Located in the Western Pacific Ocean, only 130 km from the Chinese coast, Taiwan is an island with a unique history and great strategic value for global geopolitical balances. Its identity has been marked over the years by colonial conquests, migrations and political refugees, and this has placed it for many years at the centre of contention and controversy for its control by numerous powers. Today, the island, although officially part of the People's Republic of China, maintains a de facto fully autonomous status, with its own armed forces and a democratically elected government.

Taiwan's original inhabitants were indigenous groups mainly from Indonesia and South-East Asia, fishermen and farmers who lived on the island for millennia. When Portuguese explorers discovered Taiwan in the 16th century, they claimed it in the name of the Portuguese crown and renamed it Formosa Island. However, the first to establish a permanent colony were the Dutch in 1624, followed shortly after by the Spanish who settled in the north.

A turning point in the island's colonial history occurred in 1662, when General Koxinga, a loyalist of the Chinese Ming emperors, fleeing the Manchurian invasion drove out the Europeans and founded an independent kingdom of Taiwan. The reign was short-lived and, in 1683, the powerful Chinese Qing dynasty occupied the island, annexing it to the 'Celestial Empire' until 1895, when the island underwent a process of sinization.

From 1895, with China's defeat in the Sino-Japanese War, the island became a Japanese possession, only to be regained by Chinese Republican forces at the end of World War II in 1945. However, the Chinese Civil War ravaged the peaceful island again, and Chang Kai Shek's Chinese Nationalist Army, defeated by Mao's Communists, established its last stronghold on the island, which from then on, to the present day, has become the last bastion of old republican China against the advance of Communist China.