In recent years, it promotes specialties such as tuna and wax apples. Pingtung is where Kenting National Park , the oldest and the largest national park in Taiwan established in , is located. The county seat is Pingtung City.
Pingtung means " East of Half-Screen Mountain [ citation needed ]. After two incidents in which Dutch sailors were killed by the aboriginal inhabitants of Liuqiu Island , in Spring , a punitive campaign was carried out by Dutch sailors which became known as the Lamey Island Massacre.
Pingtung County is a recently developed county. Its largest city is Pingtung City. Until the seventeenth century, this area of Taiwan was a place of exile for Chinese criminals and the occasional landing point for international mariners. Only the settlements near present-day Checheng Township existed. In , the Hakka settlers arrived from mainland China and farmed under a homesteading system introduced by Zheng Jing. In their language, "A-kau" means "the forest".
The first settlements by Han Chinese people were not established until with the creation of villages near Pingtung by people from China's southern Fujian region. By most of the Pingtung Plain was cultivated and in Pingtung was expanded. In , the government and locals worked together to build the four walls of the city the North gate, the East gate, the West gate and the South gate , and the roads were also properly finished.
In March , 14 American sailors were killed near Kenting by local aborigines in the Rover Incident , which lead to the American Formosa Expedition three months later. In , 54 sailors from Ryukyu were killed by local aborigines in the Mudan Incident. The Japanese carried out a punitive campaign against the local aborigines in the Japanese invasion of Taiwan On 1 December , Pingtung City was downgraded from provincial city to county-controlled city and county seat of Pingtung County.
