Book review: Fake news isn’t new, as The Formosa Fraud, fictitious Taiwan tale, reminds us
Graham Earnshaw has republished George Psalmanazar’s fictitious early 18th-century book about Formosa – now Taiwan – called A Description Of Formosa, which duped even the Bishop of London and a tutor at Oxford
by Graham Earnshaw
3/5 stars
If George Psalmanazar sounds like a made-up name, that is because it is. Psalmanazar, whose real name seems lost to history, was a Frenchman who claimed, with no small success, to be the first native of “Formosa” (a former name for the island of Taiwan) to visit Europe.
How Chinese Malaysian writers spurned at home found success in Taiwan, and why cultural identity is so often a theme of their novels
In his new book, The Formosa Fraud: The Story of George Psalmanazar One of the Greatest Charlatans in Literary History, Graham Earnshaw has republished Psalmanazar’s A Description of Formosa, first published in the first decade of the 18th century and, one assumes, long out of print.
