Man beyond the Sea 海外人: Hong Qisheng 洪棄生 (1866–1928) and a Peripheral Poetics of Qing Taiwan (1683–1895)

Abstract Even after the Qing Dynasty began to consider Taiwan an official province of the empire in 1887, the island never held its own provincial examination, which continued to take place in Fujian. Paired with the unreliability of ocean conditions and the poverty of maritime technologies, persistently high failure rates at the continental tests (despite preferential pass quotas for Taiwan examinees) encouraged island literati to move in a seasonal oscillation across the seas. Through the case study of Hong Qisheng, a self-proclaimed “man beyond the sea” who crossed the strait eight times in his failed endeavor to pass the provincial rounds, I propose that this ocean oscillation and other features of Qing administration, such as ocean-centric test prompts and west-facing platforms, reinforced the examinee’s attention to the imperium’s limits, guiding his expression of provenance and poetic style. Hong’s readers, meanwhile, celebrated this style as a product of the periphery.