The first Europeans in China, and China's other early witnesses

Further reading: accounts and works on the same theme

Accounts and works around this subject, in date order, to place our titles in context. Each links to a free online edition when one exists, or to our own page when the work is in our catalogue.

• Marco Polo, Le Devisement du monde (1298)

  On his way back from China, the Venetian sails along the Coromandel coast, stops at the tomb of Saint Thomas, describes the pearl fisheries, the naked kings covered in jewels, the widow-burning pyres and the kingdom of Ceylon with its sacred peak. All the marvels that Hamilton finds diminished or disputed, Marco Polo sees in their full brilliance, four centuries earlier. To read one after the other is to follow the slow transformation of the same shore, from medieval splendors to the fortified trading posts of the age of the companies.

• Ibn Battuta, Voyages (1325-1354)

  Three centuries before Hamilton, the great Moroccan traveler already sails along the Swahili coast of Mombasa and Kilwa, journeys up the Persian Gulf, reaches India, and serves the Sultan of Delhi. He sees these same Muslim ports at the height of their prosperity, before the Portuguese extort them and the Arabs of Muscat retake a few of them. His testimony provides the depth of time that the captain's account, hurried along by trade, lacks.

• Ludovico di Varthema, Itinéraire (1510)

  A Bolognese adventurer of the early sixteenth century, Varthema is one of the first Europeans to visit Mecca disguised as a pilgrim, then to sail down the Red Sea to Aden and reach India. He travels the Arabian coast that Hamilton will follow two centuries later, stops at the same coffee ports, and describes the same sheikhs greedy for tribute. His picaresque account illuminates, in advance, the Arab world that the captain will later observe with the colder eye of a merchant.

• Antonio Pigafetta, Relation du premier voyage autour du monde (1519-1522)

  Two centuries before Hamilton, the gentleman of Vicenza embarks with Magellan and survives the expedition that first crosses the Pacific. He touches at the Philippines, where the captain will meet his death, reaches Borneo and its splendid court, loads cloves from the Moluccas and sails along Timor, these same islands the Scottish merchant will visit two hundred years later. His wonder-struck journal shows the spice archipelago at the very moment Europe discovers it, when Hamilton will see nothing of it but the trading posts the companies fight over. To read one after the other is to follow the passage from the dream of spices to their ordinary trade.

• Cristóbal Acosta, Tractado de las drogas y medicinas de las Indias Orientales (1578)

  A physician and surgeon, Cristóbal Acosta arrives in Goa around 1568, the very year of Orta's death, in the retinue of Viceroy Luís de Ataíde. He travels the Malabar coast and the Konkan, sees growing the plants the Colloquies described, then publishes in Burgos a treatise that takes up Orta in Castilian, completes it and corrects it here and there. His most valuable contribution lies in the woodcuts: where Orta had included no image, Acosta draws the trees and the drugs. The book extends the Colloquies a generation later and helps make them known in the Hispanic world.

• Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, Itinerario (1596)

  A young Dutchman in the service of the Archbishop of Goa from 1583 to 1588, Linschoten observes the Portuguese city twenty years after Orta: its markets, festivals, slaves, churches, Banian merchants and spices. Back in Holland he publishes an Itinerario that delivers to the Dutch the routes and secrets of Portuguese trade and opens the way for their fleets. For plants and drugs, his chapters lean heavily on the Colloquies, annotated by the physician Bernardus Paludanus. The knowledge gathered in Orta's house thus passes, through Linschoten, to the Portuguese's Dutch rivals.

• Tomé Pires, Suma oriental (c. 1515)

  A Portuguese apothecary and agent, Pires writes around 1515, from Malacca itself, the most complete description of the great Asian trade of his time, before dying a prisoner in China. He lists the cargoes, the routes and the nations that cross paths at the strait, that same chokepoint where Hamilton ends his second volume. His meticulous inventory shows Malacca at the height of its mercantile fortune, when the Scottish captain will see in it no more than a Dutch colony, still rich but fallen from its former glory.

• Duarte Barbosa, Le Livre de Duarte Barbosa (c. 1516)

  A Portuguese factor of the early sixteenth century, Barbosa describes the Indian Ocean at the moment his nation holds its keys, two centuries before Hamilton observes its decline. Cambay, Diu, Hormuz, Mombasa, Mozambique: every stronghold the Scottish captain finds fortified, besieged, or lost, Barbosa sees new, in the hands of the Crown of Portugal. Reading the two in succession is to measure the slow tide that draws Lusitanian power back from these shores.

