TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Eryk Michael Smith, co-founder of Formosa Files, gave Taiwan News a sneak preview of some popular stories on the podcast.

In an interview on June 1, Smith, who is also the ICRT Southern correspondent, talked about the inspiration for the show and its very first episode about a fake Formosan. He also shared excerpts of tales about Mao Zedong's (毛澤東) famous Taiwanese spymaster, the "murder of the century," the last Japanese soldier to hold out from WWII, and Richard Nixon's fruitless groveling to Mao.

According to Smith, the book "Taiwan in 100 Books" was the impetus for the show, which is advertisement-free thanks to sponsorship by a foundation started by a former mayor of Kaohsiung. The show's first episode covered the story of a European man who was able to fool the courts of London for a time into believing he was a native of Formosa.

Smith said that one of his favorite stories is the adventures of a Taiwanese man who took part in the Long March and eventually set up an extensive spy network for Mao in Taiwan. He also said Pai Hsiao-yen (白曉燕) could arguably be considered the "murder of the century" because it involved heinous crimes, the child of a celebrity, a foreign diplomat and his family, and came at a time when Taiwan was transitioning from a dictatorship to a democracy.

One of the more recent episodes covers attempts by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger to win concessions from Mao by stroking his ego. However, in the process, Nixon "gave away Taiwan" and the Vietnam War continued to rage, with very little to show in exchange.

1. Could you tell us a bit about how Formosa files got started?

Yeah, sure. So we started back in 2021, but the real reason is because of this book right here "Taiwan in 100 Books," written by John Ross. So John Ross is an author and publisher with Camphor Press.

He's been doing this for a really long time and he published this book where he summarized a whole bunch of other English language books about Taiwan into one book. So I met him working for ICRT at the time, in Southern Taiwan.

I interviewed him and eventually, to make a long story short, I kept thinking about the stories that he told in the book. Some of them I knew, some of them I didn't know.

And I wanted to think of a way that they could be expressed so there was video or other options, and then one night it just hit me, “Hey, podcasting!" So I'm able to use my radio experience to do the sound mixing.

And John and I work on different stories, but the main reason is "Taiwan and 100 Books" by John Ross. I highly recommend it, and that's how we got started.

So, in 2021, when we first began, we probably had only about ten different countries, people listening, mostly Taiwan, the U.S. But I just checked today, we are up to 120, and that includes really obscure places that I wouldn't necessarily think that there would be people interested in Taiwan history, but somehow there are.

I mean, it's very gratifying to know that there's someone in Morocco or, you know, some island listening to this. And it's just grown exponentially.

2. Who was the "White Formosan?"

Okay. Well, this is a great story, and I'm not going to be able to tell it all because you're going to have to go to Formosa files and listen to Season One, Episode One to hear the real story. But in short, there was a guy in 1703 who shows up in the courts of London, a white guy claiming to be Taiwanese.

And this is, you know, a time 1703 when the Europeans have already had contact with Asia and with Asians and Africans and all kinds of other people. So somehow, he was actually believed for a time or some people believed him for a time, and they did question him.

They were like, why are you this color? And he said, well, in Formosa, it's very, very hot. So what we have to do is live under the ground.

So eventually it was... I'm not going to tell the rest of the story because really you've got to go to Formosafiles.com and check out episode one from season one. It's a fascinating story.

This guy was a bit of a genius in an evil way.

3. How did a Taiwanese spy almost give Taiwan to Mao?

Right. This is also one of my favorite stories. So according to what we know, a guy surnamed Tsai (Tsai Hsiao-chien, 蔡孝乾), he was the only person to survive the long march with Mao Zedong and his communist people up to their hideout up there, and he was born in Taiwan in the 1920s, I believe.

And at that time, or even earlier at that time, obviously, Taiwan was a Japanese colony, so he spoke Japanese fluently, and he was able to interrogate prisoners and things like that. So, eventually, Mao sent him to Taiwan to set up a spy network, and it was extremely successful.

Right around 1950, a lot of people thought the cause of Taiwan was lost. President Truman, for example, wrote off Taiwan, said they wouldn't help anymore.

So Mao was very interested in launching an invasion right about then. And this spy, whose Taiwanese surname Tsai, he had gotten over a thousand secret agents in place.

He had a general. So it's a great story of traitors and a love interest and spies and all of this. But again, you're going to have to go listen for yourself.

4. Why was the murder of Pai Hsiao-yen the "murder of the century?"

That's interesting. I don't know if we claimed that in the podcast that it was the murder of the century, but it is a fair comment because there have been people in Taiwan who have said that, um, it still, today, it has a lasting effect.

