Taiwan (historically ), also known as Formosa (from Portuguese (Ilha) Formosa, meaning "beautiful (island)"), is an island located in East Asia off the coast of Mainland China, southwest of the main islands of Japan but directly west of the end of Japan's Ryukyu Islands, and north-northwest of the Philippines. It is bound to the east by the Pacific Ocean, to the south by the South China Sea and the Luzon Strait, to the west by the Taiwan Strait and to the north by the East China Sea. The island is 394 kilometers (245 miles) long and 144 kilometers (89 miles) wide and consists of steep mountains covered by tropical and subtropical vegetation.

Since 1945, Taiwan has been under the administration of the Republic of China (ROC). However, the People's Republic of China (PRC) considers itself the successor state to the Republic of China and therefore entitled to all its holdings, including Taiwan. Although the PRC claims the island along with the Pescadores and other nearby islands as its province of Taiwan, it has never controlled any of the territory referred to thereas.

Though for decades following the cessation of major hostilities in the Chinese Civil War in 1950, the ROC was a single-party authoritarian state, it has since evolved into a democracy. Its rapid economic growth in the decades after World War II has transformed it into an advanced economy status as one of the Four Asian Tigers. This economic rise is known as the Taiwan Miracle. It is categorized as an advanced economy by the IMF and high-income economy by the world bank. Its technology industry plays a key role in the global economy. Taiwanese companies manufacture a giant portion of the world's consumer electronics, although most of them are made in their factories in mainland China.

History

main: Timeline of Taiwanese history

Prehistory and early settlements

main: Prehistory of Taiwan Evidence of human settlement in Taiwan dates back thirty thousand years, although the first inhabitants of Taiwan may have been genetically distinct from any groups currently on the island. About four thousand years ago, ancestors of current Taiwanese aborigines settled in Taiwan. These aborigines are genetically related to Malay and maternally to Polynesians, and linguists classify their languages as Austronesian. It is thought likely that Polynesian ancestry may be traceable through Taiwan.

Han Chinese began settling in the Penghu islands in the 1200s, but Taiwan's hostile tribes and its lack of the trade resources valued in that era rendered it unattractive to all but "occasional adventurers or fishermen engaging in barter" until the sixteenth century. Reprinted Taipei: SMC Publishing, 1995.

Records from ancient China indicate that Han Chinese might have known of the existence of the main island of Taiwan since the Three Kingdoms period (third century, 230 A.D.), having assigned offshore islands in the vicinity names like Greater Liuqiu and Lesser Liuqiu (etymologically, but perhaps not semantically, identical to Ryūkyū in Japanese), though none of these names has been definitively matched to the main island of Taiwan. It has been claimed but not verified that the Ming Dynasty admiral Cheng Ho (Zheng He) visited Taiwan between 1403 and 1424.