Goodreads asked Joyce Bergvelt:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Joyce Bergvelt I lived in Taiwan with my parents back in the eighties. It was then that I learnt that the Dutch once colonized Taiwan. I had absolutely no idea of this. A few years later, when I was doing my Chinese Studies degree at Durham University, I wrote my dissertation on the subject. The story absolutely amazed me and it had all the ingredients for a historical novel: heaps of drama, the classical dilemmas, fascinating historical figures... There were some non-fiction titles that had appeared in Holland over the years, but never a novel. So I vowed that I would write a novel if ever given the time.

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