What does a Formosan look like?
The portrait in his memoires is the only known surviving image of Psalmanazar. To us, it may be incomprehensible that a blond and blue-eyed man managed to present himself as an Asian, but again, relatively little had been known about Formosa in England at the time. Nevertheless, Psalmanazar’s appearance had raised eyebrows: the minutes of a Royal Society meeting in 1703, state that Psalmanazar ‘looked like a young Dutch man’. But how do you prove that Formosans look different from Dutchmen, if you have never met anyone from Formosa before? Also, Psalmanazar had an answer to everything. When challenged on his complexion, he simply replied that rich Formosans mainly lived underground and as a result, remained as pale as a European.
Psalmanazar was never publicly exposed as an imposter and forger during his life: public interest in the Native of Formosa just fizzled out in the years after the publication of An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa. Psalmanazar kept his assumed name but allowed his Formosan identity to quietly fade into the background as he became what, according to his memoires, he had wanted to be all along: a bona fide scholar.