Even young people that I talked to who were not born and I don't know why they would know this but they've been exposed to the story and just know the gruesome deeds of the evil Chen Chin-hsing (陳進興).

So it came at the end of a period in Taiwanese history where things were shifting rather dramatically. In 1996, you had the first direct Presidential election, and you could say that our democracy, our young democracy at that time, was maybe a bit too free in certain areas.

The media, for example, showed very graphic photos of things that, you know, wouldn't be allowed today. And even when he was holding the South African attache hostage, he was on the phone talking to reporters who just called up and said, you know, hey, what do you like to eat for dinner? All kinds of just bizarre questions.

So it kind of is a capstone to a very violent period that occurred just after the opening of Taiwan and direct presidential elections.

So I think this infamy of this particular person and the time that it was in just harmonize or come together to create a perfect story. And then also you have the element of the South African attache and his family.

He wrote a book about it and allegedly Chen Chin-hsing, in the end, converted and became a better man.

But again, formosafiles.com.

5. Who was the last Japanese soldier to hold out from World War II?

The Japanese got a group of volunteers. I can't say how much they were willing to volunteer, but they were called the Takasago Volunteer Unit, and they were made up of all Native Indigenous or Aboriginal people.

And the reason for that is the Japanese thought that these people would know better how to handle the tropical conditions of Southeast Asia. They had a hunter-gatherer culture, so they could operate out without a bunch of logistic support

And one individual, who went by the Japanese name of Teruo Nakamura, but his birth name was Attun Palalin. He was an Amis indigenous person, and he ended up not surrendering until 1974.

He was found on an island somewhere in Indonesia and talk about a very long period of time. The war was over in 1945, right?

So he hung out on this island believing there were planes flying above him. He thought it was all part of the war, and eventually, he was repatriated to Taiwan.

But it was a whole different Taiwan than he left, right. He left an imperial Japanese Taiwan, and he came back to an ROC Taiwan. And it's a very interesting story about a guy who was very, very loyal but perhaps deserved more for his loyalty than he ended up getting.

6. How did Nixon and Kissinger grovel to Mao and what was Chiang's "Great Torch-5 plan?"

Yeah, so that's a story that we told more recently, I think, in Season Three, the Nixon story. So if you want to try to condense it, in short, Nixon goes to China after Kissinger first flies to a third country, secretly dons a disguise and goes to China and talks to Zhou Enlai and sets up the whole deal for it to come, and then Nixon comes.

He ends up only having one meeting with Mao, and during the meeting he effusively praises Mao, tells him things like, oh, the whole world has changed because of your writings, and things like this. And in short, you could say that he gave away more than he got.

He might have been able to negotiate, who knows, you know, a better settlement for Taiwan. But instead, he gave away Taiwan. He told Mao that America would be willing to drop relations with the ROC in favor of the PRC.

And Nixon was really hoping that he would get some benefits out of this, like perhaps some help with the Vietnam War. But China was not interested at all in helping with the Vietnam War.

In fact, they did quite the opposite. They sent numerous thousands of troops into North Vietnam, not in combat roles, but to take over from Vietnamese soldiers so they could go to combat.

So Mao (Nixon) really gave away more than he could have gotten. And the groveling comes in with him just speaking to this person who is responsible, I believe, for more deaths than any other mass murderer in the 20th century. Respect and deference.

And there's a funny little story that I'll just throw in there. Um, China gave America a gift after Mao, and we all know what that is.

Two giant pandas. And that went down very well. The National Zoo in Washington, D.C., has them there.

America also gave a gift to the Chinese, a pair of musk oxen. I don't know if you're familiar with these beasts.

But they look like really hairy, shaggy cows. And they're not really even from mainland America.

They're found up in Alaska and they were mangy. And it was quite a funny story.

So again, if you go to formosafiles.com or you subscribe on any platform that has podcasts everywhere Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, you name it, you'll be able to listen to all of this for free. There's no advertisements because we're sponsored by the Frank Chen Cultural Foundation.

Frank Chen (陳啟川) was a former mayor of Kaohsiung from 1960 to 1968, so he has a foundation today. Well, he's no longer with us, but the foundation respects his memory by supporting cultural and other educational programs, and we are one of them.

So we're very grateful to the Frank Chen Foundation for that. And all I can say is go and listen,

If you have any interest whatsoever in the last 400 years of Taiwan history, you'll find something for you there.

We don't tell it in a chronological order. We tell story after story.

Every week is going to be different. And we did that deliberately because if you did it in a chronological order, I would feel that a lot of people would think it's sort of like a college lecture or a course, and we didn't want to be boring.

So we did our best to--every week to come up with an exciting story that has an interesting hook and things that people have, even students, of history perhaps have never heard of before.

For the rest of the interview, click on the video below: