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At the Port of Anping in Tainan, Taiwan's ancient capital, a large cargo ship named Hong Tai 58 sits decaying and riddled with rust.
Once ruled by a pirate warlord named Koxinga, who drove out Dutch colonists in the 1662 siege of Fort Zeelandia, Tainan is now where this crumbling vessel and its captain have been detained since February.
One of the ship's anchors is missing, likely left lying on the seabed about 10 kilometres west.
There, it's alleged the captain instructed his sailors to zigzag over the top of Taiwan-Penghu No. 3 communications cable, which connects the 100,000 residents of the outlying Penghu Islands to the rest of Taiwan and the world.
There are 24 of these vital arteries which connect Taiwan to the beating heart of the modern world — the internet — and China has been accused of sabotaging several, including two just this year.
Even though the Chinese Communist Party has never ruled Taiwan, Beijing has labelled what it calls "reunification" as essential to the full rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.
Chairman Xi Jinping has been increasingly strident in his statements, refusing to rule out the use of force to seize Taiwan.
In 2023, the severing of two cables connecting the Matsu Islands, which sit close to the Chinese coast, saw their 14,000 residents nearly completely disconnected from the internet for more than a month.
Communications weren't impacted in Penghu in February.
But the Penghu archipelago sits much nearer to Taiwan's main island, showing how willing Beijing is to encroach closer and closer in its efforts to pressure the self-ruled democracy.
It also offers a preview of how Beijing might try to isolate Taiwan in any future blockade or invasion.
"I think this is a warning sign," said Sheng I-che, a researcher and activist on Penghu Island who previously served as CEO of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party's Penghu chapter.
"We've received a very clear signal, this is the prelude to a coming war.
"Now that we look back, what happened in Crimea in 2014 is gradually happening around Penghu and the surrounding waters of Taiwan."
China's 'grey zone tactics' at sea
But many on Penghu don't share Mr Sheng's grave view of the current situation.
Everything here revolves around the ocean, the local economy largely driven by fishing and tourism.
Speaking to sellers at the largest fish market on the island in the early hours of the morning, few are terribly worried about what happened to the undersea cable — some are even completely unaware.
They are, however, animated about the impact on local livelihoods.
"I didn't feel much pressure [when the cable was cut]," one seller tells the ABC.
"What I worry about are the fishing boats going out to sea. I worry that they might be under more pressure."
Last year, a fishing vessel from Penghu was captured by the Chinese Coast Guard and towed back to China.
The speaker of the local government travelled to Fujian, the province closest to Taiwan, to secure the release of the boat captain.
There have also been recent clashes between fishing boats and the coastguard on both sides around other offshore islands, Kinmen and Matsu, which sit very close to southern China.
The most notable incident was when a Chinese vessel capsized near Kinmen Island early last year while being pursued by the Taiwanese coastguard, resulting in the drowning of the two crew members on board.
Beijing seized that moment, announcing it would step up coastguard patrols around Kinmen, which at its closest is only 2km from the Chinese city of Xiamen, clearly visible from multiple places on the island.
Then, in an unprecedented escalation, six Chinese coastguard officials boarded a Taiwanese tourist boat for about half an hour, checking its papers and planned route, according to Taiwanese officials.
"When it comes to issues involving fishermen, local residents in Penghu react more strongly," Mr Sheng said.
"Because most of these fishermen are people they know or they're connected to the community in some way, so naturally the threat feels much more personal.
"But what's worth noting is that China has been constantly using so-called grey-zone tactics in this process, a tactic they often use is mixing military and civilian operations."
The ships lurking in Taiwanese waters
The Hong Tai 58 was flying under a flag of convenience, registered to the nearly landlocked African nation of Togo.
Its crew and captain are Chinese, and the Taiwanese coastguard alleges it is Chinese-funded.
Prosecutors say the ship's movements were erratic in the days before the cable was cut, and tracking data shows it had been hanging around the area for some time.
Former navy radar specialist Hsu Geng-rui also noticed its strange journey.
"I keep an eye on the traffic near the submarine cable zones," he said.
"What makes them suspicious is how could there be a ship hanging around this area, drifting here for one or two months. We've even observed some have stayed for over half a year.
"For a ship to keep a crew drifting offshore like that, just the crew's salary alone would cost at least several million New Taiwan Dollars (roughly $150,000) per month.
"So unless there's some government force backing it, normal ship owners wouldn't allow their vessel to just aimlessly drift out at sea."
Mr Hsu has been monitoring military planes and vessels around Taiwan for three decades, during which time he's noticed Chinese military activity increase as well as the incidences of cable cutting, like in February.
The interior of his car is full of radios and tablets with various tracking programs installed.
Usually at night, he holes up in his car for hours, a red light illuminating the cab's interior as he watches and listens.
It's a utilitarian, but powerful set-up.
"Right now, because today's telecom transmission signals are very good, the current range we can receive here covers from just north of Hong Kong all the way to around Fuzhou," he said.
"The last Chinese military drill was called 'Strait Thunder'. There were military activities all around Taiwan.
