

The Fake 'Asian' Who Fooled 18th-Century London - throwaway344
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/04/london-forgotten-aryan-asian-fraudster/361035/?single_page=true

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benbreen
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...](https://www.academia.edu/4042982/No_Man_Is_an_Island_Early_Modern_Globalization_Knowledge_Networks_and_George_Psalmanazar_s_Formosa)

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...](http://theappendix.net/issues/2013/10/made-in-taiwan-an-eighteenth-
century-frenchmans-fictional-formosa)

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shasta
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.

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partisan
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.

~~~
logicallee
you've just described 2015.

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giltleaf
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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chung_Ling_Soo)

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erehweb
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)

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atlanticistrash
> 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.

~~~
thesteamboat
I suspect the author's primary motive for writing this piece is further down
the page:

> This post is adapted from Kembrew McLeod's new book, Pranksters: Making
> Mischief in the Modern World, published by NYU Press on April 1.

