NOW ON SALE at Plum Rain Press.com - The English Translation of: A Tale of Three Tribes in Dutch Formosa by Dr. Chen Yao-chang 陳耀昌 !!

FORMOSA FILES PODCAST S4-E30: The “First” Chinese Person to Visit Taiwan - Chen Di 陳第 (1603)

FORMOSA FILES PODCAST S4-E30: The “First” Chinese Person to Visit Taiwan - Chen Di 陳第 (1603)

Of course, Chen Di was not actually the first person from China to visit Taiwan. What makes him special is that he wrote an account of what he saw here in 1603, and that account is the earliest surviving manuscript discovered thus far.

Chen Di's short travel commentary focuses mostly on the Indigenous Peoples of Taiwan; their customs, diet, etc., a rare and valuable documentation by a man who was both a scholar and a warrior. Chen Di's account of his 1603 trip was only rediscovered in 1955!

Interestingly, the same year Chen Di came to Taiwan was when the Dutch East India Company (the VOC) set up a permanent trading post in what's now Indonesia. The Dutch are determined to break into the China trade market - but they'll need another base. Somewhere a bit closer.

Cover left: A statue of Chinese philologist Chen Di 陳第 in Lianjiang County, Fuzhou, Fujian, China. Right: Modern-day Siraya people performing a ceremony. The Siraya tribe are part of what used to be called "Pingpu Aboriginals," and they comprise four subtribes. Photo and following text via Discover Siraya: "The early Pingpu tribes lived simply, with their society being matriarchal and agricultural. The Siraya tribe was one of the most broadly distributed and influential tribes, with early scholars defining the Siraya tribal area as stretching from the modern-day Tainan Plains down to the Hengchun Peninsula, with their roots in Tainan. When the Dutch first arrived in Taiwan, they called the local Aboriginals in Tainan the Sideia, the Dutch approximation of the Taiwanese term for the four subtribes as a group. Later, this evolved into the current spelling, Siraya. Some, however, maintain that the word 'siraya' in fact means 'person.'"

#formosafiles #podcasts #taiwan #history #formosa

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The Formosa Files podcast is sponsored by the FRANK CHEN FOUNDATION (陳啟川先生文教基金會)
Website: https://www.frank-chen.org.tw/

This top-rated history podcast tells stories from the history of Formosa (Taiwan) from circa 1600 C.E. - 2000 C.E., via interesting, lesser-known short stories presented in a non-chronological order.

HOSTS: John Ross is an author and co-founder of publisher Camphor Press, which specializes in books on Taiwan and China in English, while Eryk Michael Smith has worked as a writer and journalist for multiple media outlets in Taiwan, including the island's only English-language radio station ICRT (FM 100.7). Both Ross and Smith have lived in Taiwan for well over 20 years and call the island home.

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