"In the south, south-east, and south-west areas, there were several warships and even an aircraft carrier."
The psychological burden of grey zone warfare
The cutting of Penghu's telecommunications cable was the second act of alleged Chinese sabotage just this year.
In January, the Trans-Pacific Express Cable System north of Taiwan was cut in another set of suspicious circumstances.
Authorities alleged a Cameroon-registered, Hong Kong-owned freighter named the Shunxing 39 was responsible, and requests were made for help from South Korea as the vessel was headed towards Busan.
The ship's owner at the time denied the ship had cut the cable, calling it a "normal trip".
Weeks later, Taiwan's digital affairs ministry declared that 10 of its undersea cables would be classified as "critical infrastructure", which comes with extra security and increased government oversight.
Prosecutors have also charged the captain of the Hong Tai 58 with violating the Telecommunications Management Act by destroying submarine cable infrastructure, in the first criminal case of its kind in Taiwan.
The other seven crew members have been deported to China.
But there's concern Beijing is exporting these tactics to Europe as well, to help its ally Russia, as Moscow wages war on Ukraine and tries to pressure other nearby countries.
In mid-November, two major subsea cables were damaged within 24 hours of each other, and a Chinese cargo vessel, Yipeng 3, was discovered operating in the area.
One of the cables linked Finland and Germany, while the other connected Sweden and Lithuania.
Investigations by Danish, German and Swedish authorities found evidence of sabotage.
The ultimate aim of acts like this — grey zone warfare — is to exhaust both military and civilian resources, and at least for Taiwan, wear down the public psychologically.
"I think the danger is that, because here in Taiwan, if you ask people whether they want to fight if the war happened tomorrow, it's always 50 to 60 per cent of people want to fight," said Puma Shen, a legislator from the ruling Democratic Progressive Party and criminology professor at the National Taipei University.
"But only 20 per cent say they want to surrender, so for people who have no opinion, it's probably 30 per cent — that's the target group for China's infiltration and cognitive warfare.
"They want to persuade that 30 per cent to move them to the surrender side, and then we will be a 50-50 society that will be the best timing for them to shoot the missile — and 50 per cent of our Taiwanese people will say they want to surrender and want to sign the peace agreement with China."
For its part, China denies sabotaging Taiwan's submarine cables, accusing Taipei of hyping up the Hong Tai 58 incident and politicising the courts.
"The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) authorities have been … blaming the vessel for cutting the cable without investigation — this is clearly a case of 'presuming guilt before investigation,'" Beijing's Taiwan Affairs office stated in April.
"Taiwan's judiciary has already become a political tool for the DPP's 'anti-China' agenda and has lost all credibility."
Why Ukraine's war terrified some Taiwanese
While many members of the public don't seem outwardly panicked about Taiwan's security situation, those in charge of the island's defences do seem to be feeling the urgency.
Between 2019 and 2023, Taiwan's undersea cables were damaged 36 times by external forces or collisions, according to the National Audit Office, although it's unclear how many were accidental versus acts of sabotage.
Then in March, Beijing unveiled a powerful new cable cutter, which it claims can slice through lines at depths of up to 4,000m.
Taipei has started work on reducing its reliance on undersea cables – Taiwan's main telecom company Chunghwa has signed a partnership with UK-European satellite company Eutelsat OneWeb, and the government plans to build its own satellite network, although that will take years.
The Ministry of Digital Affairs is also reportedly in talks with other international satellite companies but negotiations with Starlink, which has been a vital lifeline in Ukraine, failed amid concerns about owner Elon Musk's business connections to China and previous statements about Taiwan.
US intelligence suggests that while no deadline has been set for an actual invasion or blockade of Taiwan, Mr Xi has instructed his country's military to be prepared by 2027.
Poll after poll of the Taiwanese public indicates the majority wants to maintain the current status quo.
On the backdrop of an unpredictable second Trump administration, Taiwan is looking increasingly insecure and wondering whether the US would have its back in a war with China.
"We have Trump 1.0 not fighting an overseas war, we have Biden, who clearly stated he would not send troops into Ukraine, and even now it's even more unlikely Donald Trump would get involved in a Taiwan contingency," said Alexander Huang, the international director of the main opposition party the Kuomintang.
"It can be interpreted that the lessons we learned from Ukraine is we need to defend our own homeland."
Taiwan buys an enormous amount of weapons from the US — the backlog alone is worth more than $US20 billion — and American troops are believed to be in Taiwan training its military.
But there is still plenty of work to be done to fortify the island psychologically.
"What happened there in Ukraine at the very beginning, Russia didn't really cut their internet connection, because they believed they could actually utilise the internet connection to disseminate fake news, disinformation, to disrupt the society," said Dr Shen.
"So here we got two scenarios, one is that China won't cut the cables, but actually using the internet to do war, or they cut the cables to create chaos."
Local Penghu business owner Huang Shih-En has lived on the island most of his life.
He too worries that some locals don't take the threat seriously enough.
"I believe incidents like this will only increase in the future, and the impact will become deeper and deeper," he told the ABC.
"By the time the impact becomes really serious, if we only react then, I think it will already be too late."
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