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Abigail Gautreau

‘The Invention of Lying’: George Psalmanazar, the Society of Jesus, and the Truth about

Asia in the Seventeenth Century (Presented at the Southeast Conference of the Association for Asian Studies, January 2012)

A young man calling himself George Psalmanazar arrived in London in 1704. He was by

most accounts blond and fair-skinned, and he spoke excellent Latin.1 Unlike most new arrivals

from the continent, however, Psalmanazar claimed to be neither European nor a long-time

Christian. He had lately been converted by his companion, the Anglican Reverend Alexander

Innes, and he claimed to be a native of the island of Formosa. He spoke a language he called

Formosan, and had written a book, complete with illustrations, describing his homeland entitled

An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, an Island subject to the Emperor of

Japan, giving an Account of the Religion, Customs, Manners &c. of the Inhabitants. The book

did not simply discuss Psalmanazar’s homeland, it included a lengthy treatise on his conversion

in which he described in scathing terms the sordid activities of the Jesuits on Formosa. The book

was not unique in form; what set Psalmanazar’s story apart from other travel accounts and

memoirs was that it was a complete fabrication.

Psalmanazar was most likely a Frenchman, and he had certainly never traveled beyond

the boundaries of the continent. What he lacked in worldly experience, he made up for in

bravado, a gift for languages, and a singularly brilliant imagination. The ruse succeeded only

briefly before Psalmanazar faded into obscurity, and he spent the latter part of his life as a Grub

Street hack writer and Hebrew scholar.2 He was never officially revealed as a fraud, and despite

1 Frederic J. Foley, The Great Formosan Impostor (Taipei, Taiwan: Mei Ya Publications, Inc,

1968), 6-7. 2 Psalmanazar’s later life is explored in detail in: Robert Adams Day, “Psalmanazar’s ‘Formosa’

and the British reader (including Samuel Johnson).” In Exoticism in the Enlightenment ed. GS

Rousseau and Roy Porter, (New York: Manchester University Press, 1990).

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acknowledging his hoax in his posthumous memoirs, his invented language remained alive and

well with scholars.

The story of the Formosan faker was kept alive mainly by compendia of famous hoaxes

in history, alongside the likes of the Princess Caraboo. His story remains a novelty for modern

readers unable to imagine a world in which a blond man could pass himself off as Asian. A

handful of contemporary texts plucked Psalmanazar form obscurity. Frederic Foley, himself a

Jesuit, published the first scholarly text on Psalmanazar in 1968, arguing that Psalmanazar was

popular for his attacks on the Jesuits, rather than successful in fooling his contemporaries. A

handful of articles address Psalmanazar as an inspiration to satirists and his relationship with

Samuel Johnson.3 The most recent in depth treatment is Michael Keevak’s The Pretended Asian,

which devotes special attention to Psalmanazar’s Formosan language. This paper blends the two

interpretations, and contextualizes Psalmanazar’s story against changing European attitudes

toward China. First, though, we must take a brief look at what Europeans knew about Formosa

at the time of the hoax.

Despite Psalmanazar’s claim that Formosa was under Japanese rule, by 1704 it was under

the control of the Chinese. He can be forgiven for his error, however, as the island changed

hands many times during the seventeenth century. The island was briefly colonized by the

Dutch, and a 1670 account of Formosa in the Atlas Japonensis borrowed heavily from the

account of a Dutch missionary. It described an island of barbaric aborigines engaged in

perpetual warfare. Headhunting, theft, adultery, and murder were common occurrences. The

dead are not buried, but dried over a fire and hung up in baskets in the huts of their descendents.

Most memorably, women are not permitted to give birth until age 37, and had abortions if they

3 See: John Shufelt, “The trickster as an instrument of enlightenment: George Psalmanazar

and the writings of Jonathan Swift,” History of European Ideas 31 (2005).

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became pregnant prior to that. The abortions were performed by priestesses who danced on the

women’s bellies.4 This sort of nonsense passed for factual information in Europe, and in China,

the situation was not much better. There may not have been stories of dancing priestesses, but

Formosa was part of the Chinese periphery. Though it the island is not far from the mainland as

the crow flies, the Taiwan Strait was hazardous, rendering Formosa inaccessible by Chinese

standards.5 Furthermore, the Chinese presence on the island was limited, like that of other

would-be colonizers, to the coastal plains; the interior of the island remained under the control of

the aborigines.6

This lack of information made the island the perfect setting for Psalmanazar’s hoax; it

was a real place, but its details were fluid and the only information supposedly known about it

was outlandish. Psalmanazar’s construction was of Formosa was no eccentric. He described an

annual sacrifice of 20,000 boys (later scaled back to 18,000 for the sake of realism) to a god who

looked like an ox, men who wore nothing but a brass, silver, or gold plate tied over their genitals,

and the eating of raw meat, a habit which gained Psalmanazar some notoriety. He claimed that

the island’s fauna included rhinoceros, elephants, camels, and sea horses, “all of which are tame,

and very useful for the service of Man.”7 To the present-day reader, this conjures images of

