However, from the early 19th century onward, a fast growing intercontinental trade carried aboard purpose-built clippers redefined maritime shipping needs. A permanent network of lighthouses was necessary to ensure the safety of these new ships, which were often at sea for days or weeks at a time. To the modest beacons already marking the entrances of early trade outposts like Manila and Batavia (Jakarta), western business interests gradually added permanent lighthouses in Hawaii (1840), Singapore (1851), Sakhalin (1860), China (1865), and Japan (1866). By the turn of the 20th century, lighthouses watched over all major trading ports as well as many of the region's navigational hazards.
The "frontier" flavor of the pre-1895 Formosa trade meant that Taiwan's earliest lighthouses were installed to warn ships away from coastal danger rather than guide them to safe anchorage. Shipwrecks along Taiwan's southernmost peninsula, which saw survivors lose their lives to indigenous tribesmen or get roughed up by Chinese, inflamed international public opinion and spurred policymakers in Japan and the United States during the mid-19th century to toy with thoughts of occupying Taiwan's eastern seaboard (based on the argument that failure to bring eastern Taiwan to heel placed the region beyond Qing sovereignty and, in the logic of 19th century Great Powers, into a power vacuum). In the end, belated Qing attention to the island, a Civil War in the United States, and alarm amongst European imperialists (who viewed such an occupation as the beginning of a free-for-all grab for territory that could quickly engulf all of China) conspired to keep Taiwan Chinese, for the moment.
The Qing built and garrisoned the island's first lighthouse on the hazardous southern cape at Eluanbi (Erluanbi, 鵝鸞鼻) in 1882. The northeast coast got its first lighthouse in 1896 high above Bitoujiao's (鼻頭角) jagged shoreline, some 50km southeast of Keelung. The Japanese built Keelung's first lighthouse in 1899 along the harbor's northwestern entrance to support early modernization efforts.
In addition to those at Bitoujiao and Keelung, lighthouses of historical and scenic interest in northern Taiwan include Sandiaojiao (Punto San Diego - 三貂角, built in 1931) and Fuguijiao (Eerste Hoeck - 富貴角 built in 1896), as well as an ascetic beacon on the scenically interesting Yeliu Peninsula (Punto Diablo - 野柳), built in 1967. Agincourt is northern Taiwan's most visually impressive and least accessible lighthouse. Raised in 1906, the Victorian structure rises 26 meters above Pengjia (Pengchiayu, 彭佳嶼), a windswept volcanic islet of 114 hectares situated 56km northeast of Keelung.
-JM
I wrote the following some time ago to tie together for myself some of the important historical threads woven into this corner of Taiwan.
Reluctant Crossroads
Keelung's Incommodious Introduction to Modernity
當中西相遇 - 基隆簡史
Keelung (基隆市) is Taiwan's second largest port and fifth largest city, with narrow, congested streets, busy seafood restaurants, and a night market (Miaokou, 廟口) that draws uncomfortably large numbers of visitors on weekends. International trade drives this bustling town of 375 thousand and commerce pumps briskly through its veins.
This was not always the case. When imperial Chinese officials, at the head of a sprawling and largely self-sufficient continental empire, were forced to open Keelung to foreign trade in 1860 (under the Treaty of Tientsin [天津條約], which ended the Second Opium War), they would have been hard pressed to describe the town beyond its position on a map.
In 1860, Keelung comprised settlements on and around Keelung Bay, with a combined population of probably no more than five thousand. Fishermen here sold their catch to traders, who would haul goods by foot and sampan to markets on the agricultural plain some 30km inland. Residents grew rice, vegetables, and tea in the valleys and on the alluvial plain. Coal deposits, found throughout the Keelung area and of great interest to foreign powers, were widely speculated about, but, as of yet, worked only on a small scale.
Indeed, until 1891, when the opening of China's first commercial railway provided a more or less stable link between the port and the flourishing inland outpost of Banka (Manka / Taipei), Keelung residents lived largely isolated from the rest of Taiwan behind a curtain of abrupt hills and narrow river valleys. Even at the dawn of the 20th century, footpaths through these hills were still the chief means of getting to and from the town. They made an overland commute to anywhere else a serious undertaking.
Keelung has always looked to the sea for its livelihood and for greater purpose. Japanese and Chinese adventurers and pirates, perhaps some of the island's first residents from the Asian mainland, established long-term encampments along the Keelung narrows (on and around Peace Island [和平島]) as early as the 15th century. The Spanish, then Dutch, built permanent fortifications here during the 17th century as way stations for lucrative trade with Japan and China, and (for the Spanish) for the galleon trade between Asia and the Americas.
Formal Chinese rule in Taiwan first came in 1661 when General Koxinga (a.k.a. Zheng Chenggong, 鄭成功), champion of the vanquished Ming dynasty (1368-1644), regrouped his forces on the island following successive defeats in China against the empire's new Manchu (Qing) rulers. Koxinga besieged the ill-prepared forces of the Dutch East India Company on Taiwan and accepted the surrender of all Dutch outposts on the island the following year. From Keelung and other Taiwan harbors, Koxinga and his successors harassed shipping up and down the China coast until 1683 when, weakened by internal squabbles and the resolve of its adversary, Koxinga's Taiwan was absorbed into the ascendant Qing dynasty. Used to the Manchurian plains and highly suspicious of the open sea, the Qing largely ignored China's water links with the outside and limited coastal trade. Keelung faded into obscurity for nearly two centuries.
The 1860 Treaty of Tientsin ignited a commercial revival in Keelung that hummed along for two decades. Trans-Pacific steamers hauling cargo from China to the Americas called regularly at the port to take on fuel; coal mining grew into a major industry (In 1881, Keelung produced about 60,000 tons of mostly bituminous coal); and the town became a hub for a flourishing Chinese domestic trade across the Straits.
Occupation by France during the Sino-French War (1883-1885) destroyed most of Keelung and warned Qing officials that success as a steamship depot had made the town an all too tempting target for acquisitive colonial powers. Their fears were not unfounded. China's loss of Hong Kong Island to Britain in 1842 was followed in succession by the loss of other strategic ports including Shanghai (上海), Weihai (威海, Weihaiwei - to Britain), Qingdao (青島, Kiautschou - to Germany), Zhanjiang (湛江, Kouang-Tchéou-Wan - to France), and Lushun (旅順, Port Arthur - to Russia ... and then Japan). Further improvements to the harbor were suspended and the town went to seed. Even the landmark 1891 rail link to Taipei was described as rickety and unreliable only four years after its completion. Western steamships no longer called and the last of Keelung's foreign merchants left to pursue more profitable investments.
Keelung's fate took a final, abrupt turn when Japan took control in 1895. The Japanese, recent converts to imperialism who lacked the natural resources of other Great Powers, were eager to exploit Taiwan's agricultural and mineral wealth. Officials gave top priority to constructing modern commercial and transportation infrastructures geared to channel goods to and from Japan. The harbor was dredged and expanded, new docks were built, and Keelung was turned into a modern colonial city - soon overtaking Tamsui as Taiwan's busiest port. Trade leapt by a factor of thirty in 5 years - from $225 thousand in 1896 to nearly $7 million in 1901. Trade through Keelung included large volumes of tea, camphor, China grass (for straw hats and rope), Japanese manufactured goods, and opium.
