Formosa: How Westerners "Discovered" an Island That Was Already Inhabited

30-second overview: The name "Formosa" circulated on European maps for more than four hundred years, but it may not have been coined by the Portuguese at all. In 1704, a Frenchman who had never been to Asia used an invented script in London to impersonate a "Formosan Indigenous person," deceiving all of Britain for ten years. Before and after that episode, Dutch missionaries, British consuls, American diplomats, and French officers wrote about this island in their own languages. But Austronesian peoples had already lived on the island for six thousand years. They never needed to be "discovered."

A "Formosan" Who Had Never Been to Formosa

In 1704, in London, a young man calling himself "George Psalmanazar" published An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, immediately causing a sensation in Europe's intellectual circles¹.

The book described an astonishing island nation: every year, 18,000 boys were sacrificed alive to the gods; men walked naked in the streets; the island contained veins of gold and silver. He also invented a "Formosan alphabet" and a "Formosan grammar," and taught several classes at the University of Oxford².

The Jesuit missionary Father Fontenay, who had lived in East Asia for many years, challenged his claims in person. But Psalmanazar was too eloquent. His rebuttals sounded plausible, and London society chose to believe him. The deception lasted nearly ten years³.

His true identity remains uncertain. Most scholars believe he was from southern France, possibly from the Languedoc region. He died in London in 1763, and in his posthumous papers admitted that everything had been fabricated⁴.

📝 Curator's Note
Psalmanazar's story is not merely a historical joke. It exposes a structural problem in eighteenth-century European knowledge production: when a white man, speaking fluent Latin and armed with an elaborately designed "exotic civilization," took the academic stage, his audience did not verify his claims, because no one had been to Formosa. "Discovery" presupposes ignorance, and ignorance can be filled with any imagination. Psalmanazar filled it with every European fantasy about the "Orient."

"Formosa": A Name That May Have Mistaken the Island

The standard textbook story says that Portuguese sailors, passing through the Taiwan Strait in the 1540s, cried out "Ilha Formosa!" ("Beautiful Island"). But that story may be wrong⁵.

Research by Weng Chia-yin, a research fellow at Academia Sinica's Institute of Taiwan History, indicates that the island marked "Fermosa" on a 1554 Portuguese nautical chart runs northwest to southeast and is about 100 kilometers long. Taiwan runs northeast to southwest and is about 400 kilometers long. That "Fermosa" looks more like Okinawa⁶.

The earliest currently verifiable document that clearly refers to Taiwan as "Formosa" is the 1584 sailing log of Spanish captain Francisco Gali, which records "As Ilhas Fermosas" ("the beautiful islands")⁷. "Formosa" became firmly established as a synonym for Taiwan only after the Dutch East India Company (VOC) occupied southern Taiwan in 1624.

In 2019, Taiwan's official yearbook quietly revised its wording on the subject. It no longer asserted that "the Portuguese named" the island, adopting a more cautious formulation instead⁸.

For four hundred years, Taiwan was known internationally as "Formosa." But from the very beginning, the name may have referred to another island.

People Had Been There for Six Thousand Years

Before any European arrived, Taiwan had already been inhabited for at least six thousand years. Tapenkeng culture (about 5,000-4,500 BCE) is the earliest currently known Neolithic culture in Taiwan, and is closely related to the spread of Austronesian peoples⁹. Linguistic and genetic research suggests that Taiwan was very likely the homeland of the entire Austronesian language family, which spans the Pacific and Indian Oceans and includes 400 million people.

Chinese textual references to Taiwan predate European ones, but they are similarly ambiguous. Whether the "Yizhou" mentioned in the Records of the Three Kingdoms and the "Liuqiu" mentioned in the Book of Sui refer to Taiwan remains debated among scholars¹⁰.

✦ "The people on the island never needed to be 'discovered.' They knew where they lived. 'Discovery' is a word that only makes sense when viewed from outside the island."

The First Europeans Who Actually Set Foot on the Island

In 1624, the Dutch East India Company built Fort Zeelandia at Tayouan, in what is now Anping in southern Taiwan, beginning 38 years of colonial rule¹¹.

