As an island in East Asia, Taiwan ( 台湾 ) is located off the coast of mainland China, south of Japan and north of the Philippines. It is bounded to the east by the Pacific Ocean, to the south by the South China Sea, to the west by the Taiwan Strait and to the north by the East China Sea . The island is 245 miles long and 89 miles wide and consists of steep mountains covered by tropical and subtropical vegetation.

Evidence of human settlement in Taiwan dates back 30,000 years. Records from ancient China indicate that Han Chinese might have known of the existence of the main island of Taiwan since the Three Kingdoms period, having assigned offshore islands in the vicinity names like Greater and Minor Liuqiu ( 琉球 ) , though none of these names have been definitively matched to the main island of Taiwan. It has been claimed but not verified that Zheng He ( 郑和 Ming Dynasty ) visited Taiwan between 1403 and 1424.

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. The Dutch made Taiwan a colony with its colonial capital at Tainan .

In 1661, Zheng Chenggong ( 郑成功 ) led his troops to a landing at Lu'ermen to attack Taiwan. By the end of the year, he had chased out the Dutch, who had controlled Taiwan for 38 years. Following the fall of the Ming dynasty ( 明朝 ) , he retreated to Taiwan as a self-styled Ming loyalist, and established the Kingdom of Tungning ( 东宁王国 1662–1683). Zheng Chenggong establishing his capital at Tainan and he and his heirs continued to launch raids on the east coast of mainland China well into the Qing dynasty, in an attempt to recover the mainland.

At the age of 39, Zheng Chenggong died of malaria, although speculations said that he died in a sudden fit of madness upon hearing the death of his father under the Qing. His son, Zheng Jing ( 郑经 ) , succeeded as the King of Taiwan.

In 1683, the Qing dynasty ( 清朝 ) defeated the Zheng holdout, and formally annexed Taiwan, placing it under the jurisdiction of Fujian province. Following the defeat of Zheng's grandson to an armada led by Admiral Shi Lang, Cheng's followers were expatriated to the farthest reaches of the Qing empire, leaving approximately 7,000 Han on Taiwan . The Qing government wrestled with its Taiwan policy to reduce piracy and vagrancy in the area, which led to a series of edicts to manage immigration and respect aboriginal land rights. Illegal immigrants from Fujian continued to enter Taiwan as renters of the large plots of aboriginal lands under contracts that usually involved marriage, while the border between taxpaying lands and "savage" lands migrated east, with some aborigines while others retreated into the mountains. During this time, there were a number of conflicts involving Han Chinese from different regions of China , and between Han Chinese and aborigines. The bulk of Taiwan 's population today, the "native" Taiwanese, claim descent from these migrants.

In 1887, the Qing government of China made Taiwan a province by itself, the 20th in the country, with capital at Taibei ( 台北 ) .