active 1691-1697 Yonghe Yu

Best known as Yu Yonghe (郁永河), he was active in the 1690s during the Qing dynasty. He is remembered for Small Sea Travel Diaries (裨海紀遊), a travel narrative based on a journey connected with sulfur procurement from Taiwan after a gunpowder-related shortage in Fuzhou.

His writing stands out because it records landscapes, travel conditions, Indigenous communities, and everyday customs with the eye of an observer on the move. That has made the book especially valuable to later readers studying seventeenth-century Taiwan and the wider coastal world of Fujian.

Very little biographical detail seems to be firmly established beyond his activity in the 1690s and the work associated with that journey. What survives most clearly is the voice of a traveler whose notes became an important historical source.