Literary Formosa

Abstract

For decades, Formosa was a frontier for those people who set out from Kwangtung and Fukien in the waning days of the Ming dynasty, during the early part of the seventeenth century. By the time Koxinga defeated the Dutch in 1661 Formosa could claim a body of literature of its own. This, however, consisted mainly of histories and reports compiled by scholar-officials leaving an account of their stewardship, chronicles telling the story of settlement, cultivation and perennial skirmishes with the local aborigines, and poetry of the sort with which the learned men of China have traditionally amused themselves. This literature followed classical forms and was written in the traditional wen-yen.