Taiwan is an island and trade has always been the locomotive of its economic development. From the 1620s to the 1960s, cane sugar was Taiwan's most representative export commodity. Yet little attention has been paid to the business strategies of sugar traders and the changes in their thinking. How did the Takow (Kaohsiung) merchants who first went to Japan and Hong Kong to conduct cross-border trade in person learn about international trade and build a network of human resources that crossed borders, especially after the 1870s? And how did they face the great changes of an era in which tradition and modernity were intertwined, so that, following the regime transfer in the 1890s from the Qing Dynasty to the Japanese empire, they were able to expand their business territory and become major sugar merchants in southern Taiwan?

This article examines the career of Wang Xuenong—a well-known sugar merchant in Taiwan during the Meiji period (1868–1912). It attempts to explain, from the perspective of cross-cultural knowledge transfer and human resource strategies, why and how sugar merchants such as Wang, who had gone to Japan in the early years of the Meiji Restoration for purposes of cross-border trade, introduced a trading company system that incorporated a mixture of East Asian and Western elements. It further investigates how they expanded their business from the sugar trade into a wider commercial domain that included mechanical rice milling and steamship transport. Finally, it looks at how their actions affected a transformation of Taiwan's commercial culture from the late Qing Dynasty to the early days of Japanese rule, and the historical significance of these changes in Taiwan's transitions towards industrialisation and modernisation.