• François Pyrard de Laval, Voyage de François Pyrard de Laval aux Indes orientales (1611)

  Shipwrecked in the Maldives in 1602 and held for five years in the archipelago, Pyrard de Laval of Laval finally reaches the Indian coast, then Goa, where he is treated in the Royal Hospital and for a time imprisoned before returning to France. He describes the city at the height of its splendour: the merchant streets, the processions, the fidalgos, the physicians and the remedies of the country. Half a century after Orta, he shows the Portuguese capital seen from below, by a man without a protector. His chapter on the hospital of Goa echoes the scenes of care in the Colloquies, where cholera and the bloody flux are treated.

• Matteo Ricci and Nicolas Trigault, China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matthew Ricci (1615)

  The Jesuit Matteo Ricci entered Beijing in 1601, after eighteen patient years in the southern provinces, and lived there until his death in 1610. His memoirs, put into Latin and published by Nicolas Trigault in 1615, revealed to Europe the China of the late Ming: examinations, bureaucracy, court rites, all-powerful eunuchs. Ricci knew the same Beijing as Gwon Beol sixty years earlier, the same administrative machine that could only be moved by petitions, visits and gifts. Both witnesses describe the same court from its margins, one as a tolerated missionary, the other as the envoy of a tributary kingdom come to seek redress.

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• Abel Tasman, Journal de voyage (1643)

  In 1643, the Dutch navigator is the first to reach the islands he names Amsterdam and Middelburg, that is Tongatapu and Eua, a hundred and thirty-four years before Cook. His journal, brief and wary, notes the bartering, the canoes, the deceptive gentleness of the welcome. To read it again before this volume is to take the measure of what Cook finds unchanged and of what he comes to understand beyond it: where Tasman saw only a welcoming coast, Cook untangles a kingship, a taboo, an empire of islands.

• Nicolas Sanson and the Cartographers of the Grand Siècle (1650-1700)

  Before modern surveys, the Indian Ocean can be read on the maps of the king's geographers, where the coastlines Hamilton calls so poorly rendered gradually take shape. Following these maps, from the Ethiopic Sea to the mouths of the Indus, helps explain why the captain constantly complains of shoals and rocks missing from the charts: he sails through a world still only half guessed at, one that others, after him, would finish drawing.

• Robert Knox, An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon in the East Indies (1659-1679)

  Burckhardt knows the King of Kandy only through the Puqvoy embassy. The English sailor Robert Knox, for his part, lived nineteen years in his kingdom. Captured in 1659 with part of his crew by the troops of Raja Sinha II, he survives by knitting caps and lending grain, until his escape to the Dutch fort of Arippu, which sends him on to Batavia. Back in London in September 1680, he publishes his account in 1681, with the support of the Royal Society. Translated into German as early as 1689, it offers the exact reverse of Burckhardt's: Sinhalese Ceylon from the inside, seen by a captive, against the Ceylon of the Dutch coastal forts.

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• Johan Nieuhof, L'Ambassade de la Compagnie orientale des Provinces-Unies vers l'empereur de la Chine (1665)

  A member of the first great Dutch embassy to Peking, in the middle of the seventeenth century, Nieuhof travels up China from Canton to the capital and brings back hundreds of drawings that fix, for a long time to come, Europe's image of the country. He sees, fifty years before Hamilton, the same rivers, the same bridges and the same cities, but from the side of the pleading embassy rather than the deceived merchant. His book sheds light on the ceremony and the haughtiness of the imperial administration that the captain will suffer in his turn, without ever penetrating its ways.

• Hendrik Hamel, Hamel's Journal and a Description of the Kingdom of Korea, 1653-1666 (1668)

  A little more than a century after Gwon Beol, the Dutchman Hendrik Hamel discovered Korea from the other end. Shipwrecked on Jeju Island in 1653, he was taken to Seoul with his companions, then held for thirteen years in the provinces before escaping to Japan in 1666. His journal, published in 1668, is one of the very first European accounts of the Joseon kingdom. It shows the administration Gwon Beol passes through, provincial magistrates, relay stations and corvées, but from the standpoint of a detained foreigner. In 1655 two of the castaways even threw themselves before a Manchu envoy passing through Seoul, begging to be taken to China, in vain.

