Dive into Taiwan

By Simon Pridmore

Taiwan is a Pacific island – actually several islands: a big one and some smaller satellites – surrounded by warm tropical seas. It is easily accessible, has excellent transportation and is a first-world society with out-going, friendly, laid-back people. Especially in the south and on several of the outlying islands, there is some very good scuba diving and also a network of dive centres and resorts with first-class professional staff and equipment. They provide services for a young generation of Taiwanese, who are driving development in the sport with considerable enthusiasm.

Yet, when divers elsewhere in the world think about diving destinations, Taiwan is rarely even a blip on their radar screen. Very few people outside Taiwan have ever thought to enquire about the diving there, and very few people inside Taiwan have ever thought to tell anyone about it.

Until now…

In Dive into Taiwan, Simon Pridmore unveils the underwater secrets of these islands and guides you around expertly, making sure you travel easily, dine well and appreciate the unique culture and traditions of Taiwan as well as its marine treasures. This is the first English-language guide to diving the reefs and wrecks of hitherto unknown locations such as Penghu, Xiaoliuqiu, Hengchun, Lanyu (Orchid Island), Ludao (Green Island) and Taiwan's Northeast Coast and places them firmly on the international diving map.

Authoritative, well written and beautifully illustrated by Taiwanese photographer Kyo Liu's superb underwater images, Dive into Taiwan opens the door to a new and exciting destination for travelling divers.

The Taipei Times wrote: "This is the first comprehensive guide to scuba diving in Taiwan ever published, and it has the feel of an instant classic. All in all, this book couldn't be bettered. The author has already three diving guides to various parts of Indonesia under his belt, plus more titles on diving in general. Taiwan, in short, is lucky to have gained his attention."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon Pridmore
• Release date: Nov 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393287643

Simon Pridmore

L’auteur Simon Pridmore a travaillé dans le domaine de la plongée sous-marine comme guide, directeur de plongée, instructeur, moniteur de moniteur et moniteur de moniteur-moniteur. Il a été l’un des pionniers de la plongée technique en Asie. Durant des années il a eu son propre centre de plongée, il a dirigé une agence régionale de formation internationale de plongeurs et a été chef de vente international pour un ordinateur de plongée et des recycleurs. Il a organisé des expéditions de plongée à travers le monde, écrit des articles pour de nombreux magazines de plongée et est intervenu à des conférences sur quatre continents. Plongée confidentielle reprend les informations les plus intéressantes que Simon a collectées pendant trente années de plongée et vingt années d’enseignement et de rédaction d’articles sur ce sport. Il habite actuellement à Bali en Indonésie, en plein milieu des meilleures plongées du monde. Vous pouvez le joindre sur http://www.simonpridmore.com/

Book preview

DIVE INTO TAIWAN

Taiwan is a Pacific island – actually several islands: a big one and some smaller satellites – surrounded by warm tropical seas. It is easily accessible, has excellent transportation and is a first-world society with out-going, friendly, laid-back people.

Especially in the south and on several of the outlying islands, there is some very good scuba diving and a network of dive centres and resorts, with first-class professional staff, equipment and services. They offer scuba diving experiences, basic training courses and fun dives for a young generation of Taiwanese people that is driving development in the sport with considerable enthusiasm. For them, scuba diving is all quite new and thrilling and their excitement is contagious.

Yet, when divers elsewhere in the world think about diving destinations, Taiwan is rarely even a blip on their radar screen. Very few people outside Taiwan have ever thought to enquire about the diving there, and very few people inside Taiwan have ever thought to tell anyone about it.

Until now…

Making Ripples

In early 2019, a series of chance encounters combined to bring this book to fruition. Ming, an old friend from my Hong Kong days, became acquainted with Taiwanese scuba diving entrepreneur Dylan Chen and introduced us. Ming mentioned that nobody had ever written an English language guide to diving Taiwan and said she hoped that someday I might write one. My wife Sofie and I had spent time in Taiwan, we loved the place and the people and we thought this sounded like a great idea. So, we came up with the outline of a plan and Dylan turned our vague notions into the lengthy journey of discovery that provided the material for this book.

Other dive operators and key figures in the Taiwan diving community, such as ace photographer Kyo Liu, whose underwater images grace these pages, came on board as plans progressed. The Ripplemaker Foundation, run by Ming and her partner Ping Chu in Taipei, and the Taiwan Tourism Bureau also lent essential support to the project.

