist the transfer of Taiwan to Japanese rule. On 23 May, these men proclaimed the establishment of a free and democratic Republic of Formosa in Taipei. Tang Jingsong, the Qing governor-general of Taiwan, was prevailed upon to become the republic's first President, and his old friend Liu Yongfu—the retired Black Flag Army commander, who had become a national hero in China for his victories against the French in northern Vietnam a decade earlier—was invited to serve as Grand General of the Army.
Qiu Fengjia was appointed Grand Commander of Militia, with the power to raise local militia units throughout the island to resist the Japanese. In mainland China, Zhang Zhidong, the influential Viceroy of Liangjiang, tacitly supported the Formosan resistance movement, and the Republicans also appointed Chen Jitong—a disgraced Chinese diplomat who understood European ways of thinking—as the Republic's foreign minister, whose job would be to sell the Republic abroad.
There was little or no popular support in Taiwan for the proclamation of the Republic, and many Western observers considered its establishment as a cynical ploy by its authors to evade China's obligations under the Treaty of Shimonoseki. Acting under the authority of the new Republic, Chinese troops would be able to resist the Japanese in Taiwan without technically breaching the terms of the treaty, and if they were successful, Taiwan could return to Chinese rule at some future date (in this respect, it was significant that the nominally-independent Republic acknowledge the suzerainty of China.). There was, therefore, little sympathy in Europe for the Republic, despite its "Parisian" manifesto.
There was also a lack of support for the Formosan resistance movement in Beijing, as considerable diplomatic efforts were then underway to persuade Japan to relinquish the Liaodong Peninsula. Under the terms of the Treaty of Shimonoseki, China had agreed to cede the peninsula to Japan, but once the treaty's contents became known, there was alarm in Europe at Japan's rapacity. In a diplomatic démarche known as the Triple Intervention, Russia, France, and Germany put pressure on Japan in late April 1895 to restore the peninsula to China. On 5 May, the Japanese agreed to retrocede the Liaodong Peninsula to China in return for an increased indemnity; however, it took until December 1895 to negotiate the necessary treaty amendments, and while the negotiations were in progress Japanese troops remained in place.
During this period, Empress Dowager Cixi and her officials had considerable reasons not to offend Japan; the Qing court was horrified when it heard the news in mid-May that several officials in Taiwan intended to resist the Japanese occupation and that there was talk of setting up a Republic that recognised Qing suzerainty. Shortly before the proclamation of the Republic of Formosa, the Qing court ordered Li Jingfang, the nephew and adopted son of China's elder statesman Li Hongzhang, to proceed to Taiwan and formally transfer sovereignty over the island from China to Japan. It also cabled an imperial edict to Taipei on 20 May, directing Tang Jingsong to order all Qing civil officials and all officers and soldiers to leave Taiwan, with Tang himself ordered to return to Beijing.
Spurned by European public opinion and disavowed by China, the Republic of Formosa enjoyed only one week of uninterrupted existence. During this time, it decked itself out with the conventional trappings of sovereignty. The Republicans adopted a national flag with a yellow tiger on a blue background, ordered a large silver state seal to be made, and began to issue paper money and postage stamps in the name of the Republic. The foreign minister Chen Jitong, who had lived in France for many years, was responsible for crafting much of this republican symbolism.
Course of the war
First phase: Keelung, Taipei and Tamsui
Ruifang and Keelung
During this time, the Japanese were making their preparations for occupying Taiwan in accordance with the provisions of the Treaty of Shimonoseki. The task of securing Japan's new colony was entrusted to the Imperial Guards Division, which had seen no action during the fighting in Manchuria. 7,000 guardsmen, under the command of Prince Kitashirakawa Yoshihisa, left Port Arthur on 22 May, on board fourteen transports.
The preparations for the expedition were made in such haste that there was no time to issue the guardsmen with summer uniforms, and they left for the hot and humid climate of Taiwan in the heavy winter clothes they had been wearing in cold weather of Manchuria. On 26 May, the transports, escorted by the warships Matsushima and Naniwa, reached the Japanese-owned Ryukyu Islands to the northeast of Taiwan and anchored off the port of Nakagusuku on the eastern coast of Okinawa.
On 27 May, the recently appointed governor-general of Formosa, Admiral Kabayama Sukenori, joined the expedition from Tokyo. In view of the reports that had reached Japan that the leaders of the self-styled Republic of Formosa were making preparations to resist a Japanese landing, Kabayama felt that there was no time to lose. Consequently, he ordered the ships to set sail for Taiwan at noon the same day. On 29 May, the first troops of the Imperial Guards Division went ashore on the northern coast of Taiwan at Samtiao Point near the village of Audi (a small village in Gongliao), several miles to the east of Keelung. The Japanese had originally intended to land at Tamsui, but finding the town strongly defended, they changed their plans at the last moment. The landing marked the beginning of the war, with the first major engagement taking place on 2 June at Ruifang, in which the defending Chinese forces were defeated.
On 3 June, the Japanese captured the port city of Keelung, where, following a preliminary bombardment of the city's coastal defences by the warships Matsushima, Oshima, Naniwa, Takachiho and Chiyoda, the Imperial Guards attacked the Keelung forts from the rear. The main engagement, known as the Battle of Keelung, took place around the Shiqiuling battery (Chinese: 獅球嶺砲台). Eleven years earlier, during the Sino-French War, Chinese forces had bottled up a French expeditionary corps in Keelung for seven months during the Keelung Campaign, and the Shiqiuling battery had been held against the French for most of the war. Now, in 1895, the Japanese routed the fort's garrison and captured the fort with little loss. Keelung was occupied on the afternoon of 3 June, after the Qing commanders fled the city and left the garrison force leaderless. Japanese casualties in the battle for Keelung were 2 dead and 26 wounded.
Transfer of sovereignty
While the conflict continued at Keelung, sovereignty over Taiwan was formally transferred from China to Japan at a ceremony held on the morning of 3 June aboard one of the Japanese warships in Keelung harbour. Japan and China were represented at the ceremony by two plenipotentiaries (diplomats): Governor-General Kabayama for Japan and Li Jingfang (the adopted son of Li Hongzhang) for China. Li Hongzhang's numerous enemies had arranged for his son to handle the task of presiding over the surrender of Taiwan to the Japanese.
While the Japanese had wanted to stage the handover ceremony ashore, in the capital, Taipei, that arrangement would have been dangerous for Li Jingfang; his father Li Hongzhang was the negotiator of the Treaty of Shimonoseki that ceded Taiwan to Japan, so he was detested by the islanders, who were further angered by his son's involvement in formally ceding Chinese sovereignty over the island. Placards were posted in towns across Taiwan vowing eternal hatred to Li Hongzhang and his family, and Li Jingfang was forced to request the Japanese to hold the transfer ceremony at sea rather than ashore: the request was granted.
When the news of the defeat at Keelung reached Taipei on 4 June, the republican leaders fled. During the night of 4 June, President Tang and General Chiu escaped to Tamsui, and from there sailed for the mainland on the evening of 6 June aboard the steamship Arthur. Their departure was delayed for a day because of disorder in Tamsui (see below).