South of Taichung is the old port town of Lu-kang. Here again we come face to face with Taiwan's past, sometimes in dramatic fashion. Founded in the seventeenth century, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Lu-kang was an important port city with strong ties to Ch'uan-chou—the eighteenth-century classic but declining entrepôt of southern Min Fukien.
1999, Murray A. Rubenstein, “Introduction”, in Murray A. Rubinstein, editor, Taiwan: A New History (An East Gate Book; Taiwan in the Modern World), Armonk, N.Y., London: M[yron] E. Sharpe, page x