Now and then a work appears that ruthlessly exposes the limits of one’s knowledge. Even seasoned students of Taiwan’s history are likely to find this book doing so repeatedly. Whether speculating on the origins of the Pisheye (毗舍耶) raiders who terrorized coastal Fujian in the twelfth century; quoting from the 1875 memoirs of British Royal Navy Captain Bonham Ward Bax, for whom the Taiwanese were “plunderers … always looking on a wreck as lawful spoil;” or positing trade relations, rather than shared origins, as the source of the mutual intelligibility in the languages of Lanyu (蘭嶼) and the Batanes Islands,