• Once a self-sufficient community
  • Taiwan's economic export value accounts for the largest proportion
  • Departing from an abandoned railway
  • With the introduction of local people
  • Let's understand the history of Taiwan Sugar
Sugar mill locomotive

Retired train that used to transport sugar cane

Old banyan tree

Old banyan tree accompanied Pingtung sugar factory

Shinpei Torii

Japanese engineer built a water collection corridor

Taitang County People's Park

The transformed Park is full of amazing designs

Prehistoric period

Before the Dutch East India Company arrived in Taiwan, in the "Island Guide to the Island" written by Wang Dayuan of the Yuan Dynasty, the residents of "Liuqiu" would "brewed cane pulp for wine."The Dutch "Batavia City Diary" recorded "Sugao produces sugarcane" in February 1624. From this, we can know that the Pingpu tribe of Taiwan may have known to grow and use sugarcane as early as the 14th century. The use of sugar cane to make sugar is less clear.The characters in the "Saccharum" picture in the "Fanshe Collection" in the Qing Dynasty are mainly Han Chinese. It seems that the sugar-making technology is owned by the Han people, and the Pingpu people do not have the skills to make sucrose. In the late Ming Dynasty, Yan Siqi, Zheng Zhilong, and others, based on Taiwan, used sucrose as an export trade and mainly exported it to Japan.

荷治時期台灣進出口圖

Dutch period

During the Dutch reign, the Dutch East India Company recruited Han Chinese to come to Taiwan to cultivate and encouraged Han Chinese to grow sugar cane and make sucrose. In 1638, there were about 10,000 Han Chinese in Taiwan. In 1644, a report from the Dutch Governor of the East India to the Amsterdam Head Office indicated that Taiwan produced about 900,000 kilograms of sugar. By 1652, the sugarcane planting area had reached one third of the rice planting area. At that time, the main export target was Japan.After the Dutch East India Company was defeated by Zheng Chenggong in 1662, after exiting Taiwan, the Dutch East India Company shifted the focus of the sugar industry that it had previously operated to the island of Java and later developed it into an important sugar producing world in the world. The Persian market disappeared.

Ming Zheng Period

During the Zheng and Ming dynasties, because Zheng Chenggong's army had a shortage of food, he encouraged the cultivation of rice. The output of sucrose has been declining. Later, he imported new varieties of sucrose seedlings from Fujian. Reached 18,000 metric tons.During this period, the main export object of Taiwan's sugar industry was still Japan, in exchange for the copper, lead, and other metals required for the manufacture of arms and weapons. In 1682, there were 9,923 tons of sugar exported to Nagasaki, and in May 1677, a British ship Hermosa carried records of Taiwan sucrose to India.

Qing Dynasty

After Taiwan ruled in the Qing Dynasty, the sugar industry continued to develop, and the sugar pupa was mainly concentrated in today's Tainan area. At the end of the Qing Dynasty, 80% of the sugar pupa was concentrated here.     Compared with the government's attitude of monopoly on the sugar industry during the period of He Zhi and Ming and Zheng dynasties, the Qing Dynasty was more laissez-faire about the development of the sugar industry, but basically did not encourage sugar production but encouraged rice cultivation.In the early Qing Dynasty, Taiwan sugar entered the Chinese mainland market and was sold to Jiangsu, Zhejiang and other places. Although Sichuan sugar competed with it, Taiwan sugar still had a place, and it continued to export to Japan.Due to the growing prosperity of the sugar industry, at the time, some commercial ports in Taiwan formed specialized merchants for the sale and purchase of sugar, such as Li Shengxing, a sugar suburb in the three suburbs of Taiwan ’s capital city, and Jin Yongxing, a sugar suburb in Lugang. In addition to Tangjiao, Jinjinshun also has a record of exporting sugar to Taiwan.In addition to the Jiangsu and Zhejiang markets, Taiwanese sugar has gradually entered the Bohai coast market in the late years of Kangxi. In the thirteenth year of Daoguang (1833), the Canton Register reported that there were more than 20 Rongke ships that transported Taiwanese sugar to Tianjin each year, while Taiwanese sugar that was only shipped to North China in Xianfeng in 1856 160,000 catties, one third of which is white sugar, and the rest is brown sugar, which is worth 470,000 silver dollars.

Japanese rule

Japan had been an importer of the sugar industry until it acquired Taiwan, and has been importing Taiwan since the 17th century. When Japan first began to rule Taiwan, sugar production was still carried out by traditional sugar mills. Until December 1900, Taiwan Sugar Co., Ltd. was established, and the first new sugar factory in Taiwan, "Qiaozitou Sugar Refinery," was set up in Kaohsiung. Later, the production method of the sugar industry in Taiwan was changed.Before the establishment of the Taiwan Sugar Research Institute, the fourth governor, Taro Kodama, asked the visiting agronomy doctor Dr. Shinto Tozao to assist in investigating the sugar industry and sugar administration facilities in various countries. Inspect the sugar industry in Egypt and the Netherlands East India (Java Island). Dr. Shintodo was hired as the director of Taiwan's governor's property when he arrived in Taiwan.In 1901, he proposed the "Sugar Industry Improvement Opinion", which contains 7 points of improvement methods, 11 protection and reward schemes, and 14 suggestions for improving sugar facilities and institutions. On June 14, 1902, the "Sugar Industry Award Rules" was promulgated, and a provisional Taiwan Sugar Bureau was established to handle related matters.The "Sugar Industry Incentive Rules" are mainly composed of three measures: funding subsidies, ensuring raw materials and market protection. Funding subsidies are mainly for new sugar factories and provide subsidies for purchasing sugar-making machinery. After 1907 AD, it focused on revitalizing sucrose operations, providing fertilizer or subsidies for purchasing fertilizer,As well as subsidies for sugarcane seedlings and water conservancy projects; in terms of ensuring raw materials, the whole sugarcane cropping area is divided or designated as the raw material taking area to prevent sugar mills from overly setting up raw materials with each factory to affect the price of sugarcane. Cane farmers in the area without permission,Sugarcane must not be transported outside the region or used as a raw material for products other than granulated sugar; in terms of market protection, tariff barriers are used to protect the development of Taiwan's sugar industry. These policies have a great impact on Taiwan in the future.

早期台灣製糖所的分布圖

Post-war period

After the war, the Taiwan Sugar Corporation (Taiwan Sugar for short) was established to take over the sugar industry equipment left by Japanese capitalists and repair the production equipment destroyed during the war. In the early post-war period, Taiwan's economy was still dominated by agriculture.The sugar industry produced by the Taiwan Sugar Corporation also plays an important role in it, earning a lot of foreign exchange for Taiwan in the next few decades, and therefore playing an important role in the transformation of Taiwan's industrial structure.From the 1950s to the 1960s, the Taiwan Sugar Company became the largest enterprise in Taiwan at that time due to the large number of sugar products exported. Later, with the long-term downturn in international sugar prices and excessive production costs, the sugar industry in Taiwan began to decline.In the 1990s, sugar factories that were the focus of employment and economics of their surrounding residents were dismissed or merged, and only a few of them were transformed into sightseeing sugar factories or continued to operate. In addition, a small number of private sugar factories started their business during the Japanese rule or early post-war years, and several sugar mills continued to operate.