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• Arnoldus Montanus, Ambassades mémorables vers les empereurs du Japon (1669)

  A Dutch compiler of the seventeenth century, Montanus gathers the accounts of the Company's envoys to the Japan of the shoguns, that country closed upon itself which only the Dutch may still approach, through the narrow window of Nagasaki. His book, alive with processions and marvels, shows the closed empire that Hamilton only glimpses from afar, and tells in full the suppression of Christianity and the cunning of the merchants that the captain sums up in a few forceful pages. It is the great European picture of forbidden Japan, of which Hamilton gives only the sketch.

• Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Les Six Voyages de Jean-Baptiste Tavernier en Turquie, en Perse et aux Indes (1676)

  A dealer in precious stones, Tavernier makes the journey to the East six times between 1631 and 1668. He passes through Goa, by then in decline, but above all he visits the diamond mines of the Deccan, Golconda and Kollur, which he describes with a jeweller's precision. Orta's colloquy on the diamond, its mines and its cuts finds in him a continuation by a man of the trade, a century later. His accounts of the Mughal and Persian courts, the caravan roads and the markets of India make him one of the great European witnesses of seventeenth-century India.

• Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Les Six Voyages (1676)

  Half a century after Carletti, this dealer in precious stones travels in turn through Persia and India, from the diamond mines to the courts of great kings. In him we find the same trader's eye for gems, currencies, and routes as in the Florentine, but Asia has already changed: the Dutch and English whom Carletti saw only beginning to appear at Goa are now installed there as masters of trade.

• Ferdinand Verbiest, Voyages de l'empereur de la Chine dans la Tartarie (1685)

  Thirteen years after Min Jeong-jung, the Flemish Jesuit Ferdinand Verbiest, astronomer at court, accompanied the Kangxi emperor on his great tour of Manchuria in 1682: Shenyang, the tombs of the Manchu ancestors, then the northern forests as far as Ula. His letter, published in French in 1685, describes the immense retinue, the imperial hunts and the lands emptied by the conquest. The fifteen-year-old whom Min had glimpsed in Beijing has become a self-assured sovereign returning on pilgrimage to the land of his fathers. The two texts complete each other: Manchuria seen by an anxious tributary, then by the emperor's guest.

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• Engelbert Kaempfer, Histoire naturelle, civile et ecclésiastique du Japon (1690-1692)

  A physician for the Dutch East India Company, Kaempfer lived in Japan at the close of the seventeenth century, in a country now closed to foreigners and purged of Christians. His book shows what became of the Japan that Carletti had reached while it was still open, before the crosses of Nagasaki announced the great closing. The same archipelago, a century later, locked shut.

• Gemelli Careri, Le Tour du monde (1699-1700)

  At the close of the seventeenth century, this Neapolitan magistrate retraces, as a well-off tourist, the circuit of the globe that Carletti had accomplished as a ruined merchant. Manila, Acapulco, Mexico City: he follows almost the same route and publishes an account that will meet with immense success. Reading Gemelli after Carletti is to measure the distance travelled between perilous adventure and pleasure travel.

• Gemelli Careri, Voyage autour du monde (1699-1700)

  At the end of the seventeenth century, the Neapolitan jurist travels around the world at his own expense. He crosses China, goes up to Peking, contemplates the Great Wall, then embarks at Manila on the galleon that links the Philippines to America. Almost a contemporary of Hamilton, he sails exactly the seas of this third volume, but as a free-roaming man of curiosity rather than a merchant. His testimony confirms, corrects or colors many a scene of the captain's, from the court of Canton to the streets of Manila, and gives a learned traveling companion to the crossing of the Malay Archipelago and the China seas.

• Peter Kolben, The Present State of the Cape of Good-Hope (1705-1713)

  Thirty years after Burckhardt's stop, the Franconian Peter Kolb lands at the Cape in 1705, sent by a Prussian councillor, Baron von Krosigk, to make astronomical observations there. He stays several years, until his eyesight fails, and takes a particular interest in the Dutch colony and the Khoikhoi, those Burckhardt calls the Hottentots. His great book appears in Nuremberg in 1719, followed by a French translation in 1741. Kolb breaks with the clichés of his predecessors, compares the beliefs of the Khoikhoi with those of Europeans and reports the armed raids of the settlers. To be reread alongside the chapter on the Cape, written by a passing soldier in a hurry to leave.

