Abstract
On May 25, 1895, amid a festive atmosphere at the governor's yamen in Taipei, China's island province of Taiwan (Formosa) was declared a republic. News of this extraordinary event was received in Peking and elsewhere with reactions of dismay and skepticism. Most Ch'ing authorities and foreign observers suspected that the creation of a republic was merely a desperate scheme to keep Taiwan from being ceded to Japan as an outcome of the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95. Nevertheless, to a few witnesses the unprecedented move of establishing a republic in an area of imperial China suggested at first more hopeful signs for the future. James W. Davidson, then a Taipei news correspondent, initially surmised, “If it has been conceived and carried out altogether by Celestial minds we are emboldened to believe that there is, after all, a new China in the nursery from whom great things may eventually be expected.”
