The Great Formosa Tsunami Mystery – Snack 06
The disaster was so terrible, so deadly that shocking reports of it reached as far away as Europe; they claimed that in 1782, Taiwan had been devastated by a colossal tsunami. Some accounts said the island had almost disappeared beneath the sea and that 40,000 people had died. Yet strangely, Chinese records seemed to say almost nothing about it. In this snack episode, Eryk and John put on their white coats and get scientific; or, in other words, they use some recent groundbreaking academic papers to explain one of the greatest mysteries in Taiwan’s history. Was there really a massive tsunami on Taiwan’s southwest coast in the 1780s? Listen and learn.
AI-generated cover image.
For this Snack episode, we drew on two academic papers. The first one:
"What caused the mysterious eighteenth century tsunami that struck the southwest Taiwan coast?" Geophysical Research Letters, 42. (2015) by Li, L., Switzer, A. D., Wang, Y., Weiss, R., Qiu, Q., Chan, C.-H., and Tapponnier. P. This paper suggests that a seismically triggered submarine mass failure (SMF) – essentially a massive underwater landslide – on the Kaoping slope offshore from southwestern Taiwan is the most likely source of the disasters reported in 1781 and 1782. The authors used 13 numerical models to rule out a major earthquake from the Manila Trench, noting that such an event would have caused widespread damage in China and the Philippines, which historical records do not support. Link.
The second paper mentioned in the episode is "Historical tsunamis of Taiwan in the 18th century: the 1781 Jiateng Harbor flooding and 1782 tsunami event." Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, 22, 2517–2530, (2022), by Liu, T.-C., Wu, T.-R., and Hsu, S.-K. This paper argues that the 1781 and 1782 incidents were two independent events. While 1781 was a localized tsunami (likely from an underwater landslide), the 1782 "Great Tsunami" was more likely a massive storm surge from a typhoon. Link.
Primary Historical Sources Referenced
Taiwan Interview Catalogue (1830): The official Chinese record by Chen describing the "clear sky" flooding at Jiateng Harbor in 1781 where the sea “roared like thunder.”
For the 1782 disaster, we quoted the Gazette de France (1783), a report describing 40,000 deaths and an apocalyptic sea-level rise in 1782 and Philosophisch und physikalische Abhandlungen (1784), a German report describing “fire-breathing mountains.”
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