Dutch Church Politics in Seventeenth-Century Taiwan

This book offers the first historical summary in English and source text in Dutch of the Tayuoan Consistory Minutes recorded between 1643 and 1649 at the Castle Zeelandia in Formosa (today’s Taiwan). The minute recordings occurred at a crucial moment in the existence of the Dutch East India Company in Taiwan in the 17th century and are complemented with an annotated Introduction that contextualizes the manuscript from an historical perspective. The public disclosure in Dutch transcription and English translation is one of the few remaining primary sources covering the Calvinist mission history of the Dutch pioneering settlement in Formosa. It is concise and the reading is factual, yet enriching from a multitude of perspectives.

The main topics cover the growing community of Calvinist believers, the expansion of the education, and the evangelization of the Indigenous, such as the inspection of the schools, finances of the church and the diaconate, mobility and community membership among the VOC employees. These come to make the record of important events, evaluation of personalities and socio-economic development of the Dutch community and an emerging indigenous community of believers. This serves to deepen the understanding of the goal of the Church consistory to act as an instrument in carrying out VOC policies. We want to draw attention to illustrate how this contributed to an emerging citizenry. The manuscript is replete with valuable information about the colonial encounter, the contact with the Indigenous, the tension between a clerical and secular society in establishing a Calvinist community, and most of all to contextualize the historiographic intervention. It helps to critically scrutinize the colonial biases and its inherited narratives, and offers against the background of the traditional echoed perspectives of the VOC as a “merchant” organization, a glimpse into what this pioneering settlement was all about.