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 (??) wrote in a Facebook post late Friday that he was “shocked” after receiving photos showing pages from his book “The History of Spicy Food in China” published in Taiwan.
He posted a photo of a page from the book published in Taiwan 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, he wrote, were found throughout the book published in Taiwan.
In Taiwan, the word “continent” is translated as “??” (“dalu” in Mandarin), but the same Chinese 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 “China” (“zhongguo”) in its place.
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.
In a Facebook post Saturday, the Taiwanese publisher apologized to Cao and his readers for the “serious errors” made by editors before the book’s publication in Taiwan in January.
The publishers said it has notified book sellers to suspend sales of Cao’s book and will announce further plans for people who bought the book, which will be republished in its original form.
Following the apology, Cao wrote in another Facebook post that he was satisfied with the Taiwanese publisher’s handling of the matter, while thanking his friends’ help for highlighting the error.
Cao, born in Guangzhou, China, in 1984, is a research fellow at the Centre for Migration and Ethnic Studies of Sun Yat-sen University in the southern Chinese city, according to his LinkedIn page under the name “Rain Cao.”
He received a joint doctorate degree in history from the University of California, Santa Barbara in the United States and Jinan University in China in 2015.
Source: Focus Taiwan News Channel