Abstract
The Dutch East India Company（Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, VOC）had created an extensive intra-Asian trade and shipping networks in order to make a big profit during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By connecting nearly thirty settlements or factories, mainly production regions or port cities along coastal areas, the company sustained its world by an efficient communication system of information between Europe and Asia, as well as among Batavia and other Asian trading posts. The archives of the company include the data of trade relations and financial situations. As the company practiced its own format of double book-keeping, trade documents concerning journals and ledgers formed the fundamental materials for the research of trade activities. However, those records made by most of Asian factories in the seventeenth century seemed to be not extant according to present archival investigation. The research on Taiwan as an entrepôt of the company in the Far East thus relies more on the only existing archives of factory, the Dutch factories in Japan, for its well-preserved and almost complete condition. Besides, source materials such as invoices with some certain quantity can be useful for the analysis of commodities imported from China or exported to Japan and other places. Since more sources related to Taiwan trade in the Early Modern Era can be scattered in the archives of other factories, this article has foreseen a future approach to go beyond Taiwan in order to know Taiwan more.