As this book clearly shows, Taiwan fully deserves to have a place on the world’s scuba diving map. Is it a new Raja Ampat or a rival to the Galapagos Islands? No, of course not. But, it more than holds its own with a host of other destinations around the world that are scuba tourism hot spots and, for such a thriving, populous island, close to the coastline of the planet’s most populous continent, the quality of the diving off its shores is frankly astonishing.

The Diving

There are six scuba diving areas, one on the northeast coast, one (Hengchun) in the south and the others on the outlying islands to the west (Penghu and Xiaoliuqiu) and southeast (Green Island and Orchid Island).

In covering the diving options in each of these six areas, I have included the best of the sites as well as a variety of others to give you an idea of the range of diving available and an impression of what a good two or three days of diving would look like. To get the most out of a diving vacation in Taiwan, in terms of both underwater and topside attractions, I highly recommend that, during your trip, you visit at least two or three of the diving areas.

Taiwan Island

This is easy to do and well worthwhile. The six areas are all quite distinct from each other and the excellent land and sea transport options between them mean that you can plan an itinerary – a scuba safari - that includes several diving areas and not miss a diving day. The only area that would be difficult to include in a trip where you wanted to dive every day is the Penghu Islands. Or, you can plan a more leisurely schedule and experience the culture and natural treasures of Taiwan with diving days interspersed with land tours.

In Taiwan, as is the case everywhere in the world, standards among dive operators can vary widely and, because relatively few non-Chinese speaking people have come to Taiwan to dive in the past, not all operations can cater to the expectations and needs of foreign travelling divers.

However, in all six diving areas, there are capable and well-equipped operators that market specifically to overseas divers and have highly skilled English-speaking guides, who can take you out and show you the best diving that Taiwan has to offer. Details and contact information are given in the relevant chapters.

Dive into Taiwan

A dive trip to Taiwan has the enormous side benefit of enabling you to immerse yourself in rural communities that do not see many foreigners of any description, let alone foreign divers. Embrace the adventure. Taiwanese people are wonderful and generous hosts. Your dive guides and the dive centre staff will steer you right topside as well as underwater and your hotel or guesthouse will always be happy to help arrange onward transportation, check a schedule or confirm a reservation.

If you ever get lost, just stop a passerby. Ideally, choose someone who looks young and studious. Taiwan is nowhere near as linguistically insular as Japan or the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Many younger people speak some English and their fluency and confidence will increase, the more you show understanding and offer encouragement. Being able to speak a few basic words and phrases in Mandarin (even if you get the tones wrong) will elicit smiles and facilitate communication. The shortlist of useful vocabulary in this book will give you a head start.

Taiwan above and below the water is different, fascinating, beautiful and welcoming. Dive in and have a great time!

Simon

November 2019

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

In Dive into Taiwan, I use the Latin names for marine life from time to time, when I think it will help you know exactly what to look for, especially when the fish or animal is known by different common names in various parts of the world.

Dive site names are given in English wherever there is a pre-existing, widely-known English name. If a dive site is only ever referred to by its Chinese name, I have left it untranslated, as I think inventing new names would just produce confusion.

Some of the websites I link to in this book have no English version. To overcome this obstacle, I recommend Google Chrome, which can automatically translate the pages into English for you.

THE STORY OF TAIWAN AND ITS PEOPLE

Taiwan is part of a long chain of islands that forms an arc that includes Japan to the northeast and the Philippines to the south. This arc is a section of the Pacific Ring of Fire and marks the boundary between the continental Eurasian tectonic plate and the oceanic Philippine Sea plate.

Where is Taiwan?

Taiwan straddles the Tropic of Cancer and, in terms of land area, is about the same size as the Netherlands or twice the size of the US state of New Jersey.

To the north is the East China Sea, to the west is the Taiwan Strait that separates the island from continental Asia, to the south is the Luzon Strait and to the east is the vast rolling blue of the Pacific Ocean.

The High Island

Until the end of the last Ice Age (the Pleistocene glaciation) about 11,000 years ago, sea levels in the region were around 130m (430ft) lower than they are now. The land below today’s Taiwan Strait is part of the Asian continental shelf and nowhere is it deeper than 100m. So, during glacial periods, animals and people were able to pass via low plains to the high land at the edge of the ocean, which we know now as Taiwan’s mountainous spine. As the Earth warmed and sea levels rose, the overland route from Asia was closed off by water, the high land became an island and its people and animals were isolated.

