Leaves in the Wind--Seen and Heard in Formosa

The book's title, Leaves in the Wind, was chosen to emphasize the fact that control of Taiwan has been passed back and forth between Europeans, the Chinese, and the Japanese over the past few centuries. The metaphor is continued in the book's rich collection of photos and other images, which conspire to make the reader feel as if he were sifting through a pile of wind-tossed leaves as one Eurocentric vision after another presents itself to the viewer.

Van der Aalsvoort is not a historian by training, but during a trip to Taiwan 20 years ago as a university student majoring in psychology, he felt strongly that he had somehow come home. He concluded that he must have been Taiwanese in a previous life. After graduating, he came back to Taiwan and stayed for a year. For the past five years he has been using his income from antiques dealing to fund his research into the historical links between Taiwan and his native Netherlands. In addition to antiquarian book dealers and auctions throughout Western Europe, the quest for ancient artifacts related to China and Taiwan has led him to places as far apart as Estonia, India, Armenia, and Vladivostok. The 230-plus maps and images in his book are the fruit of his five years of peripatetic searching. Through it all, his mastery of many different languages has been a big help.

Van der Aalsvoort laments that the loss of historical materials on Taiwan has compounded difficulties, and likens his work to "sifting for gold in an abandoned mineshaft." He also acknowledges, however, that difficulty can make the breakthroughs all the sweeter. One of his happier finds was a map of Formosa created in 1940 by a famous cartographer. It was an extremely important find, for this was the very map that became the standard for subsequent cartography on Taiwan. Surprisingly, van der Aalsvoort found it tucked away, old and tattered, between the pages of a book. He said it was like running across a nugget of pure gold in a tossed salad. Because the bookseller didn't realize the value of the map, van der Aalsvoort was able to pick it up for a song.

The book is arranged chronologically, starting with the 16th-century expansion of the Dutch East Indies Company and the subsequent craze for mapmaking that arose. It goes on to describe the 17th-century conflict between the Dutch and Koxinga, the massive 18th-century influx of missionaries into East Asia and the popularity of spurious books about Taiwan, and 19th-century coal mining in Keelung and the arrival of aggressive Western military powers. The book finishes up with a look at China's cession of Taiwan to Japan. Van der Aalsvoort goes to no particular pains to avoid the apocryphal; indeed, Leaves in the Wind is a veritable compendium of second-hand falsehoods gleaned from newspapers and magazines, and reflects well the sort of image Westerners had of Taiwan.

The pages of the book clearly portray the odd imaginings that Europeans entertained about Taiwan several centuries ago, then goes on to reflect how our island gradually came into sharper focus as time went by. Included among the book's plates are fascinating glimpses of natural scenery, Aboriginal and Han Chinese customs, and a variety of religious rituals.

Professor Tsao Yung-ho, an academician at Academia Sinica and an expert in Taiwanese history and early modern Dutch, notes that the seafaring Koxinga was often depicted as an Arab-featured man riding a camel, while Taiwan's Aborigines often resembled native Americans in their physical appearance and clothing. These odd images sprang from the imaginations of people who had never actually been to Taiwan and were simply going on the basis of exaggerated writings by missionaries, merchants, explorers, reporters, and shipwrecked sailors, not to mention out-and-out fraudsters. With everyone wedded to their own particular perspective, the inaccuracies are not so surprising. The book is valuable precisely because it chronicles interaction between Europe and Taiwan over several centuries.

Academia Sinica professor Chen Kuo-tung, who served as chief editor of Leaves in the Wind, is quick to concede that the historical materials in the book have to be taken with a grain of salt, but argues that it makes a valuable contribution by bringing together scattered impressions of Taiwan that Westerners have had over a span of more than three centuries, thus giving local readers a chance to understand what their homeland has looked like to foreigners. And the more than 230 original photos and images lend considerable visual impact.

The photos and images in the book will go on public display for a time, after which a public museum plans to buy the collection from van der Aalsvoort and keep it in Taiwan.

In this age of globalization, historical viewpoints of every sort zing quickly through the ether, and the question of who has the right to interpret the past is no longer such an important issue. The real question now is how to leverage today's diversity of historical inquiry to develop a broader perspective, become more questioning, and eliminate misunderstandings. Leaves in the Wind is an easy read, and a fun look into Taiwan's past.

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In recent years Lambert van der Aalsvoort has used his income from antiques dealing to fund his research on Taiwan historical materials.