How Formosa Clothed the Samurai 🛕

VOL. IV Leiden Files III: Deerskin Gold

June 2026 · Echoes of Formosa

Hey friends - happy Friday. 🛕

Last issue I said a million. The archive says 100,000 a year.

Over four decades - two million skins. Same story, sharper numbers.

I was combing through the colonial records of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) when these figures stopped me cold. We often treat global trade as a modern invention, something born with shipping containers and fiber-optic cables. But standing on the stone docks of Tayouan (大員) in the 1630s, you would have smelled global capitalism in its rawest, most visceral form. It smelled like drying animal hide.

Let's trace how a quiet island ecosystem was stitched directly into the military-industrial fashion of feudal Japan.

In the early 1600s, Japan entered the peaceful Tokugawa era. The brutal civil wars were over, but the samurai class still needed to signal their status, wealth, and martial pride. They did this through highly ornate armor decoration and luxury leather goods like slippers and sword-grip wraps.

For this, they demanded a very specific material: Formosan deerskin. The leather was renowned across East Asia for being softer and more pliable (phê-kik 皮革) than almost anything else on the market. It was the ultimate seventeenth-century luxury utility fabric.

Before the Dutch arrived, Japan sourced its skins from Ayutthaya (modern Thailand) and Cambodia. But those routes were plagued by heavy royal monopolies and diplomatic trade barriers. Formosa, sitting quietly in the Taiwan Strait, represented a massive, unregulated goldmine of wildlife.

Think of it as the Asian equivalent of the North American fur trade. Just as European fashion trends drove the near-extinction of the Canadian beaver for top hats, the aesthetic demands of the Japanese samurai drove an unprecedented wildlife harvest in the forests of Taiwan.

When the Dutch built Fort Zeelandia in 1624 at Anping (安平), they didn't want to hunt. They wanted to manage. They quickly realized they could exploit existing networks by turning indigenous villages into commercial suppliers.

I found a VOC decree dated October 1634 that laid down the iron law of the harbor: Chinese merchants were strictly forbidden from selling deerskins to anyone but the Dutch. Violators faced immediate banishment. The VOC wanted an absolute monopoly on the island's ecology.

The real explosion happened in 1636. Hoping to maximize profits, the Dutch colonial administration began issuing official licenses to Chinese trappers, permitting them to use massive "pitfall traps" (陷阱坑).

The efficiency was devastating. In 1634, the port exported around 100,000 skins. By 1637, the annual export peaked at a staggering 151,400 pieces. The coastal markets became incredibly lāu-jia̍t (鬧熱, bustling), choked with the heavy stench of millions of hides piled high on Dutch outbound vessels bound for Nagasaki.

But this economic miracle had a violent underside. The intensive trapping completely disrupted the traditional life of the local inhabitants.

The Sirayan (西拉雅) people, the indigenous inhabitants of the Tainan plains, had hunted deer for generations using sustainable methods like snares and spears. For them, the deer was a source of daily sustenance and small-scale barter, not an infinite commodity. They watched as thousands of licensed Chinese trappers invaded their ancestral hunting grounds, systematically emptying the forests.

Resistance flared up in central Taiwan. The Favorolang village (located in modern Yunlin and Changhua) sat on the densest deer territory on the island. When Chinese trappers pushed northward into their territory under Dutch protection, the Favorolang warriors struck back, attacking the poachers to defend their lands.

The colonial response wasn't simply "Dutch versus natives." In October 1637, Governor Johan van der Burg himself led three hundred company soldiers north - joined by 1,400 indigenous warriors from rival Sirayan villages, gathered by the missionary Robertus Junius. It was a Dutch-orchestrated alliance that burned Favorolang to the ground. Corporate quotas took precedence - and rival villages were happy to settle old scores under the company's flag.

Ecosystems, however, do not negotiate with corporate balance sheets. By the 1641-42 season, the colonial government noticed a sharp decline in numbers and hastily placed a temporary ban on traps and snares. But the damage was done. The great herds of the western plains were collapsing.

When Koxinga's forces seized Taiwan from the Dutch in 1662, the deer population was a shadow of its former self. Exports dropped down to roughly 30,000 skins a year. By the early Qing dynasty rule in 1683, that number withered to a mere 9,000.

The human cost shifted too. With the deer gone, the Dutch had lost their primary revenue stream, so they began squeezing the Chinese immigrant community with heavy poll taxes and exorbitant license fees. This systematic extortion eventually sparked the bloody Guo Huaiyi (郭懷一) rebellion of 1652, the largest armed uprising of the Dutch era.

The long-term environmental payload of this trade is still felt today. The Formosan sika deer, which once roamed the island's lowland plains in vast herds, was hunted to extinction in the wild by 1979. Today, when you visit the bustling western coastal town of Lukang (鹿港 - literally "Deer Harbor"), you are walking through a living monument named after a ghost town of an ecosystem we traded away for samurai armor.

The contracts the Dutch signed with Sirayan villages sit in The Hague, still legible after four centuries - transcribed and studied by scholars in Leiden. In them, a chief writes his name with a thumbprint. A pastor writes the chief's name with a feather pen.

Next issue, we open those contracts. And we ask: whose name was really on the page?

Vol. III told you about three empires who erased African soldiers from the record.

Vol. IV tells you about three groups those same empires erased from a forest: Sirayan hunters, Chinese trappers, and the Formosan sika deer.

The Dutch didn't conquer Taiwan. They subcontracted it.

- Ricky

Tonio Andrade, How Taiwan Became Chinese: Dutch, Spanish, and Han Colonization in the Seventeenth Century (Columbia UP, 2008), Chapter 7.

Cheng Wei-chung 鄭維中, "Emergence of Deerskin Exports from Taiwan under VOC (1624-1642)," Taiwan Historical Research 24, no. 3 (2017): 1-48.

Hui-wen Koo, "Deer Hunting and Preserving the Commons in Dutch Colonial Taiwan," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 42, no. 2 (Autumn 2011): 185-203.

Daghregister Zeelandia (熱蘭遮城日誌), National Archives of the Netherlands, The Hague.

Until next echo. 🛕

🌏 Alley-Tested, Story-Driven.

⚡ Island-Vibe, Deep-Connection.

✨ May the FORMOSA be with you.