Abstract:Twelve years after China's Qing Dynasty ceded full sovereignty of Taiwan-including Penghu 澎湖 or the Pescadores Islands-to the Empire of Japan, filmmaker Takamatsu Toyojirō 高松豐次郎 (1872-1952) documented...Twelve years after China's Qing Dynasty ceded full sovereignty of Taiwan-including Penghu 澎湖 or the Pescadores Islands-to the Empire of Japan, filmmaker Takamatsu Toyojirō 高松豐次郎 (1872-1952) documented the sights and people of colonial Taiwan in his 220-minute silent film An Introduction to the Actual Condition of Taiwan (Taiwan jikkyō shōkai 台湾実況紹介) (hereafter An Introduction).A government-commissioned piece of propaganda intended to educate Jap-anese audiences about Taiwan, Takamatsu's lengthy documentary was exhibited in Tokyo at the 1907 Meiji Tokyo Industrial Exposition (Tōkyō Kangyō Hakurankai 東京勧業博覧会) followed by a seven-month tour throughout mainland Japan. 1 Delivering a historic first glance at the island known as Formosa, 2 An Introduction, albeit a political documentary made by a Japanese native, is commonly consid-ered to be the first film in Taiwan cinema history. 3 With its infrastructure modernized and industries strengthened during the colonial period, Taiwan soon became the most advanced economy in East Asia outside Japan itself. 4 As the business of film exhibition gradually flourished, foreign imports populated the majority of Taiwan's theatre screens.From 1926 to 1941, seventy to eighty percent of Taiwan's film imports were from Japan while ten to twenty-eight percent came from the United States.Although only four to ten percent of the imports were from Shanghai, Chinese-language films were among the most popular. 5 When it comes to local film production activities, fewer than sixteen features were ever made domestically in Taiwan during the fifty-year colonial period, and most of them were written, directed and produced by Japanese na-Read More