This paper tells the story of how the people of Taiwan became a Taiwanese people and how the territory of Taiwan became a state. More specifically it delineates a schematic explanatory framework for Taiwan’s nation-state formation and political history. The author argues that the three long-term historical processes of settler indigenization, social integration and the accumulative formation of state institutions that had taken place since the sixteenth century converged with the democratization of the 1990s, eventually resulting in the contemporary form of the Taiwanese state. A case of state-formation that took place at what Rokkan and Urwin called the “interface” between multiple empires or geopolitical centers, Taiwan’s nation-state formation, albeit largely completed, is nevertheless facing new threats of disintegration under the pressures of the imperializing China.