Exactly 350 years ago the Dutch East India Company (VOC) left the island of Formosa, which the company controlled from 1624 to 1662. For the past twenty years, Leiden University researchers Professor Leonard Blussé and Dr Nathalie Everts have been studying this so-called Dutch Period in the VOC archives in The Hague. The records document the history of the indigenous population in great detail, while the inhabitants themselves have recorded next to nothing of their past. By publishing a large amount of source material about the indigenous population during this period, Leiden University researchers gave the history of this people back to its descendants, who still live there today. The delegation is coming to the Netherlands to express its thanks for this research, and to personally catch a glimpse of their roots in the VOC archives.

The research carried out by Blussé and Everts shows, among other things, how much of an influence the Dutch had on the original population of Taiwan. ‘Formosa was the only place where the Protestant mission became a great success,’ Blussé explains. ‘The ministers set up schools where the population learned to write in their own language. In land transfer contracts, even in those dated two hundred years after the departure of the VOC, there are often two versions of the text noted down in two columns. The Chinese characters on the right, and the original language on the left, neatly written in Dutch cursive script.’