Taiwan is indeed very high. Seventy per cent of its landmass consists of densely forested mountains. Its long jagged central range of peaks runs from north to south and includes 286 summits over 3,000m (9,800ft). The tallest of these, Yu Shan or Jade Mountain, rises to 3952m (12,966ft) above sea level. On their western flank, hills slope gently down onto fertile plains that culminate in a long, sandy coastline. To the east, huge sheets of rock plunge directly and precipitously into the ocean, creating a dramatic landscape of towering cliffs, deep, secluded bays and sinuous gorges. Underwater, the seabed plunges away very quickly to depths of 4,000m (13,000ft) and beyond.

In the southeast, the mountains have divided to form a long, fertile rift valley and the south of Taiwan is an uplifted, ancient coral reef, worn by time into a range of limestone hills.

Arrival of the Ancestors

Archaeological evidence suggests that, 6,000 years ago, new people and a new culture appeared in northern Taiwan and quickly spread around coastal areas. Although no substantial traces of a similar culture have been found in mainland Asia, most scholars believe that these people came from across the Taiwan Strait. The new arrivals brought with them pottery-making skills and spoke early Austronesian languages. They were the ancestors of today’s indigenous Taiwanese people and probably the ancestors of most of the native peoples of the entire Indo-Pacific region (see the next chapter, Taiwan’s Gift to the World).

Eastern Islands

The first documentary references to Taiwan may be found in Chinese court documents from 2300 years ago that refer to eastern islands. In the 3 rd century CE, there are also records of troops from the Three Kingdoms state of Wu visiting an island they called Yizhou and, 400 years later, Emperor Yang of the Sui dynasty sent three expeditions to a place called Liuqiu, which may be a reference to Taiwan. (Today, Little Liuqiu is a small island to the southwest of the main island of Taiwan. The Chinese characters for Liuqiu are the same as those for the Japanese Ryukyu Islands, the chain that runs northeast of Taiwan up to Okinawa.)

By the 12 th century CE, fishermen from China were living on the Penghu Islands in the Taiwan Strait and farmers from China and Japan had begun to establish small settlements on Taiwan itself. These were ventures fraught with risk. The indigenous peoples of Taiwan were headhunters: possession of Chinese heads was a sign of manhood and enhanced the owner’s marriage prospects.

Taiwan Discovered

During the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1271 – 1328), the Penghu Islands were brought under the control of the Chinese emperor. But, beyond Penghu, Taiwan remained isolated and ignored by the outside world, its population almost entirely composed of Austronesian-speaking indigenous peoples. Sixteenth-century Ming dynasty records show that, even then, nobody was really sure how many islands lay out there over the horizon, whether it was one or many. Then European ships arrived in the region, trading ships began to sail past Taiwan and both Western and neighbouring nations started to take an interest.

The first recorded European sighting of Taiwan came in 1542 when a Portuguese ship sailed along the green, mountainous coast of present-day Taitung Province and called the island Formosa (beautiful), a nickname that lives on today. However, the Portuguese never established a colony.

The first Western settlers were the Dutch. In 1622, the Dutch East India Company started to build a fort on Penghu in an attempt to establish a base for China trading. They were swiftly expelled by Chinese Ming Dynasty forces and retreated to Taoyuan Bay on Taiwan’s southwest coast, close to where Tainan city is today. There they started work on a new headquarters, Fort Zeelandia, and began to turn Taiwan into a Dutch colony, pacifying indigenous villages that opposed their presence, setting up a tax system, building schools and introducing Christianity.

The Spanish, seeing the Dutch in Taiwan as a threat to their own colony in the Philippines, just to the south, decided to set up their own base in Taiwan and chose the bay of Keelung in the north of the island. The Spanish colonists were few in number and were plagued by both disease and angry indigenous people. After a short 16-year stay, they were gone.

The Dutch lasted a little longer but in 1662, they were forced out of Taiwan by Koxinga (Zheng Chinggong). Koxinga was a Japan-born Chinese trader-cum-pirate from Fujian loyal to the Ming dynasty, which by this time had been defeated by the Manchurian Qing dynasty that now ruled China. When Qing forces advanced on his base in Amoy (Xiamen), Koxinga escaped with his fleet to set up a new Ming dynasty headquarters in Taiwan. To do this, he had to remove the Dutch, so he laid siege to Fort Zeelandia for 9 months, with the help of the local indigenous Taiwanese tribes, who began to hunt Dutch heads instead of Chinese heads.