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• Lorenz Lange, Journal de la résidence du sieur Lange, agent de Sa Majesté impériale de la Grande Russie à la cour de la Chine, dans les années 1721 et 1722 (1726)

  When the embassy leaves in March 1721, Unverzagt stays in Peking with the resident Lorenz Lange, and it is the continuation of that stay that Lange's journal recounts, published in French at Leiden in 1726, then translated into English as an appendix to John Bell's account. The tsar's only representative at court, Lange records his visits to ministers, the evasive replies, the trade soon suspended and the affair of the Mongol defectors that blocks everything. Here is Unverzagt's city again, but seen from the files: the patient, often bitter reverse side of the banquets and the New Year fireworks.

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• Johann Wolfgang Heydt, Allerneuester Geographisch- und Topographischer Schau-Platz von Africa und Ost-Indien (1733-1740)

  Half a century later, Johann Wolfgang Heydt follows in Burckhardt's footsteps: a German who entered the Company's service in 1733, he first spends two years in Ceylon before reaching Batavia, where in 1737 he becomes the Company's architect and draughtsman. Back in Europe in 1740 for reasons of health, he publishes in Nuremberg in 1744 a large album of more than a hundred plates engraved after his drawings, with a long text: the Cape, Colombo and its fortifications, Batavia, Malacca, the Moluccas, Dejima. There one sees, drawn, the places Burckhardt describes in words: the citadels, the streets, the gardens and the life of the European employees of the Indies.

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• John Bell, Travels from St. Petersburg in Russia, to Diverse Parts of Asia (1763)

  Unverzagt's best reading companion walked at his side: the Scottish physician John Bell belonged to the same Izmailov embassy. He published his account in Glasgow in 1763, more than forty years after the journey, with the hindsight of a man who had already followed the Russian mission to Persia. In it we find Tobolsk, Lake Baikal, the Mongolian steppe, the entry into Peking and Kangxi's audiences, told by an adult attentive to plants, peoples and the negotiators' arguments. To read the two books together is to see the same procession through two pairs of eyes: the dazzled young man's and the observant practitioner's.

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• Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, A Voyage round the World (1768)

  In April 1768, the Boudeuse anchors off Tahiti, which Bougainville names New Cythera and leaves after nine days, leaving behind anchors and a legend. His account, written by a gentleman-philosopher, single-handedly invents the Polynesian myth that will occupy Europe for a century. To read it before this volume is to measure the distance between the dream and the inquiry: where Bougainville sees an island of gentleness, Cook and Anderson count ranks, wars, the skulls of the morai. The anchor bought back at Bora Bora is the thread linking the two books.

• Carl Peter Thunberg, Travels in Europe, Africa, and Asia (1770-1779)

  A pupil of Linnaeus, the Swede Carl Peter Thunberg signs on in 1771 as a surgeon of the Dutch Company in order to collect plants in the Indies. He spends three years at the Cape, reaches Batavia in May 1775, stays at the Dejima trading post and in 1776 accompanies the Dutch embassy to Edo, then lives in Ceylon from July 1777 to February 1778, before returning by way of the Cape. His account appears in Uppsala from 1788. A hundred years later, he almost retraces the route of Burckhardt's memorial, from the Cape to closed Japan by way of Ceylon, but with a naturalist's eye: where the clerk reports marvels, Thunberg names, classifies and describes the plants.

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• Georg Forster, A Voyage round the World (1772-1775)

  Son of the naturalist embarked on the second voyage, Forster is seventeen when he discovers Tahiti and the Society Islands. His account, published in 1777, the very year this volume is set in, is the first great literary text to come out of Cook's voyages: sensitive prose, at times indignant, alert to what the arrival of Europeans destroys. He describes the same beaches, the same chiefs, the same war fleet, but through the eyes of an adolescent who refuses to be merely a witness.

• John Ledyard, A Journal of Captain Cook's Last Voyage (1776-1780)

  An American corporal of marines was at Kealakekua that morning. Once home, Ledyard published in Hartford, in 1783, an account of the voyage that came out more than a year ahead of the official edition and told of Cook's death without going through the Admiralty. The tone is free, at times borrowed from others, and the judgment on the officers' conduct severe. It is the first counterpoint to the text just read: two men, the same beach, the same quarter hour, and two versions whose comparison has occupied historians ever since.

• Pak Chi-won, The Jehol Diary (1780)

  Sixteen years after Kim Jong-jeong, the scholar Pak Chi-won passed through Shenyang in his turn with the Korean embassy of 1780, on the way to Beijing and Jehol. His Yeorha ilgi, translated into English as The Jehol Diary, devotes famous pages to the city: shops, signboards, night-time conversations with Chinese merchants. The contrast with Kim is striking. Where the investigator of 1764, humiliated and suspicious, sees in the Manchu capital nothing but barbarism and corruption, Pak Chi-won finds a prosperity and a technical skill from which, he argues, Korea should learn. The same city, two moods, and the beginning of a debate that would run through Korean scholarship.