4 See Donald F Lach and Edwin J. Van Kley, A Century of Advance, vol. 3, book 4 of Asia in the

Making of Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), chapter 22.4. 5 See Laurence G Thompson, “The Junk Passage Across the Taiwan Strait: Two Early Chinese

Accounts,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 28 (1968), 170-194. 6 Father de Mailla, SJ, “The Early History of Formosa.” Translated from the French. In “Lettres

edifiantes and curieuses,” 1715. Reprinted from The Celestial Empire (Shanghai: Loureiro & Co

Printers, ????), 14. 7 George Psalmanazar, An historical and geographical description of Formosa ...: Giving an

account of the religion, customs, manners, &c., of the inhabitants. Together with a relation of

what happen'd to the author in his travels; particularly his conferences with the Jesuits, and

others, in several parts of Europe. Also the history and reasons of his conversion to Christianity,

with his objections against it (in defence of paganism) and their answers .... (Printed for D.

Brown, 1704),

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children’s cartoons, but for the early modern European who only knew these creatures from

engravings, the claims might not have seemed so outrageous. Psalmanazar carefully pointed out

that there were no mythical beasts like unicorns or griffons, as Formosans knew these creatures

to be, “fictions of the Brain.”8 Psalmanazar walked a careful line on his fantastic tales,

commenting on the exotic and avoiding subjects well known to his contemporaries. A tame

rhinoceros was one thing, but a unicorn crossed the line.

This blend of the familiar and exotic was integral to Psalmanazar’s fraud and his success.

By making his origins strange and unknown, he established himself as the only expert on the

subject, the only person capable of making this unknown space known. This was no happy

accident; his memoirs, which are generally acknowledged as being truthful by scholars, reveal a

young man who was exceptionally conscious of what and how his contemporaries saw the world

around them.

The path to Psalmanazar’s fraud began when he was fairly young, having been sent away

by his mother, who had fallen on hard times, to live with his father. After a hard journey, he

found his father’s circumstances were no better, and he set off again.9 During his travels, he saw

that people were more charitable from those who were from far away than to their own

countrymen, so he began trying to pass himself off as an Irishman. This scheme did not last

long, as he regularly ran into people who spoke Irish or were familiar with the island. He then

adopted the pretence of being a Japanese convert to Christianity, as he was less likely to meet

anyone who was familiar with Japanese language or customs. He had learned about Japan from

http://books.google.com/books?id=C3_psCzPD7EC&ots=2SGDCnd8S1&dq=psalmanazar%20d

escription%20of%20formosa&pg=RA1-PA264#v=onepage&q&f=false [Accessed May 2,

2011], 264. 8 Psalmanazar, Description, 265.

9 George Psalmanazar, Memoirs of **** Commonly known by the Name of George Psalmanazar;

a Reputed Native of Formosa… 2nd

ed. (London, 1765), 98-99, 123.

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the Jesuits who taught him in school. He remembered very little of what he had been taught, but

as the saying goes, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and he decided to simply make up

anything he did not recall.

However, I was rash enough to think, that what I wanted of a right knowledge of

them, I might make up by the strength of a pregnant invention, in which I flattered

myself I might succeed the more easily, as I supposed they were so little known

by the generality of Europeans, that they were only looked upon, in the lump, to

be Antipodes to them in almost every respect, as religion, manners, dress &tc.10

The notion of “Antipodes” became central to Psalmanazar’s supposed identity; being Japanese

was a negative state without inherent meaning, so the only thing it meant to be Japanese was to

be Not European. If Psalmanazar could sort out which behaviors Europeans considered to be

distinctly their own and behave in the opposite way, he would, for all intents and purposes, be

Japanese. This is also gave him room to counter accusations about his appearance. Europeans

were aware the Asians did not look like them, but concepts of race had no scientific or

pseudoscientific baggage in the early eighteenth century. As Keevak points out in Becoming

Yellow, color terms were evaluative rather than descriptive. Being white was a function of

cultural sophistication.11

Therefore, being Formosan or French or English meant acting

Formosan or French or English. And, since Psalmanazar was defining what it meant to be

Formosan, all he had to do was follow his own prescriptions.

