Taiwanese publisher Rye Field Publishing Co has pulled a book on the history of chili peppers in China and publicly apologized to its Chinese author after its editors incorrectly changed the word in the book for “continent” to “China” in Chinese.
The book’s author, Cao Yu (曹雨), wrote on Facebook late on Friday that he was “shocked” after receiving photographs showing pages from his book The History of Spicy Food in China published in Taiwan.
He posted a photo of a page that said chili peppers were introduced to China thanks to Christopher Columbus’ discovery of the new “China,” even though he wrote new “continent” in his original book.
Such errors were found throughout the book published in Taiwan, he wrote.
In Taiwan, the word dalu (大陸), which means “continent,” is also used to refer to “mainland” China.
The government agency that handles affairs related to China, Hong Kong and Macau, for example, is called the Mainland Affairs Council.
Some Taiwanese dislike the dalu or “mainland” designation for China, believing it infers that Taiwan is part of China, and tend to use the term for zhongguo (中國, “China”) instead.
Cao wrote that he was already angry about two chapters from his book being removed when it was published in China, and he could not believe that his book was butchered again in Taiwan.
Rye Field apologized on Facebook to Cao and his readers for the “serious errors” made by editors before the book’s publication in Taiwan last month.
It has notified book sellers to suspend sales of Cao’s book, Rye Field said, adding that it would announce further plans for people who bought the book, which is to be republished in its original form.
Following the apology, Cao wrote on Facebook that he was satisfied with Rye Field’s handling of the matter, while thanking his friends for highlighting the error.
Cao, born in 1984, is a research fellow at the Centre for Migration and Ethnic Studies of Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, according to his LinkedIn page, where he goes by the name Rain Cao.
He received a joint doctorate degree in history from the University of California, Santa Barbara in the US and Jinan University in China in 2015.
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