It was in Formosa that I found these matriarchal people; Formosa, that little-known island in the typhoon-infested South China Sea, so well called by its early Portuguese discoverers--as its name implies--“the beautiful.” Indeed, it was the beauty of Formosa that first attracted me. I shall never forget the first glimpse that I caught of the island as I passed it, going by steamer from Manila[2] to Nagasaki. There it lay, in the light of the tropical sunrise, glowing and shimmering like a great emerald, with an apparent vividness of green that I had never seen before, even in the tropics. During the greater part of the day it remained in sight, apparently floating slowly past--an emerald on a turquoise bed. For on that day there was no typhoon or threat of typhoon, and on such a day the China Sea can, with its wonderful blueness and calm, make amends for the many other days on which, like the raging dragon that the Chinese peasants believe it veritably to be, of murky green, spitting white foam, deck-high, it threatens--and often brings--death and destruction to those who venture upon it. Nor was the emerald island a jewel in the rough. The Chinese call it Taiwan, a name which means, in the characters of their language, Terrace Beach, [Illustration].[3] This name the Japanese--the present masters of the Island--have adopted; and it is not an inappropriate one. Nor do the terraces refer to those small, low-lying ones of the rice-paddies which for some centuries Chinese coolies have cultivated on the fertile east coast of the island; but rather to those bolder mountain terraces, carved by the hand of Nature, and covered with that wild verdure which only tropical rains, followed by tropical sunshine, can produce.[4] These terraces--gleaming brilliant green, and seeming to refract the sunlight of that April day, as we sailed across the Tropic of Cancer, which cuts Formosa through the middle--were curiously like the facets of a great emerald, polished and carefully cut. The glimpse which I caught that day of the shining island with its vivid colouring, and seemingly wondrously carved surface, remained with me as a pleasant memory during the several years that I spent in Japan. Although Formosa is now a Japanese colony--has been since 1895--one is able to get curiously little definite information in Japan regarding the island. From the Japanese themselves one hears only of the marvellous energy and skill of the Japanese in exploiting the resources of the island--sugar, camphor, tea--and the manufacture of opium, a Government monopoly. From the English, Scottish, and Canadian missionaries stationed in Formosa, who sometimes spend their summers in Japan, one hears more of the exploiting, on the part of the Japanese, of the Chinese population of Formosa--a fact which later I found to be cruelly true.