| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Emma Jinhua Teng . Taiwan's Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683–1895. (Harvard East Asian Monographs, number 230.) Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center. 2004. Pp. xvi, 370. $49.50.
Many will remember the speech President Bill Clinton delivered on June 28, 1998, to a packed auditorium at Peking University, after which one strategically placed "student" with flawless English poured out for the former leader of the free world his great love for the province of Taiwan and his heartfelt desire to have it reunited with the motherland. I think the president can probably be forgiven for failing to mention that not one mainland Chinese regime has ever held political control over the island.	1
In her fine new book, Emma Jinhua Teng demonstrates that it took centuries before people on the mainland—Chinese or Manchus—even considered Taiwan's inhabitants to be human. Marshalling a prodigious number of works—travel writings, maps, drawings, even fiction—from the late seventeenth century through the late nineteenth, Teng demonstrates changing mainland perspectives on the capacity of the natives/savages to be assimilated to "civilization." Were the Taiwan natives really human beings, or were they of an altogether different species (yilei)? Slowly but surely, the Qing imperium moved from a position of utter disgust for the place and its people to a sense that it needed to be "transformed" and later conquered and brought within the fold.	. . .

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