Overview

More than 300 years ago, Taiwan was a controversial topic in London thanks to a stupendous fraud perpetrated by a Frenchman claiming to have been born there. He made up an entire fantasy for the island with a fake history, a fake language and long list of outrageous claims that made his book, A Description of Formosa, a publishing sensation in London in 1704. Even the Bishop of London swallowed Psalmanazar's story and invited him to teach his (fake) Formosan language at Oxford University. The Formosa fantasy world he created, including elephants and camels, gold mines and outlandish religious sacrificial ceremonies, almost rivals Tolkein's Middle Earth, with the crucial difference that many people believed it to be real. This is the story of one of the great frauds in literary history.

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9789888422128

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Daphne Allen Dunn was born an American in Vladivostok, Siberia, in 1906. She lived through the fall of the Russian Czar, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the turmoil in Asia during the early decades of the 20th century. After her internment, Daphne moved to the United States, where she died in 2006 at the age of 100 years and one month in Sarasota, Florida.

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