The Ornithology of Formosa: A British Vice-Consul, 201 Latin Names, and the Mountains He Never Entered

30-second overview: In April 1862, a blue pheasant skin was carried out of the mountains by a hunter and brought down to Tamsui.
It reached Robert Swinhoe, was shipped to London, and was named by John Gould as Lophura swinhoii — Swinhoe's pheasant. The name honored the British vice-consul, not the language of the man who killed the bird.

In 1863, Swinhoe published The Ornithology of Formosa in The Ibis, recording 201 species¹. He employed 30 hunters and 6 skinners², shooting whatever could be brought down along the coastlines of Takao, Tamsui, and Keelung.

But he never set foot in the Central Mountain Range. The Mikado pheasant would have to wait until 1906, when a British collector lifted two ownerless tail feathers from the headdress of his Tsou guide³.

Keywords: Robert Swinhoe, Ornithology of Formosa, Gould, Swinhoe's pheasant, Mikado pheasant, indigenous bird augury, Linnaean naming, colonial natural history

A 5-minute deep read

A blue pheasant skin

In the spring of 1862, Robert Swinhoe was living in the British consulate at Tamsui. Twenty-five years old, titled vice-consul, and the first British diplomat ever stationed on Taiwan⁴.

One day in April, a blue pheasant skin was brought in. A hunter had shot the bird in the mountains and carried only the skin down to Swinhoe⁵. He posted it back to London, into the hands of John Gould — the most celebrated ornithologist of the Victorian era.

Gould looked at the plumage, the crest, and a few tail feathers. He published the new species description in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, with the scientific name Lophura swinhoii, after the British vice-consul who had sent in the skin⁶.

This was the moment Swinhoe's pheasant entered the Linnaean system. What it received in that moment was the surname of a British diplomat, not any of the names that the Atayal, Tsou, or Bunun peoples had been calling it for who knows how many thousand years.

What did the hunter who killed this bird in the mountains call it in his own language?

No one wrote that down.

201 new names

Swinhoe was born in Calcutta in 1836⁴. At eighteen he joined the British consular service and was posted to Amoy. He first set foot on Taiwan in 1856, stopping for two weeks near Hsiang-shan in Hsinchu. Two years later, he sailed around the island aboard HMS Inflexible, nominally on a mission to look for British and American survivors of the 1848 wreck of the Kelpie⁷. He found no one — but he had now seen the entire coastline.

In 1860 he was appointed Britain's vice-consul to Taiwan. He arrived at Tainan-fu in July 1861, and at year's end moved the consulate to Tamsui because of harbor silting. In 1864 he was reposted to Takao (today's Kaohsiung) to open a southern Taiwan consulate. On 4 February 1865 he was formally promoted to consul⁸.

He spent more than four years on the island in total. In that time he wrote The Ornithology of Formosa, or Taiwan, serialized in three parts in 1863 in the British Ornithologists' Union journal The Ibis¹.

The paper has a long opening. He starts from Chinese history, from Gu Yanwu down to Koxinga, and only then circles back to the island:

"At the time when our forefathers, of blessed memory, tattooed their bodies a sky-blue, and ranged the woods at large in a state of nature, and all Europe was sunk in savagedom..."

— Swinhoe 1863, opening of The Ornithology of Formosa⁹

He wrote it that way because the readers of The Ibis in mid-19th-century Britain were ornithologists, most of whom couldn't have placed Formosa on a map. He had to first speak the island into existence before he could speak about its birds.

The body of the paper lists 201 species. Several numbers float through secondary sources — sometimes 186, sometimes 227. The 1863 original held in the National Museum of Taiwan History (NMTH) collection records 201 species, and a contemporary book review confirms the same count¹⁰.

But of these 201, only some were named personally by Swinhoe. The Taiwan blue magpie Urocissa caerulea was named by Gould. Swinhoe's pheasant Lophura swinhoii was named by Gould¹¹. Swinhoe's job was supplying specimens. He shot the bird, made a skin, posted it to London, and the ornithologists in London compared, described, and named against the specimens.

Naming authority was never in Taiwan.

30 hunters, 6 skinners

In 1864, an anonymous review appeared in London commenting on Swinhoe's natural history results from Formosa. The reviewer noted Swinhoe's collection methods on the island: he had employed 30 hunters and 6 skinners².

The number doesn't sound large today. But in 1860s Taiwan, on the western coast, this was a small industry. These weren't random Han neighbors helping out. They were full-time, salaried laborers who went out daily with shotguns and brought birds back. Swinhoe himself wrote in a letter to Dr. J. E. Gray, "my hunters constantly rambled"¹².

19th-century natural history was a transcontinental specimen supply chain. The colonial officer in the colony, the local hunter in the colony, the metropolitan naturalist, and the metropolitan museum — every specimen had to pass through these four nodes before it entered the Linnaean system.

"I procured some paws lately at Sawo Bay, and the cap of a savage covered with a patch of its skin."

— Swinhoe to Dr. J. E. Gray, 10 August 1864, Tamsuy¹³

"The cap of a savage." The phrase appears in his private correspondence — the off-the-record register of a 19th-century Englishman who saw indigenous people as "savages." It contrasts sharply with the neutral descriptive language of his published papers. Natural history has always carried its own value commitments; it is part of the colonial structure.

His map starts from the coastline

The collecting locations Swinhoe visited are well documented: Tamsui, Tainan, Takao, Keelung (Kelung), Suao, Penghu, Fengshan, Wuqi¹⁴. In early 1866, just before leaving Taiwan, he went once to the foothills of Xueshan (Snow Mountain), where he recorded the sambar deer¹⁵.

This is a coastline map. A collecting route along the sea.

The core of the Central Mountain Range was the world of the indigenous peoples. He never went in. At least no first-hand source shows him going in. In a private letter, he wrote:

"this must wait till my return to that wild and solitary isle."

— Swinhoe to Dr. J. E. Gray, 27 July 1864, Foochow¹⁶

"That wild and solitary isle." This is his private description of Formosa. There is fascination in the phrase, and there is distance. Four years of consular work made him familiar with the coast, but it never moved him across the line between mountain and sea.

The blanks on his map are as significant as the species he recorded.

The Mikado pheasant would not be seen by the world until 1906. That year, the British collector Walter Goodfellow entered the Alishan region. He never saw the live bird. What he saw were two long tail feathers in the headdress of his Tsou guide. Goodfellow took the feathers back to London. The ornithologist Ogilvie-Grant described and named the species from those feathers — Syrmaticus mikado, the Mikado pheasant³.

Swinhoe died in London in 1877, aged 41. Across his lifetime, his Formosa bird records published in The Ibis and the Proceedings of the Zoological Society accumulated to 227 species. He never saw the Mikado pheasant. He never saw the Taiwan yuhina or the Taiwan barwing either — three Taiwan high-mountain endemics, all named only in 1906 by Ogilvie-Grant¹⁷.

Those two tail feathers had been worn on the heads of hunters for who knows how many generations.

The successors

After Japan colonized Taiwan, it took over the natural history specimen supply chain.

In 1912, Uchida Seinosuke published A Catalogue of Formosan Birds — 290 species¹⁸. In 1916, Kuroda Nagamichi was invited by the Government-General of Taiwan to come and survey¹⁹. In 1921, Kuroda and Horikawa Yasuichi co-authored Birds of Formosa Illustrated — the count rose to 338 species¹⁹. Japanese-era ornithology was finer-grained than Swinhoe's; they entered the mountains and surveyed indigenous hunting grounds. But the naming system was still the same system: Linnaean binomial nomenclature, in Latin, posted from Formosa to Tokyo or to London.

It was a long time after the war before Taiwanese ornithology developed a local perspective. The Chinese Wild Bird Federation was founded in 1988 (the English name was changed to Taiwan Wild Bird Federation in 2020)²⁰. The Endemic Species Research Institute was founded in Jiji, Nantou, in 1992 (restructured in 2023 as the Biodiversity Research Institute)²¹. The Raptor Research Group of Taiwan was founded in 1994²².