Psalmanazar set about writing a fake language, and remembering that Asian languages

were not like European ones, he wrote right to left and named his letters.12

He joined an army in

the pay of the Dutch to better secure his living, and found that his assumed Japanese identity had

the desired effect of setting him apart from his comrades and gaining the attention of the officers,

10

Psalmanazar, Memoirs, 113. 11

Michael Keevak, Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 2011), 28. 12

Psalmanazar, Memoirs, 114.

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which is how he met the Anglican Reverend Alexander Innes. Innes discovered Psalmanazar’s

fraud by asking him to translate the same passage from Cicero twice. When he found the

discrepancies, rather than revealing Psalmanazar, he encouraged him to better learn his language,

and devised a scheme whereby Innes would convert Psalmanazar (a Catholic pretending to be a

Japanese heathen) to Anglicanism and bring him to London. There is no mention of Formosa

until Innes’ intervention.

Psalmanazar agreed to the scheme and set about adopting behaviors that would mark him

as a Formosan, including eating raw meat, which he claimed never made him ill, but rather that,

“people’s surprize at [his] diet, served [him] for a relishing sauce.”13

He claimed that his skin

was fair because the wealthier sector of the population lived underground and were unaffected by

the heat (a common explanation for variance in skin tone).14

Psalmanazar stuck to his story

relentlessly, but he was soon basically discredited by interviews with scholars and Jesuit priests

who had been to China and the East. After spending six months at Oxford, he returned to

London more notorious than popular, and found that Innes had abandoned him to his fate.

Psalmanazar had appealed to Europeans on a number of levels; his language, a

supposedly Asian tongue written with an alphabet rather than characters, seemed to offer a

bridge between European tongues and Chinese, a possible key to the clavis sinica. His attacks

on the Jesuits came at a time when the popularity of the Jesuits was waning because of their

accommodationist policy toward ancestor worship among Chinese converts, which they

considered to be civic and social rites rather than idol worship. This particular Jesuit

interpretation had long been criticized by the Dominicans. The mendicant order also found fault

with the Jesuits’ adopted practice of styling themselves as Confucian scholars (ru) to win

13

Psalmanazar, Memoirs, 163. 14

Psalmanazar, Memoirs, 165-166

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converts from the top of Chinese society down, rather than working among the people as the

Dominicans did. Jesuit success in becoming ru paid off; their adoption of Chinese manners,

behavior, and dress earned them entrée into the royal court, where they won a respectable

number of converts. They were perhaps not so unlike Psalmanazar in this respect, though of

course the Jesuits never attempted to pass themselves off as ethnically Chinese.

While the Jesuits taught astronomy and worked on conversions, they also sent back

information about China to Europe. Their letters and bits of material culture formed the basis of

the only information most Europeans had about China, and Jesuits steadily constructed an idea of

what China was like for the European audience. It would be unfair to cast this in a malevolent

light; the Jesuits certainly had their own motives, but they were neither expected nor equipped to

act as ethnographers, not that such a discipline even existed at the time. The Jesuits were not in

China to simply observe and report back; they were on a mission from God to convert the

Chinese, which required the spiritual and financial support of their European backers. The

Chinese could not be made to seem too paganistic, lest conversion seem hopeless. The Chinese

mission had to be a two-way street; Europeans poured educated men and money into China, and

they needed to receive something more than a handful of souls in return. The Jesuit construct of

China was a response to this need.

Cynthia Klekar specifically addresses this issue in her article, “‘Sweetness and

Courtesie’: Benevolence, Civility, and China in the Making of European Modernity.”15

Klekar

examines the letters of several missionaries of both the Jesuit and Dominican orders, using them

to illustrate how the missionaries used Chinese behavior as an exemplar to European monarchs.

The letters describe the Chinese emperor as a father to his people, happy to give up his own

15

Cynthia Klekar, “ ‘Sweetness and Courtesie’: Benevolence, Civility, and China in the Making

of European Modernity” Eighteenth-Century Studies 43, no. 3 (2010).

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luxuries to see to the needs of his people.16

Chinese social structure is also a good model, as

people at all levels of society share the same behavioral qualities and express themselves with

equal grace.17

These letters were not the only idealized vision of China the missionaries created;

they also translated the Four Books into the Confucius Sinarum philosophus, published in 1687.

The text included extensive Jesuit commentary alongside the original text, and selective

translation of terms to better fit the tenets of Christianity. Lionel Jensen has argued convincingly

that Confucius himself is really a Jesuit construct loosely based on the philosopher and teacher

Kong fu zi.18

Again, the goal of the Jesuit efforts was not to deceive Europeans for their own

ends, but rather the process of making Confucianism known and knowable for Europeans

necessarily involved the infusion of the Western, Jesuit perspective. Consequently, everything

Europeans learned about the East was filtered through the lens of the Jesuit construct. The letters

of the missionaries praised Chinese society for its emphasis on education, but neglected to

mention that education was the primary means of upward mobility through the civil service

exams. These exams were available to everyone, but many families were unlikely to be able to

afford to send a son to school or hire a tutor to prepare him. The examination process could also

stretch out over years as students failed and re-sat different levels of exams.

