Timothy Brook
Made in Taiwan
Lost Colony: The Untold Story of China’s First Great Victory over the West
By Tonio Andrade
Princeton University Press 431pp £24.95
With numbing regularity, publishers of history books strive to grab the attention of window-shoppers by declaiming that the book on offer tells an untold story. The trouble with most of these claims is that their stories have already been told. And if they have not, it is usually because the narratives they relate are either not worth hearing, or utterly fabricated. As fabrication sells better than triviality, pure nonsense has been gaining ground in the field of popular history over the past decade. The narrow soul who spoils the effect by pointing out that this or that untold story is actually untold nonsense rarely gets a hearing.
In the case of this book, however, I was able to relax. The publisher is absolutely right: the defeat in 1662 of the Dutch colonists on Taiwan by the naval forces commanded by Zheng Chenggong, popularly known as Koxinga, is an untold story worthy of the label. Not only is
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
Don't ask about the dress code, don't talk about your spouse too much, flirt with everyone
Andrew Martin on the rules, pleasures and pitfalls of living in Paris
Andrew Martin - Bobos versus Beaufs
Andrew Martin: Bobos versus Beaufs - Impossible City: Paris in the Twenty-First Century by Simon Kuper
literaryreview.co.uk
for the latest edition of @Lit_Review I worked on some excellent pieces – @MortenHoiJensen on Kafka
@ellafox_m on @mimpathy (Honor Levy)
@profrhodrilewis on Shakespeare novels
@edcumming on Kaliane Bradley
@zoeguttenplan on @NationalTheatre's Dickens show
wrote about MY FIRST BOOK (@GrantaBooks) for @Lit_Review, a book that I think makes difficult things look very easy: