TAIWAN HISTORY - Formosa Files Episodes

She loved opium, handsome pirates, and spoke English... plus she allegedly (it's almost certainly not true) sometimes went into battle topless! He was a pirate warlord who, at one point, had hundreds of ships and tens of thousands of men …

John chats with veteran Hong Kong-based journalist and author of The Island (2024) Mark O'Neill, who tells us what Taiwan was like in the early 1980s, when he first came to study Chinese. Despite a mysterious knife attack and various …

Japanese princes, Taiwanese activists, a Korean martyr, American generals and presidents, Chiang Kai-shek and his son Chiang Ching-kuo. It’s an action-packed episode with an amazing cast of characters. These little-known Taiwan-related assassination attempts and plots will surprise you. And, we …

Taiwan loves seafood, and boats from this island trawl for yummy ocean offerings thousands of kilometers away from our shores. Taiwanese fishing vessels are very good at what they do, but they weren't always so good in how they did …

April 1997. Taiwan’s crime story of the century starts with the kidnapping and murder of a celebrity’s 12-year-old daughter by a trio of hardened criminals. In the seven-month crime spree that follows, there are more kidnappings, killings, rapes, police manhunts …

In the 1980s, Japan's, South Korea's, and Taiwan’s massive fishing fleets gained notoriety for their destructive driftnet fishing. The use of giant driftnets, sometimes tens of kilometers long, threatened to turn the oceans into deserts. In 1989 the United States …

As one of the four "Asian Tigers," Taiwan's economy roared in the 1980s, but free-flowing money came with downsides such as the exploitation of wild animals, including tigers.