The Taiwan History Podcast: Formosa Files

Does a “triangular head” mean danger? Did the wartime Japanese release experimental snakes on Yangmingshan? Do you really collapse after a hundred steps if a hundred-pacer bites you? Herpetologist Gerrut Norval joins John Ross to talk snakes. They focus on Taiwan’s six important venomous species: the green bamboo viper, Chinese cobra, many-banded krait, Russell’s viper, Taiwan habu, and the famous hundred-pacer. The biggest surprise for John was learning about the wild population of Burmese pythons on Kinmen. Be sure to visit the Formosa Files website for pictures and names of the snakes mentioned.

To celebrate the new Yaima Maru ferry service connecting Keelung with the Yaeyama Islands, Taiwan’s nearest neighbors, we uncover stories of Taiwanese migrants there in the Japanese colonial era. On jungle-clad Iriomote Island, some suffered brutal conditions in the coal mines. On nearby Ishigaki, Taiwanese settlers helped transform the island’s agriculture. They developed its pineapple industry and also introduced water buffalo, whose descendants can be seen today pulling tourist carts.

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.