Initially a very successful literary fraud. Almost certainly this was not his real name, and his place of birth is not known (possibly Avignon, France), but he came to London in 1701 claiming to be a native of Formosa (Taiwan) who had been recently converted to Christianity. He was taken under the wing of the bishop of London who provided him a living in Oxford where he trained missionaries to continue the good work in Formosa. He translated church texts into a language that no one else understood, purportedly Formosan, and convinced people that Formosans looked more European (like him) than Oriental. In 1704 he published an entirely fictitious A Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa. In it he described a weird Formosan lifestyle: centenarians, strange diet, ritual slaughter, polygamy, cruel punishments, and so on. This appealed to the public\u2019s imagination, and his book sold well, going into a second edition in 1705 despite exposures by Formosan missionaries. In 1728, fearing that he was mortally ill, he admitted that the whole thing was a fraud (which had rewarded him handsomely). He spent the rest of his life, a repentant born-again Christian of his day, using his writing and linguistic talents to produce articles for reference works, some about China and Japan, and working on his Memoirs, which were published after his death.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Initially a very successful literary fraud. Almost certainly this was not his real name, and his place of birth is not known (possibly Avignon, France), but he came to London in 1701 claiming to be a native of Formosa (Taiwan) who had been recently converted to Christianity. He was taken under the wing of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-211245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-g"],"yoast_head":"\n