Written by Joshua W.J. Brown
Image credit: Qingjing Mosque in Quanzhou, Fujian, one of the surviving Islamic sites in the Song–Yuan maritime emporium discussed in the essay. Windmemories, Wikimedia Commons, 30 January 2023. Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. No modification is proposed.
Taiwan is usually made to explain itself through questions that arrive late. Is it China? Is it independent? Can its democracy survive coercion? Can the world’s semiconductor supply survive a war? Every one of those questions matters. None is a starting point.
Before Taiwan was reduced to a problem in geopolitical strategy papers, it was an island inside several overlapping maritime worlds. Its Indigenous peoples were—and remain—peoples with their own lands, languages, political histories, and oceanic relations. Dutch and Spanish colonisers established footholds. Fujianese migrants crossed the strait. Japanese, Southeast Asian, European, and Chinese trading systems collided. The Zheng family built a maritime state. The Qing conquered it. Later empires kept renaming the island’s meaning.
One layer in that history is still easy to miss: the Islamicate networks of China’s southeast coast and the Muslim-descended lineages that travelled outward from Fujian. “Islamicate” matters here because it does not mean that every person in the network practised Islam. It names a wider social and cultural field shaped in part by Muslim merchants, families, institutions, memories, and routes.
I began with a larger provocation. The sources refused it. Good. The defensible story is more compelling than a secret-origin myth anyway.
Begin with the correction
Muslims did not “found” Taiwan. The Zheng regime was not an Islamic state. Quanzhou, a prefectural port city on the Taiwan Strait in southern Fujian, has its Islamic heritage; that heritage does not automatically become part of Taiwan’s history simply because many migrants crossed from Fujian. Any account that begins with a Chinese port has already begun too late: Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples cannot be reduced to a preface before outsiders arrive.
The narrower question is worth asking. What changes when the Fujianese world feeding the Taiwan Strait is treated as internally plural rather than culturally flat? What becomes visible when historians follow lineages, ports, ritual spaces, tombs, surnames, and family memory instead of looking only for a mosque or a state that called itself Muslim?
The port that changes the map
Quanzhou gives that question firm ground. UNESCO’s World Heritage listing describes the city as a major maritime emporium of the Song and Yuan periods, from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries. Its surviving sites include the eleventh-century Qingjing Mosque, Islamic tombs, inscriptions, docks, bridges, administrative buildings, and production sites. Arabic and Western texts knew the port as Zayton.
That material record does not prove a Muslim Taiwan. It proves something more basic and more useful: the southeast Chinese maritime world was never one thing. The same coast that later supplied migrants, soldiers, merchants, and ships to Taiwan had long been tied to Muslim commercial and family histories.
Quanzhou was not an exotic footnote sitting outside “Chinese” history. It was part of the machinery of maritime Asia. Once that is visible, the Taiwan Strait no longer looks like an empty corridor between a mainland nation and an offshore island. It becomes a crowded field of routes and inherited connections.
Lineages outlast institutions
The bridge to Taiwan is not just theoretical. In a 2025 article in History and Anthropology, Oded Abt examines communities descended from Muslims in Fujian, Taiwan, and the Philippines. The lineages trace their origins to Muslim sojourners who settled in Fujian between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries and gradually assimilated into local non-Muslim populations beginning in the fifteenth century. Their descendants do not all tell the same story or use the same identity. What persists are kinship narratives, ritual relationships with ancestors, symbolic spaces, and renewed exchanges with relatives in Fujian.
Dru Gladney’s earlier work on the Ding lineage in Chendai, near Quanzhou, showed a related problem: religious identity can thin, localise, or be recognised again without the lineage itself disappearing. If the only acceptable evidence is continuous orthodox practice, the archive will falsely report absence. A family can retain its ancestry, ritual space, dietary memory, architecture, or genealogy even after changes in formal observance.
This does not authorise historians to label people against their will. Descent, present religion, ethnic classification, and community membership are different claims. It does, however, give us a documented method for seeing connections that state and religious categories alone can miss.
The Zheng hinge
Seventeenth-century Taiwan is where these questions meet a radically mobile political world. Tonio Andrade’s history of Dutch, Spanish, Han, and Indigenous encounters shows that intensive Chinese colonisation accelerated only after the Dutch established their trading colony in the 1620s and 1630s. Taiwan was not timelessly organised as a Chinese province waiting to be recovered.
Xing Hang describes the Zheng organisation as a multinational, transnational commercial and military enterprise whose routes stretched from Japan to the Strait of Melaka. Zheng Chenggong—Koxinga—drove the Dutch from Taiwan in 1662. His successors built a mercantile territorial state while remaining entangled in Ming loyalism, Qing power, Japanese relations, and the wider economy of maritime East Asia.
None of these factors makes the Zheng state Islamic. That claim would be nonsense. It does mean that Zheng Taiwan belonged to a sea-world larger than the later China-versus-Taiwan frame. Muslim-descended Fujianese lineages and Islamicate port histories were part of that world even when they did not appear as a separate political bloc.
What the archive will not let us say
Popular histories sometimes offer precise figures for Muslim troops accompanying Koxinga, the number of mosques lost, or surviving customs in particular Taiwanese families. Some may preserve real memory. They still require a source chain. I am not using those claims as established fact here because the available documentation does not yet carry that weight.
The better research programme is less theatrical: identify a specific lineage in Taiwan; trace its genealogy to a documented Fujian place and branch; compare ritual spaces and family narratives; check local histories, land records, tombs, and migration records; and let the people concerned define their present identity. Abt’s research shows that this work is possible. It also shows why a single label cannot contain the results.
After the Qing conquest of 1683, Taiwan became increasingly legible through imperial administration and later through rival national histories. When history is written as a relay race between sovereign owners, networks and mixed lineages look secondary. That is an effect of the frame, not proof that the people or connections vanished.
A wider Taiwan
Recovering an Islamicate maritime layer does not make Taiwan secretly Muslim, less Indigenous, or more Chinese. It makes the island’s history harder to flatten.
Taiwan is an Indigenous homeland and an Austronesian centre. It is also a place transformed by Dutch and Spanish colonisation, Fujianese settlement, Zheng state-building, Qing rule, the Japanese Empire, Nationalist authoritarianism, democratisation, and new migrations from Southeast Asia and elsewhere. These histories do not cancel one another. They accumulate, collide, and leave uneven records.
The point is not to manufacture a Muslim Taiwan. It is to stop manufacturing a flat one. Quanzhou’s mosque and tombs, Fujian’s Muslim-descended lineages, and their documented extensions into Taiwan and the Philippines belong on the same maritime map. Once they are restored to it, the Taiwan Strait looks less like a border drawn between two finished identities and more like what it has long been: a passage where identities were made, moved, translated, and sometimes forgotten.
AI-use disclosure. AI-assisted research organisation, source comparison, drafting, and document production under the author’s direction. Brown selected the argument, reviewed the cited sources, removed unsupported claims, and accepts responsibility for the text.
Joshua W.J. Brown is a Toronto writer, filmmaker, and independent researcher whose work integrates public history, archival method, documentary development, and evidence-controlled research. He studied Film Studies at Brock University from 2011 to 2015; degree conferral is not asserted.