“Made in Taiwan? How a Frenchman Fooled 18th-Century London”, 2018-04-18 (; backlinks; similar):
Benjamin Breen on the remarkable story of George Psalmanazar, the mysterious Frenchman who successfully posed as a native of Formosa (now modern Taiwan) and gave birth to a meticulously fabricated culture with bizarre customs, exotic fashions, and its own invented language…Who was this man?
The available facts remain surprisingly slim. Despite hundreds of years of research by everyone from the father of British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli to contemporary scholars at Penn and the National Taiwan University, we still don’t even know Psalmanazar’s real name or place of origin (although he was likely from southern France). We know that elite figures ranging from the scientists of the Royal Society to the Bishop of London initially believed his claims, but he eventually fell into disgrace as competing experts confirmed that he was a liar.
Beyond this, we move into the fictional realms that “Psalmanazar”, like a Borges character come to life, summoned into existence with his voice and pen…Although the scale and singularity of his deception made him unique, Psalmanazar was also representative: while he was inventing tales of Formosan cannibalism, his peers were writing falsified histories of pirate utopias, parodic accounts of islands populated by super-intelligent horses, and sincere descriptions of demonic sacrifices.