The English name "Endemic Species Research Institute" is telling. What it studies are "endemic species" — species that evolved only on this island. Swinhoe didn't have this concept. Ogilvie-Grant didn't have it. It's a naming perspective that came out of the late 20th-century overlap of ecology and evolutionary biology, one that puts a species back into its habitat, its geography, its history.

Rather than tearing it out of its habitat, turning it into a skin, and posting it to London.

The call of Sisil

The Morrison's fulvetta. Alcippe morrisonia. Swinhoe, 1863²³.

That is its identity in the system of Latin scientific names: a specimen brought down by an English vice-consul's hunter on the Taiwan coast, sent to London, named, archived.

But in the Atayal Gaga, this bird is called Sisil²⁴. Before going out to hunt, the hunter must stand outside the house and listen for its call. Clear and continuous: good. Hurried and short: bad. Sisil is the messenger of the spirits.

In Seediq, it is also called Sisil. In Tsou, it is called Oazomu. In Bunun, it has yet another name²⁴.

These names predate the Latin scientific name by a thousand years.

The work Swinhoe did was, by the standards of the late 19th century, a great achievement of natural history. The first systematic record of 201 species turned this island from "that wild and solitary isle" into "a very fine list of the avifauna" — his own words²⁵.

But seen from today, the same work is also a textbook move of colonial natural history: take a place's birds, and write them — in the language of the metropole, by the rules of the metropole, by the scholars of the metropole — into the knowledge base of the metropole.

These birds had lived on Formosa for thousands of years. 1863 was the first year they were written in Latin. The world's knowledge base began recording them from there.

For further thought

Discussion questions

1. The 19th-century natural history "discovery" model meant foreign naturalists going to colonies, collecting, naming, and bringing the work back to the metropole. What is similar and different about today's models of scientific collaboration? Who is still playing the hunter, the skinner, the vice-consul, the Gould?
2. If we were to rewrite Taiwan's bird checklist today, should we keep the species name swinhoii? Should indigenous languages be used as the formal species names? (Māori-language species names are now part of IUCN's official standards in New Zealand.)
3. This article focuses on birds, but the same naming structure also occurred in plants (Glycine swinhoei, the sambar deer), mammals, and reptiles. The biological inventory of an entire island was almost entirely written down in the 19th and 20th centuries by foreigners in foreign languages. What does this mean for Taiwan's homegrown nature writing?

Further reading

• → Robert Swinhoe (史溫侯) — entry on the protagonist of this article, covering his diplomatic career and his non-ornithological work in Taiwan.
• → Taiwan Island Natural History (台灣島嶼博物學) — a wider natural history frame: Wallace's Line, Austronesian migration, paper mulberry DNA — interdisciplinary perspectives.
• → The Sino-French War (清法戰爭) — another segment of Formosa's encounter with the West around the same period, 22 years apart.
• → Charles W. Le Gendre (李仙得) — another westerner who reshaped the Formosa narrative around the same time, dealing with the Rover Incident in 1867.
• → Malayan Night Heron (黑冠麻鷺) — Swinhoe's 1865 Tamsui collection of the Malayan night heron is one of the entries in this list; what was a "rare" bird then has become 160 years later an everyday sight in Taipei's parks and campuses, the most dramatic sequel to the list.

References

The most central primary sources for this article come from the National Museum of Taiwan History "Overseas Historical Materials of Taiwan" Digital Archive, in particular the bilingual editions of Swinhoe's papers and letters in the "Translation and Compilation Project of 19th-Century Western Writings about Taiwan" (Douglas L. Fix et al., 2020). Verbatim English quotations are transcribed directly from the NMTH collection files; Chinese translations are credited to translators and sources.

Secondary sources include Fa-Ti Fan's British Naturalists in Qing China, Taiwan Panorama, the Taiwan Wild Bird Federation, Takao Club, and related Wikipedia entries. The 1906 Goodfellow Mikado pheasant story — including the detail of "two tail feathers from a Tsou guide's headdress" — is drawn from biographical descriptions consolidated in the Wikipedia entries on the Mikado pheasant and Goodfellow, cross-checked against Ogilvie-Grant's original 1906 naming paper. The collecting location is verified as the Alishan region; specifics like "headdress" and "brought back to London" follow widely circulated multi-source retellings, without further scenic embellishment.