The Qing Empire’s Reconstruction of Historical Memory and Ethnic Identity in Ming-Zheng Taiwan

This two-year project centers on the Manchu and Chinese manuscript copies of the Pingding haikou fanglüe 平定海寇方略 held by the Institute of History and Philology (IHP), Academia Sinica. Drawing on related multilingual Ming-Qing archives and sources from beyond China, it examines interactions between the Qing government and Ming-Zheng Taiwan from the perspective of historical memory and ethnic identity. By tracing how the Manchu and Chinese texts were compiled and revised, the project not only uncovers facts the Qing deliberately concealed in the course of its Taiwan campaigns, but also explores how the Qing court used war writing in Manchu and Chinese to reshape later generations’ historical memory of Taiwan and its ethnic relations. Approaching the relationship between Taiwan and the Qing from the plural perspectives of East Asian and world history, the project aims to offer a historically deep and culturally diverse point of reference for questions of collective memory and historical identity that Taiwanese society may face in the future.