• Jean-François de La Pérouse, Voyage autour du monde (1785-1788)

  Ten years after Cook, La Pérouse crosses the same waters, calls at the neighbouring Navigator Islands, and loses his second-in-command there in an ambush that answers, like a sinister echo, all the lavish friendships of this volume. His account, saved from the final wreck by copies sent home in time, shows the other side of the Polynesian coin: the same sea, the same magnificent chiefs, and the violence that Cook brushed against without always seeing it coming.

• Jean-Baptiste Barthélemy de Lesseps, Travels in Kamtschatka, During the Years 1787 and 1788 (1787-1788)

  The sole survivor of the La Pérouse expedition was the one who was sent home. In September 1787, at twenty-two, Lesseps landed at St. Peter and St. Paul with his commander's journals and orders to carry them to Versailles overland. It took him a year to cross Kamchatka, Siberia and Russia, by dog sledge and then by reindeer, along exactly the routes King had just described. He passed through Bolcheretsk, stopped at Clerke's grave, and found the same jourts, the same toions, the same bears. No other book continues this one so closely.

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• John Meares, Voyages Made in the Years 1788 and 1789, from China to the North West Coast of America (1788-1789)

  Cook had scarcely left Nootka before the price of sea otter skins in Canton was already setting merchants in motion. In 1788, Meares settles in the very same bay, builds a small ship there, trades with the chief Maquinna, and his disputed settlement sets off the Nootka crisis that comes close to throwing England and Spain into war. His account, less scrupulous than Cook's, shows the reverse side of discovery: within ten years, the otter cove has become a trading post, and the captain's iron bartering, the first act of a great commerce.

• John Meares, Voyages Made in the Years 1788 and 1789, from China to the North West Coast of America (1788-1789)

  Here is the project of Chapter 19, carried out eight years later by a former naval officer turned merchant. Meares fitted out at Macao, sailed up to Nootka, built a house and a ship there, bought sea otter pelts on the same terms King had calculated, sailed back down to sell them at Canton, and triggered along the way the diplomatic crisis that nearly brought England and Spain to war. His book is boastful and often dishonest, which does not stop it from being the first document of the maritime fur trade, the very trade this volume invented without knowing it.

• William Bligh, A Voyage to the South Sea (1788-1789)

  The Master of the Resolution, the man who sounds the bays of Kerguelen's Land in this volume, returns to Adventure Bay twelve years later aboard the Bounty, plants apple trees on the very same spot, then sets a course for Otaheite, where the mutiny awaits him. To read his account of Van Diemen's Land alongside Cook's is to measure what a pupil retains from a master: the same method, the same gestures, and a temperament that will make all the difference.

• James Morrison, The Journal of James Morrison, Boatswain's Mate of the Bounty, and Memorandum on Tahiti (1789-1792)

  The boatswain's mate of the Bounty, left at Tahiti after the mutiny of 1789, lives there nearly two years before being captured, sentenced, then pardoned. His memoir, written in prison, is the most detailed description we have of Tahitian society before its conversion: the arioi, the morai, the royal maro, the district wars, everything Cook only glimpsed as a visitor. It lights up from the inside the chapters Anderson wrote, twelve years earlier, on the same islands.

• James Bruce, Voyage aux sources du Nil (1790)

  Half a century after Hamilton, the Scotsman James Bruce finally enters the Abyssinia his countryman had known only through the accounts of fleeing missionaries. He lives at the court of the ruler Europeans called Prester John, and sees with his own eyes the customs, the raw meat, and the salt currency that Hamilton had known only by hearsay. His account confirms, corrects, and extends the astonished pages the captain devotes to the Christian kingdom of the mountains.

• George Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean (1791-1795)

  Vancouver was a midshipman on the Discovery during this voyage. Fifteen years later he commands his own expedition, calls at Dusky Bay and then at Queen Charlotte's Sound, and finds the stumps of the trees felled by Cook's carpenters. The reader sees what becomes, within a generation, of a familiar anchorage and the people who once camped there.

• George Leonard Staunton, An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China (1797)

  In 1793 Lord Macartney led the first British embassy to China, to the court of the Qianlong emperor, and his secretary George Staunton published the official account in 1797. The quarrel that made it famous concerned the kowtow: Macartney refused to perform the prostration required of every tributary envoy, Koreans included. Read beside Gwon Beol's journal, the English narrative shows the other face of the same ceremonial. What the Korean ambassador performs without demur, as the price of an ancient relationship, appears to the Englishman as a humiliation to be negotiated, and the failure of his mission foreshadows a century of conflict between China and the West.

