The building currently known as the ROC Presidential Office was originally built as the Office of the Governor-General by the Japanese colonial government.

The terrain of Taiwan is mostly mountainous in the east but gradually changes to gently sloping plains in the west. Penghu Islands (the Pescadores) are to the west of Taiwan (Satellite photo by NASA).

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Taiwan (Traditional Chinese: 臺灣 or 台灣; Simplified Chinese: 台湾; Hanyu Pinyin: Táiwān; Wade-Giles: T'ai-wan; Taiwanese: Tâi-oân) is an island in East Asia. "Taiwan" is also commonly used to refer to the territories administered by the Republic of China (ROC), a state whose effective area of administration consists of the island of Taiwan, Lanyu (Orchid Island) and Green Island in the Pacific off the Taiwan coast, the Pescadores in the Taiwan Strait, and Kinmen and Matsu off the southeast coast of the territories administered by the People's Republic of China (PRC).

The main island of Taiwan, sometimes also referred to as Formosa (from Portuguese, meaning "graceful"), is located at 22°57′N 120°12′E, off the coast of the territories administered by the People's Republic of China, south of Japan and north of the Philippines. It is bounded 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.

By the end of major fighting in the Chinese Civil War in 1950, the ROC had lost control of mainland China to the PRC. Since then, the ROC has been restricted to its present effective area of administration consisting of Taiwan and some neighboring islands. Today, the PRC does not recognize the ROC, and considers all of the territories administered by the ROC as PRC territory. For more information on this dispute, see Political status of Taiwan.

History

Prehistory and early settlement

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 Polynesians, and linguists classify their language as Austronesian. Han Chinese began settling in the Pescadores 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.

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), having assigned offshore islands in the vicinity names like Greater and Minor Liuqiu (Ryūkyū in Japanese), though none of these names have 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.