Heng Lian

Born in 1878 and dying in 1936, Lien Heng — often rendered in older sources as Heng Lian — was a Taiwanese historian, poet, and linguist. He is most closely associated with The General History of Taiwan (Taiwan Tongshi), the work for which he is best remembered.

His writing grew out of a turbulent period in Taiwan’s history, and later scholars have described his work as important to the development of Taiwanese cultural identity. Alongside his historical research, he also wrote poetry and took an active interest in language and literature.

Readers coming to him today will usually meet him through his historical writing rather than fiction. What makes him stand out is the scale of his ambition: he set out to record Taiwan’s story in a sustained, literary way, giving later generations one of the island’s most influential early modern histories.