Tales of skulduggery, cross-dressing and… er… stamp-collecting, as I talk to the History Hack podcast about the brief moment in 1895 that Taiwan was an independent republic… or was it? Just one chapter from my new book, Rebel Island: The Incredible History of Taiwan, out now in the UK.

This isn’t the first time I have boggled the people at History Hack with tales of Taiwan. You can also hear my archived interviews about The Pirate King of Taiwan and the historical importance of two obscure shipwrecks.

The picture shown is one of the hastily created Republic of Formosa postage stamps: “whether it represents a dragon or a squirrel or a landscape or anything else or even which is the right way up we have not been able to discover,” according to the Stanley Gibbons Monthly Journal. It is, of course, the tiger of the republican flag.