“Yizhou 夷洲” and “Liuqiu 流求” in Historical Chinese Texts: International Relations on the Northeast Asian Seas (3rd-17th Centuries)
Man-houng Lin and Yi-chen Huang
Sun Quan 孫權, Emperor Da of the Eastern Wu, and Emperor Yang of Sui Yang Guang 楊廣 sent armies across the sea to invade Yizhou and Liuqiu between the 3rd and the 7th centuries. Since 1874, when the French sinologist Léon d’ Hervey Saint-Denys proposed the theory that Liuqiu of the past is Taiwan, giving it a close historical relationship with China, the question of whether Taiwan or Ryukyu 琉球 is the historical Liuqiu has been a significant topic of academic contention. Yizhou was brought into this discussion by the research of Ichimura Sanjirō 市村瓚次郎 in 1918, which similarly explored the question of whether Yizhou is Taiwan or Ryukyu.
This paper uses the Hanyu pinyin “Liuqiu” for antiquated toponyms in historical documents, including 流求 and 流球. “Ryukyu” is commonly used to refer to 琉球, the modern formulation in use since the Ming-dynasty of China, in Western languages. Research on Yizhou and Liuqiu has been very challenging because it requires comparing historical records and references to modern archeological and historical studies on international relations in maritime Northeast Asia. This paper employs increasingly available and comprehensive electronic databases to overcome past difficulties. Specifically, these are “Scripta Sinica” 漢籍電子文獻資料庫, the “Taiwan Documents Collection Database” 臺灣文獻叢刊資料庫 developed by Academia Sinica, and Donald Sturgeon’s “Chinese Text Project,” and others.
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