Under Chinese Rule

Koxinga died shortly after victory over the Dutch, but the Zheng family regime ruled for 20 more years before they were finally defeated by Qing dynasty forces. Once victory had been achieved, the Qing court found itself in a dilemma. It had only been interested in destroying the Zhengs and tying up loose ends in the conquest of the Ming. It had no intention of bringing Taiwan - an island the Qing Kangxi emperor once described as a ball of mud beyond the pale of civilisation – into the empire. After some debate, however, Taiwan was made a Chinese prefecture. The Zhengs and their followers were taken off to the mainland, but over 7,000 Chinese men, who had married indigenous women and had property on the island, were left behind.

By 1811, there were over 2 million Chinese immigrants in Taiwan and, in 1885, it officially became a Chinese province. Over the intervening centuries the indigenous Taiwanese had not lost their propensity for headhunting and, time after time, the island proved to be a really bad place to be shipwrecked. In 1871, members of the indigenous Paiwan tribe beheaded fifty-four survivors of a ship that had run aground off the southeast coast.

The ship and the sailors were from the Ryukyu Islands, which at the time were under Chinese rule, but Japan had territorial designs on both the Ryukyus and Taiwan itself and tried to use the incident to advance its claims. Accusing China of being too weak to control its outlying territories and their inhabitants, the Japanese mounted a punitive (though ultimately unsuccessful) military operation against the Paiwan. On this occasion, the Qing court managed to stave off Japanese intentions with a massive bribe but, a couple of decades later in 1895, China finally lost the Ryukyus and Taiwan to Japan as part of the settlement following its defeat in the Sino-Japanese War.

At the time, Taiwan had a population of about 2.5 million, of which 2.3 million were Chinese and 200,000 were indigenous people.

The Japanese Period

Taiwan was part of Japan from 1895 to 1945 and this period saw the island evolve from a traditional society into a modern society. Over 300,000 Japanese people came to live in Taiwan and infrastructure and industrial, social and financial systems were developed that were among the most advanced in Asia, ranking only behind Japan itself.

During, the second Sino-Japanese War, which began in 1937 and eventually became part of the Second World War, Taiwan’s role changed. Heavy industry was established to assist the war effort, military bases were set up and around 200,000 people from Taiwan joined up or were conscripted to the Japanese army. Over 30,000 of these soldiers lost their lives.

The Chinese Return

China, fighting against Japan alongside the USA, Great Britain and others, had demanded the return of Taiwan in the event that they should be victorious. So, when Japan was defeated in 1945, that was what happened. Most of Taiwan’s Japanese population was repatriated and the islands had new masters once again.

China had also undergone massive changes over the previous fifty years. The country was no longer ruled by an Imperial dynasty. It was now the Republic of China (ROC) and, since 1927, the ruling Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) government and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had been embroiled in a civil war. There was an interlude between 1937 and 1945 when the two sides suspended hostilities to fight together against the invading Japanese, but once Japan surrendered, the civil war resumed.

An ROC provincial government was set up in Taiwan in 1945 and the islands were placed under martial law. Three years later, with defeat in the civil war looming, Nationalist forces began a retreat from the mainland across the Strait to Taiwan. In a matter of just a few months between 1948 and 1949, around 2 million soldiers and supporters of the regime arrived on the Island. (At the end of the Second World War, Taiwan’s population had been 6 million.) In October 1949, the CCP declared victory and established the People’s Republic of China on the mainland.

Unsurprisingly, the change of government, quickly followed by the massive influx of Nationalist troops and refugees, did not proceed any more smoothly than had the arrival of the Japanese 50 years before, nor indeed any attempt over the centuries by external forces to assume control over Taiwan and its people. As usual, passive resistance led to armed resistance and violent repression was succeeded by gradual assimilation. Financial aid from the United States, effective industrial and financial reform programmes and a capable, well-educated workforce, among other factors, resulted in strong growth and the phenomenon widely known as the Taiwan Economic Miracle. By the 1960s, Taiwan was being hailed, along with Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea as one of four Asian Tigers. In 1996, democracy was introduced and received by Taiwanese people with great enthusiasm.

Taiwan Today

Technically, the Chinese civil war has never ended. There has been no armistice or peace treaty. From 1949 onwards, with the two sides ensconced on either side of the Taiwan Strait, both claiming to be the rightful government of China and the USA supporting Taiwan militarily, the conflict became part of the Cold War. In the first couple of decades, there were a number of skirmishes but these were always relatively minor and they have become much less frequent and significant in recent years.

Officially, China still considers Taiwan to be a renegade province and refuses to have diplomatic ties with any nation that officially recognises Taiwan as a