As regards this particular odd corner of the world, naturally, in my peregrinations about the island, I picked up a certain amount of information. Among other things, I learned that those who make up the vast majority of the population of the island at the present time, and who are known as “Formosans”--this not only among themselves, but who also are so called (i.e. _Taiwan-jin_, “men of Formosa”) by their Japanese conquerors, and by Europeans resident in the island--are Chinese; that is, descendants of the immigrants from the mainland of China. Of these, between 80,000 and 90,000 are Hakkas, originally from the Kwantung Province of China--a people rather despised by the other Chinese.[42] The remaining nearly 3,000,000 “Formosans” are descendants of Chinese from the Fukien Province of the mainland, and most of them speak the Amoy dialect of Chinese, though a few speak the dialect of Foochow. The Japanese, who since the treaty of Shimonoseki (1895) have been masters of the island, number between 120,000 and 125,000, and are constantly increasing in population. All official positions, and those of authority of any sort, are in the hands of the Japanese as is now all the wealth of the island. The aboriginal population it is naturally more difficult to estimate. But the number of the aborigines at the present time cannot, in reality, exceed 105,000. Personally I doubt if a carefully taken census would reveal that number.[43] Certainly the aboriginal population is steadily diminishing, and all tribes are being driven constantly farther up into the mountains; or, in the case of certain tribes--such as the Ami and Paiwan--are being more rigidly confined to the precipitous, barren east coast. The whole of the island--including the marvellously fertile great plains on the west side of the central mountain range--was naturally once in the hands of the aborigines. But during the Chinese dominion of the island, from the conquest of Koksinga (1662) to the close of the Sino-Japanese War (1895), the aboriginal population was--if all reports and all records, including those of the Chinese themselves, speak truly--treated with systematic cruelty and with ruthless greed and rapacity. Sometimes by wholesale slaughter, sometimes by fraud and cunning, the Chinese gradually pushed the aborigines back into the central mountain range, or, as the Japanese to-day are doing, confined them to the sterile, ill-watered east coast, and thus gained for themselves possession of the whole of the broad, level, western sea-board; and even of those valleys between the mountains where rice and tea could be made to grow. Chicanery was often cheaper than gunpowder. An aborigine would fancy a gun or a red blanket. A Chinaman would supply him with the commodity desired and would take in exchange, or more frequently “as security,” fertile fields. Naturally--to one who knows the habits of the aborigines--the “security” was seldom redeemed, and the Chinaman became the owner of