Chen Di’s Record of Formosa (1603) and an alternative Chinese imaginary of otherness

Jenco, Leigh K. ORCID: 0000-0001-7249-7843 (2020) Chen Di’s Record of Formosa (1603) and an alternative Chinese imaginary of otherness. Historical Journal. ISSN 0018-246X

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Abstract

This article examines Chen Di's 1603 text Record of Formosa ( Dongfan ji ), the earliest first-hand account in any language of the indigenous people of Formosa (now called Taiwan). Recent commentators have viewed Chen's text as a key elaboration of Chinese imperial discourse and its various tropes of hierarchical difference. In contrast, I argue that Chen reads the perceived cultural differences between his society and Taiwan's indigenous peoples as evidence of the contingency, rather than inevitable superiority, of a historical story that produces the outcome of ‘civilization’. Building on a broader understanding of Chen's intellectual biography and his extant works, I show that Chen Di places the indigenes along a different timeline in which they forge their own contingent history parallel to, rather than behind, that of a civilizational centre. By doing so, Chen's historical narrative resists aligning their society with Han Chinese forms of development and offers a glimpse of how late Ming syncretic thought could produce an account of legitimate otherness.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/historical...
Additional Information:	© 2020 The Author
Divisions:	Government
Subjects:	D History General and Old World > DS Asia G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GN Anthropology
Date Deposited:	05 Nov 2019 16:24
Last Modified:	14 Oct 2025 23:16
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/102388

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