The Jesuits did not simply send back stories and books, they also sent a handful of young

Chinese converts to Europe. While these visits did not always go smoothly, the young Chinese

men they brought over were usually potential candidates for the priesthood, and hand-selected to

give a good impression. One of the most successful young visitors was Shen Fuzong, who

arrived in Europe in 1683 and toured Paris, Rome, Lisbon, and London. The young man

16

Klekar, “Sweetness,” 364-6. 17

Klekar, “Sweetness,” 361. 18

18

Lionel Jensen, Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and Universal Civlization,

(Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 8.

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delighted the monarchs of Europe; James II had a portrait of Shen painted and hung it near his

bedchamber, and Louis XIV turned on the fountains for him at Versailles.19

Shen’s appearance

was novel, and his blend of familiar and exotic customs was intriguing. Psalmanazar’s behavior

and appearance no doubt held similar appeal. China was, to Europeans, what the Jesuits showed

them.

The success of the Jesuit construct of China was largely due to the nature of knowledge

in early modern Europe. The Scientific Revolution was underway, and the Enlightenment was in

its infancy, but both of these phenomena were novelties. There was one absolute truth, and it

was the Word of God as recorded in the Holy Bible and explained by the Church. All other facts

were fluid, and had to be adjusted and interpreted to match the Bible. When the Chinese

demonstrated that they had documented history predating the Western timeline for the creation

of man, calculations were adjusted to fit the new figures. For Westerners, there was simply no

inherent, knowable truth about China, and for the missionaries, the China they manufactured was

the authentic, real China.

By the time of Psalmanazar’s arrival in Europe, the Jesuit version of China was under

heavy criticism. Dominican friars claimed that the Jesuits allowed converts to keep altars to

Confucius alongside those dedicated to Christ, and complained that the Jesuits hid images of

Christ’s Passion from their Chinese converts until after baptism, because the images disturbed

the Chinese deeply.20

This infighting compounded the objections raised during the Protestant

Reformation, which was still a fresh wound. The year of Psalmanazar’s arrival in Protestant

London coincided with the censure of the Jesuits by the pope for their accommodationist policies

19

DE Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500-1800, 2nd

ed. (New York:

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2005), 78-79. 20

J.S. Cummins, A Question of Rites: Friar Domingo Navarrete and the Jesuits in China

(Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Company, 1993), 59.

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in China. These factors contributed to make London ripe for a young Eastern visitor with

scandalous tales of the wrongs committed by the Jesuits in Formosa, far from papal oversight.

Foley points out in his work that while the Jesuits emphasized the positive qualities of the Asian

populace, taking the attitude that they were good people lacking only the revelation of Christ,

Psalmanazar did the opposite, playing up the salacious barbarity of his supposed homeland.21

Psalmanazar offers to set the record straight, presenting himself as the keeper of the truth and

casting further doubt on the claims of the Jesuits, who had “imposed so many Stories and such

gross Fallacies upon the Public.”22

Psalmanazar’s attack was doubly effective because whether one believed his story or not,

his Description illustrated how easily the story of a civilization could be invented. While the

troubles of the Jesuits cast doubt on their assessment of Chinese civilization and cultural

practices, the growing consensus that Psalmanazar was an impostor and his book an elaborate

forgery undermined faith in such documents as proof of the known. Psalmanazar created a

knowable construct of an unknowable place; the Jesuits misrepresented their activities in China

and the nature of Chinese civilization and society. The positive, idyllic vision of China created

by the Jesuits was suspect, and Psalmanazar’s antics only intensified the criticism. By appearing

to be European and yet behaving in antipodal ways, Psalmanazar indicated and insurmountable

obstacle to the equivalence of European and Asian civilizations. The Jesuit emphasis on

commonality of culture fell by the wayside, and as the seventeenth century wore on, tensions

between East and West increased steadily.

Psalmanazar faded quietly into obscurity, and became something of a joke to Europeans.

The ease of this transition illustrates the increasing certainty of knowledge, or at least a rise in

21

Foley, The Great Formosan Impostor, 29-31. 22

Psalmanazar, Description, A3.

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criticism giving way to a decline in gullibility. This skepticism made Europeans more certain of

their own identity and superiority; the Society of Jesus was shortly dissolved, and Jesuit China

along with it. Psalmanazar had perpetuated his hoax in a Europe where appearance was

secondary to behavior in determining identity, and his story offers a case study in the intellectual

revolution that transformed modern European thought.