The Blonde-Haired, Blue-Eyed “Formosan” Who Fooled Great Britain

George Psalmanazar convinced people he was from Formosa and his phony book about the island became a best-seller

Title page of Psalmanazar’s book and his invented Formosan alphabet (Source: Archive.org)

Worldbuilding is the process science fiction and fantasy authors use to construct the various elements of the universe or world in which they set their story or series. George Psalmanazar’s worldbuilding made a name for him in early 18th century London. The problem was, the world he created was a fabricated version of the island of Formosa (now Taiwan).

The blonde, blue-eyed European convinced Great Britain he was a native Formosan kidnapped by Catholic missionaries. His 1704 book, An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa: An Island Subject to the Emperor of Japan (with nearly 50 more words in the subtitle), sold out immediately. Yet, it was entirely fictional.

Even the name George Psalmanazar is phony. No one knows his real name, nor did he reveal it in his posthumously published memoir. The memoir says he was born in the early 1680s somewhere between Avignon, France, and Rome. There’s no evidence one way or the other. He also laid out a tangled tale of being educated in Franciscan and Jesuit schools in France, assuming the identity of an Irish pilgrim, pretending to be a native of…