Small Sea travel diaries : Yu Yonghe's records of Taiwan
郁永河, active 1691-1697, Macabe Keliher (Translator) / Yonghe Yu
Small Sea Travel Diaries: Yu Yonghe's records of Taiwan is the companion volume to Out of China. It is a direct translation of the diaries and essays composed by Chinese litterateur Yu Yonghe during hist travels through Taiwan in the late seventeenth century. When the imperial gunpowder stores exploded in 1696, officials searched frantically for a means to replenish the lost supply. Having heard that the newly acquired territory of Taiwan was rich in sulfur, they dispatched Yu to search, mine and transport the essential mineral. Throughout his journey across the perilous Taiwan strait and up the miasmal eastern Taiwan coast, Yu kept a diary of all he saw and experienced. Upon his return to China he published this diary, along with several essays on history and culture, as the slim but opulent Pihai Jiyou. He meant for his writings to inform Chinese officials and literati about a land and a peole they had no contact with and hardly knew. Today, when a war of historical conscience rages across the Taiwan Strait, and research on the history of the island is still haunted by political ghosts, Yu and his diaries offer a glimpse into a time we know little about, illuminating our contemporary torments from the vantage point of three hundred years prior. Even divorced from Taiwan Pihai Jiyou has an important and innovative place in the history of Chinese literature and travel writing: it was the first work to record a journey overseas in unstinting detail, and to do so as a day-by-day account. Although peregrinating literati began to make frequent use of the diary technique by the late sixteenth century, most, if not all, only used it in their writings about travel within China. Yu's Pihai Jiyou is the first such travelogue to take the reader in first person on the sea and to a distant land.-- Page 2-3 of cover
Print Book, English, 2004
SMC Pub., Taipei, 2004
History
xx, 225 pages : illustrations (some color), maps (some color) ; 22 cm
9789576386282, 9789576386299, 9576386284, 9576386292
57493087
The opening scroll
The middle scroll
The closing scroll
Appendices. The Zheng family episode
Addendum on the savage territory
Tales of the sea
The terrain inside the universe
Map on lining papers
Companion vol. to: Out of China or Yu Yonghe's tale of Formosa. Taipei : SCM Pub., 2003
Includes index