The Fake 'Asian' Who Fooled 18th-Century London (opens in new tab)

I wrote an academic journal article about this guy! It's interesting how often his story bubbles back up into popular consciousness in different contexts. In fact that continual repackaging of his narrative is in part what the article is about, along with the transmission of his invented language which is sort of like a Borges story before Borges:

https://www.academia.edu/4042982/No_Man_Is_an_Island_Early_M...

There's also this is a popularization of it that I wrote in 2013. His drawings of supposed "Formosan" (Taiwanese) townsfolk are worth checking out:

http://theappendix.net/issues/2013/10/made-in-taiwan-an-eigh...

Here's all of the foreshadowing sentences. Now you can read them three times. Enjoy:

Nobles and rich merchants invited him to their dinner tables, where he spoke gibberish while inhaling mouthfuls of bloody food. There was simply no conceptual framework in place to ask the question, “Aren’t you Caucasian?” The book contained illustrations of Formosan clothing, architecture, and a grill used to roast the hearts of little boys. He wrote 12 hours each day and sustained himself with 10 to 12 drops of opium mixed with a pint of punch.

Chung Ling Soo took this to the next level. He was an American magician who performed, and lived his life, as Chung Ling Soo for several decades. He died when he failed to catch a bullet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chung_Ling_Soo

It must have been both exciting and frustrating to have lived in a time when there was so much unknown waiting to be discovered and yet, such limited knowledge of the world.

This and many other interesting stories can be found in cartoon form in "The Big Book of Hoaxes: True Tales of the Greatest Lies Ever Told!" (Factoid Books)

> Although some ethnic distinctions existed during this period—such as the difference between light-skinned northern Europeans and sub-Saharan blacks—modern categories of race didn’t yet exist. There was simply no conceptual framework in place to ask the question, “Aren’t you Caucasian?”

This sounds a little silly to me. From the way European and Arab chroniclers describe the Mongols and their appearance, it seems that people back then had a more than robust enough system of racial categorization to separately classify East Asians. More likely Taiwan was simply such a remote, alien place to Europeans that almost none of them had sufficient first- or second-hand knowledge to call Psalmanazar's bluff.

In fact, I suspect that the quoted sentence expresses the author's primary motive for even writing this piece in the first place; namely, to argue - contrary to the entire field of population genetics - that categories like "white" and "Asian" are wholly arbitrary social constructs and that races (or at least white people) don't really exist.