Reputed Natives of Formosa

ABSTRACT

This work of creative nonfiction begins with the last days of George Psalmanazar, an eighteenth-century fraud who claimed to be the first native of Formosa (present-day Taiwan) ever to visit Europe. Scholars believe that Psalmanazar’s fraudulent account, published in 1705, formed the birth of Taiwan studies in Europe, leading to an explosive scientific, commercial and evangelical interest in the island. The essay traces the entwined histories of camphor, Christianity, and indigeneity on the island in the centuries following Psalmanazar’s hoax.

KEYWORDS:

• Taiwan
• Indigenous studies
• Christianity
• capitalism

Author’s Note

Apart from the opening anecdote of George Psalmanazar sustaining a fungal infection at the end of his life and the attribution of quotations to his journal, all information in this work was derived from primary and secondary source material; no quotations other than the ones from his “private journal” were fabricated. The Taiwanofungus camphorates is a real fungus, and the closing account is taken from a Taipei Times article dated February 14 2018. I owe a formal debt to W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World; (in particular the chapter “Prussian Blue”), and Wu He’s The Remains of Life.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. George Psalmanazar, An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, trans. Oswald, 2nd ed. (London: Mat. Wotton, 1705), xlviii–xlix.

2. George Psalmanazar, Memoirs of **** Commonly Known by the Name of George Psalmanazar (London: R. Davis, 1765), 10.

3. Ibid., 5.

4. Ibid., 182.

5. Hung-yi Chien, “The Psalmanazar Affair and the Birth of Taiwan Studies in Europe: A Reassessment of the Historic Hoax,” International Journal of Taiwan Studies 3 (2020): 129, https://doi.org/10.1163/24688800–00301008.

6. Ibid., 130.

7. Psalmanazar, Memoirs, 4.

8. Ibid., 50.

9. Ibid., 3.

10. Míng Yǒng Wú, “Zhí Mín Dì Lín Xué de Duò Shǒu : Jīn Píng Liàng Sān Yǔ Tái Wān Jìn Dài Lín Yè Xué Shù de Fā Zhǎn,” Tái Wān Xué Yán Jiū 13 (July 2012): 65–92.

11. R.A. Donkin, Dragon’s Brain Perfume: An Historical Geography of Camphor (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 60.

12. Ibid., 85.

13. Ibid., 101.

14. Ibid., 122.

15. James Wheeler Davidson, The Island of Formosa, Past and Present History, People, Resources, and Commercial Prospects. Tea, Camphor, Sugar, Gold, Coal, Sulphur, Economical Plants, and Other Productions (London: MacMillan & Co., 1903), 398.

16. William Alexander Pickering, Pioneering in Formosa: Recollections of Adventures Among Mandarins, Wreckers & Headhunting Savages (London: Hurst and Blackett, Ltd., 1898), 203.

17. Husluman Vava, Soul of Jade Mountain, trans. Terence Russell (Amherst, MA: Cambria Press, 2020), 403.

18. Ibid.

19. Pickering, Pioneering in Formosa, 117.

20. Ibid., 206.

21. Ibid., 239.

22. George Leslie Mackay, From Far Formosa: The Island, Its People and Missions (New York, New York: F. H. Revell, 1895), 282.

23. Ibid., 94.

24. Janet B. Montgomery McGovern, Among the Head-Hunters of Formosa (London: T. Fisher Unwin Ltd, 1922), 143.

25. Scott Simon, “Politics and Headhunting among the Formosan Sejiq: Ethnohistorical Perspectives,” Oceania 82, no. 2 (July 2012).

26. Mackay, From Far Formosa, 94.

27. Sū Hāo Xù, “Hé Hé Shì Tài Láng Yǔ ā Lǐ Shān Sēn Lín Tiě Lù de Dàn Shēng,” Taiwan Forestry Journal 38, no. 3 (June 2012): 79. Translation mine.

28. Scott Simon, “Lest We Forget: How the 1930 Musha Incident Reveals the Hidden Nature of the Canada-Taiwan Relationship,” Centre for International Policy Studies, October 26, 2020, https://www.cips-cepi.ca/2020/10/26/lest-we-forget-how-the-1930-musha-incident-reveals-the-hidden-nature-of-the-canada-taiwan-relationship/.

29. Qīng Shān Jīn, “Tái Wān Yuán Zhù Mín Zú Jiào Huì Xìn Yǎng Zhī Mǔ–Jī Wàng,” The Presbyterian Church in Taiwan, July 2005, http://www.pct.org.tw/article_peop.aspx?strBlockID=B00007&strContentID=C2006071400004&strDesc=&strSiteID=&strCTID=CT0005&strASP=article_peop.

30. Michael Stainton, “Presbyterians and the Aboriginal Revitalization Movement in Taiwan,” Cultural Survival Quarterly 26, no. 2 (1995).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amanda Su

Amanda Su is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of California, Berkeley. Her fiction and criticism have been published in Guernica, ASAP/J, the Journal of Asian American Studies, and is forthcoming in Breaking the Bronze Ceiling: Women, Memory and Public Space (Fordham University Press, 2024). She is from Kaohsiung, Taiwan.