From Wikimedia Commons
I like to read old books about Taiwan, and it doesn't get much older than this. In 1704, a man named George Psalmanazar, claiming to be a native Formosan and Christian convert, published A Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa. It took England by storm, creating what was apparently a "Formosa craze", with French and German editions to follow.
The first half or so of the book appears to be a long, unscientific and unphilosophical proof about the absolute superiority of the Christian religion. This part is skippable; it's not at all related to Taiwan and it's hardly rigorous. Psalmanazar (not his birth name) keeps self-complimenting the irrefutability of his logic. I'd say it was refutable, but that would be deigning to categorize it as logic at all.
Following that, a series of short chapters outline what Formosans wear and eat, how their islands and cities are laid out, some very improbable designs for Formosan boats, various customs, money, marriage rites, their relation to Japan, their social classes and their government. He includes some notes about the grammar of "the Formosan language" -- apparently tones signify grammar differences? -- with an alphabet and translations of various Christian verses into "Formosan", which resembles pig latin.
Obviously, Psalmanazar was a fraud. He was probably born in France, and had never been to Formosa or East Asia at all. It was all completely made up, based on basically nothing -- although he'd clearly incorporated some basic knowledge of China and Japan, even that included a fair amount of fabrication --there was never a Japanese emperor named "Tampousama", for example; the Emperor of Japan during the beginning of their isolationist period was Go-Mizunoo, aka Emperor Kotohito, and he did not die as a Christian exile in Goa.
But there's something really fascinating about the fraud. Not the expected banalities of why he did it, although he seemed to me unlike a lot of impostors in that he wasn't so much pretending to be something he wished he really had been as simply seeking a false identity almost for the hell of it. His original goal had been to travel to Rome; the fame and society-crashing came later. Still, who cares?
What interested me was how his fake culture and language, including fake social classes and a fake religion said a lot more about what people really do when they fabricate knowledge about people different from them. In fiction, so many characters are based on people the author knows, tweaked to be more interesting or appropriate to the story. So it was with Psalmanazar, whose fever-dream of East Asia seemed mostly to be based on a twisted representation of European culture, mixed with a heavy dollop of orientalism and finished off with descriptions of Generalized Foreign Lands and a sprinkle of random nonsense.
Take his descriptions of the social structure and religion: he describes an absolute monarch named Mariandanoo, followed by a series of nobles and their wives, with illustrations of their clothing -- they all pretty much sounded like European-style nobility and their clothing were just weirder versions of things Europeans have been known to wear. The religion seemed to include one God, with a bunch of other gods described more as saints, and a holy book called the Jarhabadiond, is just an odd spin-off of Abrahamic religion with an added pagan element of worshipping celestial bodies. The language sounds vaguely Indo-European: a general is a carillan, a poorhouse is a caa tuen pagot ack chabis-collinos, and fictional cities includes Chabat and Pineto. Marriage is Groutacho. Some words appear to be just weird-ized Asian-sounding things, such as the fictional islands of Peorko and Loctau. The alphabet looks like it sprang from the mind of someone who wanted to create a new writing system but couldn't quite get the Roman alphabet out of their head.
Other words are just random nonsense: my favorite is the word for one hundred, ptommftomm (though taufb for the number one is fun too). You can read the extremely weird translation of the Lord's Prayer into fake Formosan on Wikipedia.
In his later autobiography, Psalmanazar claims he was a linguistic prodigy in his youth and had considerable intellectual gifts otherwise. Perhaps -- his fake Formosan language does seem to have enough internal consistency to have come from a fairly intelligent mind. But it isn't particularly imaginative otherwise, and he was a known liar in other ways.
Some elements, including close attention to astronomy and the name of the capital (Xternetsa) appear to be gleaned from what might have been public perception of Indigenous American cultures. A few ideas, coincidentally or not, are accurate to some of East Asia in general at that time, but not Formosa per se. One god-saint, Amida, is basically Japanese for Amitabha.
Other elements, such as the descriptions of exotic animals and their uses, including the eating of snakes and use of skins as clothing, seems to be just generic foreign and exotic stuff. He claimed that Formosa had camels, lions, tigers, rhinocerots [sic], elephants and sea-horses, all tame and of service to people. Brendan and I agreed that by 'sea-horses' he probably meant hippopotamuses, but the idea of a tame seahorse that serves humans is more amusing.
Showing that he hadn't even tried to do a little background reading to make his fakery more believable, he claimed that Formosans had "no knowledge of dragons". I'm not sure to what extent dragons exist in various Taiwanese Indigenous mythologies, but for the Chinese immigrants who were settling Taiwan by then, well...it's a bit weird to say they'd never heard of dragons.
So what does a spirited rando with some (but not a lot) of imagination do when he sets out to create a fake culture to pretend to be from? Apparently, it's to exoticize their own culture, throw in some random bits about far-away peoples circulating in the general social consciousness of the time, put the whole thing through a weird-izer and sprinkle some gibberish on top.
At least, of course, when someone can't be bothered to think beyond what they already know to come up with something truly unique.
Some of Psalmanazar's fabrications are weirdly true, if only by coincidence. For instance, he describes the capital Xternetsa as being near a large mountain "which abounds with many wholesome springs", which is technically true of Taipei. He describes an extremely sexist social hierarchy in which men can have multiple wives but women are restricted to the home without her husband, except for the first wife. This was actually the way many Chinese settler families operated in Taiwan at that time -- although I'm not sure if even the first wife could go out in those cases -- but that's because patriarchy is a common and unsurprising facet of many cultures. He wasn't describing something unique or exotic so much as pretty basic ingrained sexism.
