The Taiwan History Podcast: Formosa Files

Looking for the true story behind the Dragon Boat Festival (Duanwu Jie)? There’s much more to it than dragon boat races and sticky rice dumplings (zongzi).

Many know the standard origin story of the patriotic poet Qu Yuan, but Formosa Files uncovers the less-tidy roots of the holiday. The Dragon Boat Festival date falls on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month; once feared as the dangerous "Month of a Hundred Poisons." Discover how people responded with temple rituals, protective herbs, and even arsenic-laced wine.

John Ross and Eryk Michael Smith also chat about what marks the arrival of summer in modern Taiwan, from peak mango season to the blooming of the yellow golden shower and red flame trees right around when schools celebrate graduations. Plus, Eryk shares ancient wisdom from Ben-Hur ("Row well, and live" – 1959) as he recounts his own dragon boat racing glory.

As we head into the 2026 World Cup, we take a look at Taiwan’s surprisingly rich football heritage. Although a minor sport today, there have been periods of intense popularity and success. The soccer story starts more than a century ago with British Presbyterian missionary Edward Band, who introduced the sport to students in Tainan. We follow the growth of football during the Japanese colonial era, the White Terror crackdown, and then the unusual “Hong Kong Legs” era when the ROC national team used “football mercenaries.” The country’s greatest international success, however, came with the Mulan women’s football team.

The disaster was so terrible, so deadly that shocking reports of it reached as far away as Europe; they claimed that in 1782, Taiwan had been devastated by a colossal tsunami. Some accounts said the island had almost disappeared beneath the sea and that 40,000 people had died. Yet strangely, Chinese records seemed to say almost nothing about it. In this snack episode, Eryk and John put on their white coats and get scientific; or, in other words, they use some recent groundbreaking academic papers to explain one of the greatest mysteries in Taiwan’s history. Was there really a massive tsunami on Taiwan’s southwest coast in the 1780s? Listen and learn.

Who owns Taiwan’s time? Taipei-based political commentator and author of Formosa Review substack Sasha B. Chhabra helps us wind back the history of Taiwan’s clocks, from local rhythms before what we now call “standard time,” to Japanese colonial rule, wartime Tokyo time, and ROC “Central Plains Time.” Then we move forward to more recent debates over sovereignty and identity. “What time is it?” seems like a simple question, but this episode delightfully complicates it with stories of daylight, empire, modernization, authoritarianism, and Taiwan’s right to define its own place in the world.

Who owns Taiwan’s time? Taipei-based political commentator and author of Formosa Review substack Sasha B. Chhabra helps us wind back the history of Taiwan’s clocks, from local rhythms before what we now call “standard time,” to Japanese colonial rule, wartime Tokyo time, and ROC “Central Plains Time.” Then we move forward to more recent debates over sovereignty and identity. “What time is it?” seems like a simple question, but this episode delightfully complicates it with stories of daylight, empire, modernization, authoritarianism, and Taiwan’s right to define its own place in the world.