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台灣首部史詩級大河劇《斯卡羅》原著小說
《傀儡花》英文版 陳耀昌醫師台灣史小說力作
本書重現了1867年的台灣時空、事件與人物，有史實依據，也有虛構成分。小說家藉由想像和推理，在幾個看似孤立的歷史事件之間找到了鏈結，從而串接起當下與過往的情感紐帶，牽動了台灣的命運。
In 1867, an American merchant ship, the Rover, sank off the coast of southern Taiwan. Fourteen sailors reached the shore, where almost all were killed by indigenous people. In retaliation, the United States launched two disastrous military operations against local tribes. Eventually, the U.S. consul to Amoy, Charles Le Gendre, negotiated a treaty with Tauketok, the chief of the eighteen tribes of the area, that secured safe passage for shipwrecked sailors.
Yao-Chang Chen’s historical novel Puppet Flower retells the story of the Rover incident, bringing to light its pivotal role in Taiwanese history. Merging documented events and literary imagination, the novel vividly depicts Tauketok, Le Gendre, and other historical figures alongside the story of Butterfly, a young woman of mixed ethnic heritage who serves as an interpreter and mediator during the crisis. Chen deftly reconstructs the multiethnic and multilingual society of southern Taiwan in the second half of the nineteenth century from multiple perspectives, portraying local people’s daily struggles for survival and their interactions with Han Chinese settlers, Qing dynasty bureaucrats, and Western officials, tradesmen, and adventurers. The novel explores nineteenth-century Sino-American and Sino-indigenous relations and emphasizes the centrality of Taiwanese indigenous cultures to the island’s history.
A gripping work of historical fiction, Puppet Flower is a powerful revisionist narrative of a formative moment in Taiwan’s past. It was recently adapted into a popular Taiwanese TV miniseries, Seqalu: Formosa 1867.