Once again, Psalmanazar shows us that most people, when trying to be imaginative, just end up repeating some distorted or lightly fictionalized version of what they already know. It's interesting, I suppose, at least for what that tells us about how we view the world through our own cultural lenses and often don't even realize it.
The lack of curiosity from someone claiming brilliance was also, well, something. Here's a conversation I had with Brendan about it:
Me: The thing is, he could have been so much more believable if he'd just read up a bit more on the part of the world he was claiming to be from.
Brendan: Do you think he really cared?
Me: Not rea---Brendan: Well there ya go.
I suppose what surprises me is that this research, even if he didn't care, would have helped him perpetuate the farce awhile longer. Toward the end he starts discussing the massacre and general kicking-out of Jesuits from Japan around 1614, which did happen. It's so otherwise inaccurate, however, that it not only seems lazy to have not just included something based on verifiable accounts, but that it reads like a ticking time bomb with Psalmanazar's name on it: enough people knew about the Dutch in Formosa and the flight of Christians from Japan that eventually, someone was going to point out that he was talking nonsense.
The thing is, in the early 18th century, Taiwan would still have been predominantly Indigenous, no? While it's a stretch to say that the Austronesian cultures of Taiwan had gender equality, they were certainly more progressive in this way than many traditional societies. You may recall that Chinese writing about Taiwan called it an "Island of Women" for this reason. So of all the places he could have chosen to fabricate a backstory, he picked the one where in many parts, the sexist tropes didn't quite fit.
I'm not even getting into the stuff that falls under Generalized Exotic Foreign Barbarity Tropes. Think child sacrifice (apparently thousands of younger sons were sacrificed in Psalmanazar's Formosa every year, and it's implied that the priests eat them), wearing metal codpieces, animal skins, being warlike, you know, all that stuff. The most insulting passage in my opinion wasn't about cannibalism or codpieces or the straight-up gibberish language, but the passage on music. It's hard to select quotes because, like many men of his time, he used insufficient periods. I'll try, though:
It must be acknowledg'd that the Art of Musick was not known for many Years in any of the Eastern Countries, neither had they any certain method of singing and playing upon instruments of Musick, though they had then such as resembled the Drum and the Tabor, the Trumpet and the Flagellet, the Lute and Harp: But since the time that the Europeans came thither, they have learn'd the way of making and using these Instruments, which are now made almost after the same fashion as they are here in England.
Which...what?
For when they heard the Jesuits play upon the Organs in their Churches, and sing Musically after the manner of the ROmish Church, they were mightily taken with it, and inflam'd with a desire of learning the At of Musick, which now by their industry and ingenuity they have attained, tho' not in perfection, yet to such a degree as wonderfully pleases themselves; and therefore they commonly use both vocal and instrumental Musick at theur Marriages, Funerals, Sports and Recreations, and at their offering Sacrifices, chiefly when they Sacrifice Infants.
Okay then.
Thus it is in Japan, but in the Island Formosa, the Natives still observe their ancient method of singing and playing upon Musical Instruments, if their way of singing may be call'd a method; for except some few particular Prayers, which are sing by the Priests only, the People sing all other things, every one after a different manner, according to his fancy; which they do not look upon as ridiculous, because they know no better...
Screw you, dude.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot -- the entire book claims and then assumes thereafter that Formosa was annexed by Japan and was for all intents and purposes Japanese, and the nobles there went to Japan to pay respects to the emperor. That's quite funny, seeing as Japan did try to annex Taiwan a century or two before, but wasn't successful because they couldn't find a king or emperor to demand tribute from. Ha ha.
Don't they know they could have just contacted this guy? Apparently he's the King of Formosa!
On the one hand, one of the goals of this book appears to be encouraging missionaries to go to Formosa to "civilize the pagans" (scare quotes are mine). On the other, he treats Taiwan as wholly separate from China. That's honestly a lot more than I can say for some of the analysts today who claim to understand Taiwan. but then write their own fictitious garbage through a completely Chinese lens, and in some cases read as insulting and dismissive of it in a modern sense as Psalmanazar was then. At least this guy's nonsense treated it like a unique culture.
That might be my most controversial take on this short, weird book. The West knows more about Taiwan now than it did in 1704, but that doesn't mean it understands a lot. A combination of people having their own lives and not a lot of time to learn about places they'll never visit along with relentless propaganda from China have harmed attempts at increasing understanding about Taiwan. Many will therefore read some utter nonsense in, say, Foreign Policy, by people passing themselves off as Taiwan experts, and take it as fact because they don't know better or don't care.
It's a perpetual problem for places that aren't as well-known (or face a well-funded war machine trying to take them down) -- there will always be someone looking to benefit from others' ignorance about these places, or create narratives about them that suit their own ends, rather than the place they're talking about.
Some of these modern fraudsters are Taiwanese, some aren't. Arguably the KMT has it in their DNA: they, along with the CCP, have been creating twisted or wholly fabricated narratives about Taiwan for their own ends for a few generations now, and don't seem to be stopping anytime soon. They've convinced far too many people that Taiwan is Chinese (it's not -- I'd even argue that it's not just politically distinct from China, but culturally as well) or that the people identify as Chinese (they don't), or that Taiwanese schools are founded on Confucian thought, for better or worse (they're not).
We can laugh at poor old George Psalmanazar, smart and eccentric but not terribly creative and clearly deeply, deeply racist. But really, British society believed him in 1704 for reasons not entirely different for why people believe nonsense about Taiwan now.
