The ROC is 100 years old

This weekend I went to Taipei, here is the bus ticket stub:

From the ticket you can see that it cost 400NT which is about $13US. Not too bad for a trip of 167 miles(270 km). But it does take 4 hours when traffic is good. The other interesting detail is that the date is January 1st but the year is 100! not 2011. How did that happen?

 Sometimes in Taiwan the year is expressed from the founding of the Republic of China(ROC) which was in 1911. (It's so Western to date everything from the birth of Christ.) That was the year the Qing Dynasty was overthrown and China be came a republic. Here is a time line of the events and how they concern Taiwan.

1895 The Qing Dynasty loses a war with Japan and cedes Taiwan to Japan
1911 Sun Yat Sun and his followers overthrow the Qing Dynasty, establishes ROC
1925 Sun Yat-sen dies and Chiang Kai-shek takes takes over the ruling party
          of  the ROC, the KMT
1945 Japan loses the "War of the Pacific" and surrenders Taiwan to the ROC
1949 Mao Zedong and Communists defeat the ROC forces on the Chinese     
         mainland and the ROC retreats to Taiwan. The communist government on
         the mainland is called the Peoples Republic of China(PRC).
1975 Chiang Kai-shek dies
1976 MaoZedong dies
1987 Martial law lifted in Taiwan
2011 100 years of the Republic of China(ROC)

In the future, I'll add detail and try not to add too much commentary(this whole sequence of events is nuanced).