Taiwan was largely peripheral even to the Qing from the 1684 defeat of the Zheng family to its ceding to Japan in1894 except as a source of rice for grain-deficit Fujian. But 1949 changed that. Yet it was a fraught existence and it emergence a more or less sovereign state so uncertain. Hsiao-ting Lin's "Accidental State" (Harvard, 2016) challenges many views on the emergence of the "Two Chinas" dilemma. At one point in the late 1940s there was even the idea to make it a UN protectorate. The US was no way committed to Chiang and his holdout on Taiwan. But the Cold War changed the equation, though American support for Taiwan was in many ways ambivalent, then and now.