The purpose of this paper is to analyze the process and meaning of the discourse of “Taiwaneseness” constructed by the other's insight at that time through the travelogues of Chinese writers who recreated Taiwan in the 17th century. Taiwan was a ‘new frontier' that was incorporated into the Qing Empire in 1684, but the Taiwan's landscape reproduced in the text was not entirely new, but a typed space with precedents and system of references. In the literature before the Ming Dynasty, Taiwan was described as an ambiguous space where imagination and reality were mixed. From the 17th century, the travelogues of Chinese writers who actually visited Taiwan began to appear. However, they still recognized and expressed Taiwan's objects according to the existing patterns and rhetoric that describe foreign countries in ancient literature. Of course, the meanings produced by similar rhetoric were different. Record of the Eastern Savages (Dongfan ji) signified Taiwan as an ancient utopia, while Brief Note on Taiwan (Taiwan Jilüe) described it as a barbaric and ugly land of barbarians. Yu Yonghe, who went to Taiwan at the end of the 17th century and stayed there for eight months, operated two narrative levels in Small Sea Travelogue (Pihai Jiyou). In strange land narrative, he observed, defined, and classified the unfamiliar landscapes of Taiwan with the gaze of “surveillance.” After clearly summarizing the knowledge of Taiwan obtained here, he presented the future direction and concluded with the theory of enlightenment. In another level of narrative, adversity narrative, however, Taiwan was described as a land of unpredictable suffering and pain. The reproduction of Taiwan in the 17th century, which can not escape from the influence of precedents, still exhibits ‘language dominant' characteristics. However, Yu Yonghe's adversity narrative made the space and people of Taiwan more existentially recognized, temporarily escaping from surveillance's gaze and enlightenment discourse.