The Dutch missionary George Candidius wrote the Western world's first serious ethnography of Taiwan in 1628. He described the Siraya people's inibs (female ritual specialists), the practice of forced abortion, concepts of the soul, and sacrificial rituals¹². This was not a Psalmanazar-style fantasy. It was an observational record written by someone who actually lived in the village.

In 1670, the Dutch writer Olfert Dapper published The Second and Third Embassies of the Dutch East India Company to Qing China, which included a dedicated chapter on the "island of Formosa"¹³. Dapper himself never left the Netherlands, but he edited and organized firsthand reports by VOC merchants and missionaries, adding finely made copperplate engravings. European readers' visual imagination of Formosa was shaped to a significant degree by the illustrations in this book.

The Nineteenth Century: Naturalists, Consuls, and Officers

After 1856, Western writing about Taiwan entered a new stage. It was no longer a matter of fragmentary records by missionaries and merchants, but of systematic scientific surveys and diplomatic reports.

Robert Swinhoe came first. A British consul in Taiwan, he wrote 52 papers in four years and recorded 227 bird species. What he saw was species.

Charles Le Gendre came second. The American consul in Xiamen, he visited Taiwan eight times and left behind 1,600 pages of manuscripts. What he saw was intelligence.

The French officer Eugène Garnot came third. He accompanied the army to Taiwan during the Sino-French War of 1884-1885 and wrote a memoir of the expedition. What he saw was a battlefield.

The letters that René Coppin, an assistant surgeon in the French army, wrote to his mother recorded seasickness, mildewed clothes, and the figure of four men dying of illness every day. What he saw was suffering¹⁴.

These observers had one thing in common: they all came from outside the island, and wrote about it in their own languages, with their own classification systems and their own frameworks of interest. Their records are extremely valuable, but every one of them carries an implicit premise: Taiwan was an "other" that needed to be described.

📝 Curator's Note
The National Museum of Taiwan History's "Overseas Historical Materials on Taiwan" project has organized manuscripts, letters, photographs, and maps left by nineteenth-century Western observers. Douglas Fix and his team spent more than twenty years extracting these documents from the Library of Congress, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the UK National Archives, then translating, annotating, editing, and publishing them¹⁵. The project is itself an act of reversal: Taiwanese people actively recover the Western gaze on Taiwan, then reread it through their own framework.

From Being Written About to Writing Oneself

In 1990, the historian Ts'ao Yung-ho proposed "Taiwan Island historiography": taking the island as the subject, and observing how external cultures in different periods interacted and recombined on the island¹⁶.

This perspective reverses the entire narrative: Taiwan is not the possession of any empire, nor an object waiting to be "discovered." It is an island on which different human communities have landed, lived, and departed for six thousand years. The Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, Qing dynasty, Japan, and the Nationalist government are all merely chapters in the island's history.

James W. Davidson's The Island of Formosa, Past and Present, published in 1903, remains the most complete general history of Taiwan in English¹⁷. Yet even in this most rigorous work, "Formosa" in the title is still a name affixed from the outside.

In 1704, Psalmanazar invented a Formosa in London that did not exist. Three hundred years later, researchers from the National Museum of Taiwan History flew to Washington, Paris, and London, bringing the real Formosa scattered across national archives back to Taiwan page by page¹⁸.

From fabrication to recovery. From being written about to writing oneself. That path has taken three hundred years.

The people on the island are still walking it.

Further Reading:

• Taiwan Island Historiography — the framework proposed by Ts'ao Yung-ho in 1990: seeing history with the island as subject, rather than from the perspective of any empire
• Prehistoric Era and Indigenous Peoples — Taiwan's six thousand years before Europeans "discovered" it: Tapenkeng culture and the Austronesian homeland
• Dutch, Spanish, and Koxinga Era — the first European colonizers' 38 years in Taiwan, where Candidius's ethnography began
• Robert Swinhoe — a typical nineteenth-century Western observer: he saw Taiwan through scientific eyes and left records more enduring than his diplomatic career
• National Museum of Taiwan History — NMTH's 2014 Chinese translation of Davidson's 1903 original The Island of Formosa, Past and Present (translated and annotated by Chen Cheng-san) is a concrete institutional instantiation of "from being written about to writing oneself"

References