With hundreds of peaks over 3,000 m high, Taiwan is a special island. Portuguese sailors, viewing it from nearby seas in the 16th century, named it ilha Formosa - "Beautiful Island". Geologically it is the location where the Philippine Sea Plate, shaped into a sharp wedge by Manila Trench and the Ryukyu Trench, collides with the continental Eurasian Plate. The result was collision type mountain formation, like the uplift that produced the Himalayas. Because of the narrow range of the collision, sheer cliffs were forced up from the flat surface of the sea, creating the island's remarkable landscape.The island was originally inhabited by groups of Austronesian peoples. It first appears in European records in the 17th-century Age of Exploration, when the Dutch and Spanish founded East Asian trading bases there. Around the same time, the population increased through the arrivals of coastal dwellers from the Chinese province of Fujian and mountain dwellers from the province of Guangdong. The Dutch, with strongholds in the southern part of the island, gained complete control by ousting the Spanish from the northern part. But in 1661 they were in turn defeated by Zheng Cheng-Gong. Descended from a family of merchants and pirates and born in Hirado in Japan, Zheng was Chinese Ming dynasty loyalist who resisted the Manchu conquest of China. His defeat of the Dutch and founding of a kingdom in Taiwan was part of that resistance, but the result was the independence for Taiwan. Zheng is still revered there for that reason, although his kingdom lasted less than 20 years. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Taiwan was ruled by the Manchu Qing dynasty, and the basic walled city layout was established in the island's main cities.
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