Written by Jo-Tzu Huang.
Image credit: Cover of Taiwan’s Imagined Geography, published by Harvard University Press.
My encounter with Emma Jinhua Teng’s book Taiwan’s Imagined Geography came relatively late in 2018, when its Chinese edition was first published. Less than a year ago, I had relocated from Taiwan to Toronto, a city known as Tkaronto on the traditional lands of many First Peoples, to start my PhD. At that time, I was still immersed in the excitement of finding human geography as my new intellectual home. As an interdisciplinary researcher whose path has traversed civil engineering, planning, and urban studies, I have never found it easy to position myself and my work within the existing disciplinary boundaries. Although Taiwan’s Imagined Geography, originally published in 2004, had already sparked discussions among scholars both in Taiwan and North America (see notes), it had not crossed my radar until the first year of my PhD. This was probably because my research focused largely on contemporary environmental issues—my master’s project examined the urban politics surrounding water quality in Kaohsiung.
Back then, as someone just landing in human geography, I was struck by how differently this discipline, which broadly concerns the social and power relations of everyday space, took shape in Taiwan and Canada. In Canada, a country whose foundation is deeply rooted in the violent history of European settler colonialism, geographers have taken up settler colonialism as a central analytical framework, an enduring structure rather than a past event, that has continuously shaped how space is politically, socially, and materially produced across the past, present, and even into the future. For example, geographer Nicholas Blomley’s 2003 and 2004 article and book showed us how the Western property regime served as a legal tool that dispossessed Indigenous lands and continuously caused violent displacement even into the present. In class discussion, the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), along with its counterpart in Canada, were often mentioned examples of how pipelines function as infrastructure of settler colonialism.
The intellectual encounters I had at the beginning of my PhD journey constantly brought me back, in thought, to the island I had left thousands of miles behind, where I grew up as a descendant of Han settlers. As an island with a similar history, how can we make sense of the island’s settler-colonial past and present? Moreover, with multiple layers of colonial histories, including European merchant colonialism, Han Chinese settler colonialism, Japanese colonialisation and the KMT’s authoritarian rule under the Cold War, how does Taiwan’s settler colonialism differ from or connect to that in North America or elsewhere? Or, more fundamentally, how can I reposition and reorient the island in relation to the land where I am currently living and working, as well as within a broader scholarly landscape of the geography discipline?
The publication of the Chinese edition of Taiwan’s Imagined Geography arrived at a timely moment while I was grappling with the above questions. The author, Emma Jinhua Teng, is currently the T.T. and Wei Fong Chao Professor of Asian Civilisations at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The birth of the book, as the author recalled in the Preface of the Chinese edition, can be traced back to her family connection to Taiwan, which brought her to the then Stanford Center in Taipei for language learning, where she was introduced to Yu Yonghe’s Small Sea Travelogue (裨海紀遊). This encounter with Yu Yonghe’s texts sparked her interest in Chinese travel writing and later grew into her doctoral research project at Harvard University.
As an extension of Teng’s dissertation, the book draws on the travel writings of Qing literati, such as Yu Yonghe, Chen Di, Lin Qianguang, Lan Dingyuan, Ji Qiguang, to tell the story of how Taiwan, initially conceived of as a “ball of mud” lying “beyond the seas,” became an imperial frontier in the 18th century and was gradually incorporated into the Qing empire’s territory. As a geographer, I am particularly interested in how empires produced and mobilised geographical knowledge, given the discipline’s historical entanglement and complicity with imperialism—as Edward Said and the geographer Derek Gregory have shown, the production of geographical knowledge was an imperial project.
Taiwan’s Imagined Geography provides an example of how the imperial production and construction of geography was carried out in a non-Western empire, such as the Qing. As the author noted, an important intervention of the book is to challenge colonial studies by complicating the conventional view of imperialism, which largely confines itself to Western empires and assumes that colonisers and colonised map onto Europeans and non-Europeans (p. 7-8). Teng’s examination of Qing’s expansionism—the military conquests and rule over non-Chinese lands—through the lens of imperialism was then provocative and experimental in China studies, since many historians tended to view imperialism and colonialism as unique to the West. However, as Teng clarified, this move was by no means intended to conflate the differences and distinctions between the Qing and European empires, nor to claim a “universal definition of imperialism” (p. 255). Instead, it sought to make postcolonial discussions and questions possible by “opening a space for multiple forms of imperialisms and colonialisms” (p. 255).
Teng considered imperialism not only a political economy but also a cultural process. Inspired by Edward Said, Teng focused on colonial discourses and representations in Qing frontier travel writings, maps, and illustrations, showing how Taiwan’s landscapes, peoples, flora, and fauna were reimagined and rendered as subjects of the empire. The book has nine chapters, in addition to the Introduction, Conclusion, and Epilogue. Each chapter presents a key theme in colonial discourses, while the reader can still follow the chronological order and see how these discourses changed over time, as shaped by Qing imperial policy. Teng’s analysis reveals a shift in the narrative framing of the island and its landscapes, from an anachronistic “living museum” characterised as a “horrid wilderness” or “empty lands” to the “land of bounty” with agricultural potential, as Taiwan was gradually incorporated into the imperial economy. Moreover, the book provides an extensive analysis of the Han Chinese racial and ethnic discourses towards Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples, showing how racial differences and classifications were constructed to serve imperial interests. As Teng reminded, colonial discourses, as cultural representations of imperialism and colonialism, are no less important than the political-economic structures since they could have long-lasting effects.
Overall, Taiwan’s Imagined Geography offered a perspective that helped me reposition and reorient Taiwan—the island where I grew up as a settler and where my work is based—in the academy of human geography in North America. As a geographer who studies Taiwan in North America, I encountered the book in my first year of PhD studies, which prompted me to reflect on the shared settler-colonial past and present between the two places. Although my PhD project did not directly engage with its themes, the book became a reference point for me to think about and relocate Taiwan in North America, as well as within the discipline of geography. The book critically points out the dominant Han-centric, settler-colonial perspective within Taiwan’s historical narratives, offering a foundation for exploring a decolonising approach to postcolonial critiques of Taiwan.
Notes: For reviews articles authored by scholars in Taiwan, please see: Lung-Chih Chang, “A Review of Emma Teng, Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683-1895,” Bulletin of the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, no. 26 (2005):415-422 (in Chinese); Jia-Lun Chang, “ A Review of Jinhua Teng, Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683-1895,” Bulletin of Historical Research, no.36 (2006): 215-225 (in Chinese).
Jo‑Tzu Huang is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on environmental politics, science and technology studies (STS), and multispecies relations in ocean and fisheries contexts. She received her PhD in Geography from the University of Toronto, where her dissertation examines how techno‑visions of the ocean—sea farming and stock enhancement—have materialised in Taiwan.
This article was published as part of the special issue on ‘Old Books in Taiwan Studies’.