Taiwan National Tsinghua University history professor Fabio Yu-chung Lee (李毓中) has received an award from the Spanish royal family for his research into cultural and linguistic interactions between Spanish merchants and the Hokkien-Minnan (閩南) people of Taiwan and Southeast Asia during the Age of Discovery four centuries ago.
Lee headed an international team of historians and linguists to complete nine volumes of the The Hokkien Spanish Historical Document Series (閩南—西班牙歷史文獻叢刊), published in collaboration with three co-authors and editors, the Academia Sinica fellow Chen Tsung-jen (陳宗仁) and Spanish academics Regalado Trota Jose and Jose Luis Cano Ortigosa.
Lee’s research focused on "First encounter between languages of two empires — manuscripts of Chinese-Spanish-Hokkien vocabulary that were in use at China’s southeastern coast regions, as the first era of globalization.”
Photo courtesy of the Taiwan National Tsinghua University
The nine-volume series received recognition in Spain, where it was named the recipient of the first prize in an inaugural award earlier this month, with the second prize won by an academic research team from Algeria and the third prize given to researchers based in Cuba.
The awarding foundation and seminars were started by Spanish royalty to promote the studies of Spanish language and culture, the Taiwan National Tsinghua University said in a press release.
Lee and his research team attended the ceremony earlier this month.
Lee’s research team also gifted the manuscript series to the National Library of Spain.
One key discovery for Lee and his team came in 2017, when the nearly-forgotten 400-year-old dictionary Dictionario Hispanico Sinicum (西班牙─華語辭典) was found within the archives of the Philippines’ University of Santo Tomas. The dictionary contains over 1,000 pages, 27,000 Hoklo words, terms and expressions, providing an understanding of the daily living and business conduct of Hoklo people in the Philippines and Southeast Asia four centuries ago.
When going through it, Lee was surprised to find a number of Hoklo and Spanish words for place names and terms used by natives of Taiwan, including “Tamchuy” (Tamshui, 淡水), and “Cheylam” (雞籠), then the hamlet harbor of Pingpu Ketagalan people, currently named Keelung (基隆), he said.
It indicated the Dictionario recorded people’s names, words, places when Spanish occupied parts of northern Taiwan in the 1600s, Lee said.
They also worked with other historic documents collected in Spain and Italy, including the Arte de la Lengua Chio Chiu (漳州話語法), and The Philippine Chinese Manuscripts in The Herzog August Library (奧古斯特公爵圖書館菲律賓唐人手稿).
More volumes of The Hokkien Spanish Historical Document Series are to be published as it has become a leading reference for historic and linguistic studies of Spain and Hokkien people in the past centuries, he said.
Lee said that it is his wish to bring together his research publications at Tsinghua University with other 16th and 17th century Spain and Hoklo documents along with collections of other countries to get recognition under UNESCO’s Memory of the World program.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
MEDICAL: The bills would also upgrade the status of the Ethical Guidelines Governing the Research of Human Embryos and Embryonic Stem Cell Research to law The Executive Yuan yesterday approved two bills to govern regenerative medicine that aim to boost development of the field. Taiwan would reach an important milestone in regenerative medicine development with passage of the regenerative medicine act and the regenerative medicine preparations ordinance, which would allow studies to proceed and treatments to be developed, Deputy Minister of Health and Welfare Victor Wang (王必勝) told reporters at a news conference after a Cabinet meeting. Regenerative treatments have been used for several conditions, including cancer — by regenerating blood cells — and restoring joint function in soft tissue, Wang said. The draft legislation requires regenerative treatments
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater