"Until 350 years ago, the Chinese considered Taiwan a "savage island" beyond the pale of Chinese civilization. When the Qing conquered the island in 1683, the court debated the value of colonizing this "ball of mud." Yet, two centuries later, in 1895, Chinese writers lamented the island's cession to Japan as a loss of sacred national territory. Taiwan's trajectory from "savage island" to China's "sovereign territory" is the subject of this book."--BOOK JACKET.