active 1691-1697 Yonghe Yu

Yu Yonghe was a Chinese writer and Qing official active in the 1690s. Chinese-language sources describe him as someone who loved travel, and they note that from 1691 he served in Fujian as a staff aide to an official, traveling widely in the region.

He is best known for Small Sea Travel Diaries (Bihai Jiyou), a work connected to his 1697 journey to Taiwan. The book records his voyage, his overland trip to the Beitou sulfur area, and his observations of Taiwan’s scenery, local customs, and Indigenous communities at the end of the 17th century.

What makes his writing stand out is its documentary feel: even on an urgent official mission, he left behind a detailed travel narrative that later readers have valued as an unusually rich glimpse of Taiwan in 1697.