Chapter 2 Section 2 The Roots of the Mainland and Taiwan

Taiwan, the beautiful island of the motherland, is located between the East my country Sea and the South China Sea, facing the blue Pacific Ocean to the east, and facing Fujian Province across the Taiwan Strait to the west.The whole territory is composed of Taiwan Main Island, Penghu Islands and more than 80 affiliated islands, with a total area of ​​about 36,000 square kilometers.The main island of Taiwan is long from north to south and narrow from east to west. The longest point is 380 kilometers, and the widest point is only 140 kilometers. Looking down from a high altitude, it looks like a huge banana leaf falling in the vast sea in the southeast of my country.

The Taiwan Strait is about 300 kilometers long, less than 200 kilometers wide, and only 130 kilometers at its narrowest point.Whenever the weather is fine, people climb to the top of Gushan Mountain in Fuzhou, looking eastward, and the hazy haze over the Jilong Mountain and Datun Mountain in northern Taiwan is looming.When a gust of wind hits, bamboo rafts and canoes from the west coast of Taiwan can blow all the way to the coast of Fujian; if the wind is smooth and the waves are flat, sailboats can sail from Xiamen, Fujian to Anping Port, Taiwan within a day and night. The geographically interdependent relationship between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait has attracted people's attention as early as ancient my country.Zhu Xi, a great Confucian in the Song Dynasty, once visited Gushan Mountain and saw that "Five Tiger Mountains enter the sea and the capital faces east" in Fuzhou. From this, he inferred that the mountains of Fujian Province "passed the sea" and thought that the mountains of Taiwan "extended their roots" from the southeast of the mainland. He sighed. : "Dragon crosses the sea! Five hundred years later, there will be a county with millions of people overseas!" ("Chi Xian Bi Tan") Folks in Fujian and Taiwan have also circulated since ancient times: The two sides of the Taiwan Strait were originally connected because of a strong incident in ancient times. Only after the earthquake and tsunami did Taiwan "tear apart" and drift away from the mainland.Interestingly, these speculations and imaginations of the ancients have now been confirmed by modern science:

Geologists have discovered that the mountains of Taiwan and the eastern coastal mountains of the mainland of China are in a northeast-southwest direction; the coastlines on both sides of the strait are relatively straight and simple; the Taiwan strait is just a shallow sea, the water depth generally does not exceed 200 meters, and the shallowest point is only 80 meters (One said 50 meters), assuming that the sea water is lowered by 100 meters, the western coast of Taiwan north of Penghu will be directly connected to Fujian.But the east coast of Taiwan is completely different. More than 10 kilometers away, the Pacific Ocean suddenly drops to a depth of 2,000 meters, and it gets deeper and deeper as it goes east, reaching more than 4,000 meters.This shows that Taiwan is not an isolated island in the Pacific Ocean, but a highland on the edge of the Asian continent, the so-called "Shanqian Island" or "Mainland Island".

Geologists have also discovered that the Danan'ao schist in eastern Taiwan contains very thick limestone layers, and most of the late Paleozoic marine strata in central and southern China in mainland China are also limestone layers; the marble contained in the Danan'ao schist, There are spindle-like spindle-like spindle-worms, Histella, Neo-Schilia and coral-like corals such as Wagneria. The fossils and corals of these insects were commonly found in Central China and South China from the Qixia period to the Maokou period in the Permian period. in the strata of the period.This shows that the paleontology on both sides of the strait has a great "affinity".

Botanists have found that Taiwan's native tree species share as many as 68 genera and 81 species with the southern mainland and Hainan Island; but with Japan and Ryukyu, there are only 16 genera and 18 species.What does the distribution of this plant show? Even more thought-provoking is the discovery of archaeologists.In the western part of Taiwan, a large number of mammal fossils that lived in the ancient mainland about 2 million years ago were unearthed, such as common elephants, stegodonts, rhinoceros, bison, sword tigers, big-horned deer, and the unique "four different elephants" in mainland China. "Wait.We all know that none of these large mammals can swim, so how did they get from the mainland to Taiwan in ancient times?

After comprehensive multidisciplinary research, scientists finally came to a common conclusion: Taiwan was originally part of mainland China; the Taiwan Mountains were originally the "Boundary Mountains" in the southeast of the mainland, but because the earth's climate warmed about 18,000 years ago , A large number of glaciers melted and the sea level rose, submerging the low and flat valley between Fujian and Taiwan, which made Taiwan a large island separated from the mainland. Facts show that the mainland and Taiwan are rooted together!