Overview

This book offers the first historical summary in English and source text in Dutch of the Tayuoan Consistory Minutes recorded between 1643 and 1649 at the Castle Zeelandia in Formosa (today’s Taiwan). The minute recordings occurred at a crucial moment in the existence of the Dutch East India Company in Taiwan in the 17th century and are complemented with an annotated Introduction that contextualizes the manuscript from an historical perspective. The public disclosure in Dutch transcription and English translation is one of the few remaining primary sources covering the Calvinist mission history of the Dutch pioneering settlement in Formosa. It is concise and the reading is factual, yet enriching from a multitude of perspectives. The main topics cover the growing community of Calvinist believers, the expansion of the education, and the evangelization of the Indigenous, such as the inspection of the schools, finances of the church and the diaconate, mobility and community membership among the VOC employees. These come to make the record of important events, evaluation of personalities and socio-economic development of the Dutch community and an emerging indigenous community of believers. This serves to deepen the understanding of the goal of the Church consistory to act as an instrument in carrying out VOC policies. We want to draw attention to illustrate how this contributed to an emerging citizenry. The manuscript is replete with valuable information about the colonial encounter, the contact with the Indigenous, the tension between a clerical and secular society in establishing a Calvinist community, and most of all to contextualize the historiographic intervention. It helps to critically scrutinize the colonial biases and its inherited narratives, and offers against the background of the traditional echoed perspectives of the VOC as a “merchant” organization, a glimpse into what this pioneering settlement was all about.

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9789819564927

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Ann Heylen is a professor in the Department of Taiwan Culture, Languages, and Literature, National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) and the executive director of the International Taiwan Studies Center (ITSC) at the College of Liberal Arts, NTNU. She is a founding member of the European Association of Taiwan Studies (EATS) (2004–present), an editor-in-chief of East Asian Journal of Popular Culture (EAJPC). She graduated with a Ph.D., in Chinese Studies (Sinology) from Catholic University Leuven, (K.U.Leuven, Belgium) in 2001. Since 2008 relocated to Taipei as a professor at National Taiwan Normal University, she teaches and publishes on topics covering the culture, history, and historiography of Taiwan with special attention to Dutch Formosa and the Japanese colonial period (1895–1945). The article “Missionary Linguistics on Taiwan: Dutch Language Policy and Early Formosan Literacy (1624–1662)” published in 2001 (ISBN 9058671615) was first translated and reprinted in Mandarin (1998, 2020). Christopher Joby is a research associate at the Centre of Taiwan Studies, SOAS, University of London and an honorary research fellow, School of History, University of East Anglia. He has lectured at universities in the UK, South Korea, and Poland and given guest lectures at universities in Taiwan. His research focuses on the intersection of Dutch culture and language and other cultures and languages in historical contexts. He has published many articles and six monographs: Calvinism and the Arts: A Re-assessment (Leuven, 2007); The Multilingualism of Constantijn Huygens (1596–1687) (Amsterdam, 2014); The Dutch Language in Britain (1550–1702) (Leiden, 2015); The Dutch Language in Japan (1600–1900) (Leiden, 2020); John Cruso of Norwich and Anglo-Dutch Literary Identity in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 2022); and Christian Mission in Seventeenth-Century Taiwan (Leiden, 2025).

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