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• Alexander von Humboldt, Voyage aux régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent (1799-1804)

  Two centuries after Carletti, the Prussian scholar explores New Spain and Peru with the instruments of modern science. Where the merchant noted the prices of cacao and silver, Humboldt measures, classifies, and understands. The same lands, seen through an Enlightenment mind, shed light in return on the still-groping curiosity of the Florentine traveler.

• François Péron, Voyage de découvertes aux terres australes (1800-1804)

  The Baudin expedition spends the summer of 1802 in Van Diemen's Land and spends long hours with the inhabitants of the south-east coast, the very people who come out of the woods at Adventure Bay in this volume. Péron, a young scholar as curious as he is talkative, notes their names, their songs, their manners, and takes it upon himself to measure their physical strength, in tests that say more about him than about them. It is the last great testimony before everything changes.

• Adam Johann von Krusenstern, Voyage Round the World in the Years 1803, 1804, 1805 & 1806 (1803-1806)

  Twenty-five years later, Russia finally did what King had imagined for it. Krusenstern linked Kamchatka to Japan and Canton, carried an embassy to Nagasaki that waited six months only to be turned away, surveyed the Kuril Islands and Sakhalin, and sold the Russian-American Company's furs at Canton. Page after page, one reads the programme of Chapter 19 carried out by others, and the first serious answer to the question King left open: what would happen if Kamchatka traded directly with Japan?

• John Martin, Récit de William Mariner aux îles Tonga (1806-1810)

  In 1806, an English ship's boy named William Mariner survives the massacre of his ship's crew and lives for four years among the Tongans, adopted by a chief, learning the language and the wars of the archipelago. Dictated to Dr Martin, his testimony is the most intimate account we have of that society from within. It illuminates, better than any other, what Cook could only glimpse from the outside: the meaning of the taboo, the place of the sacred king, the logic of the festivities that this volume describes with wonder.

• Archibald Campbell, A Voyage Round the World (1809-1810)

  Thirty years after the tragedy, a shipwrecked Scottish sailor, both feet amputated, washes up at Hawaii and spends thirteen months there, from 1809 to 1810, under the protection of King Kamehameha, the Maiha-Maiha of this volume. He lives in Honolulu, weaves sailcloth for the sovereign, and observes a court where iron, ships and muskets have changed everything, yet where the old order of the chiefs still holds. No other book shows so well what became, in a single generation, of the world described in the last chapters of this volume.

• Otto von Kotzebue, Entdeckungsreise in die Süd-See und nach der Berings-Straße (1815-1818)

  In 1815, a Russian officer sets out again to find, in the very strait where Cook had stopped, the passage he had not been able to force. Aboard the brig Rurik, with the poet and naturalist Chamisso on board, Kotzebue discovers north of the strait a vast bay that today bears his name, and uncovers cliffs of fossil ice mixed with earth. He prowls along the pack ice, questions the Chukchi, and meets the same refusal as his predecessor. Forty years on, the Arctic has given up nothing.

• Otto von Kotzebue, A Voyage of Discovery into the South Sea and Beering's Straits (1815-1818)

  In 1816, a Russian captain set out again to find the passage where Cook and Clerke had failed. He discovered the great sound that now bears his name on the American coast, found cliffs of fossil ice full of mammoth bones, measured the currents of the strait and ran into the same pack ice, in the same place, at the same season. The naturalist aboard, Chamisso, the very man who had written Peter Schlemihl, kept for his part the liveliest journal of the expedition. Two generations, one single barrier.

• Jacques Arago, A Narrative of a Voyage Round the World (1819)

  Draughtsman of the Freycinet expedition, Arago lands at Hawaii in August 1819, a few weeks after the death of Kamehameha and a few months before his son publicly overturns the law of the taboo. He thus witnesses the last summer of the order whose rules King had, forty years earlier, patiently taken apart. His pen is lively, talkative, often unfair, and prodigiously alive; one sees chiefs in European dress, abandoned morais, and prohibitions no one troubles to observe any longer. The end of a world seen by a man who does not know he is watching it.

• Ferdinand von Wrangel, Narrative of an Expedition to the Polar Sea (1820-1824)

  Chapter 7 of this volume argues that the coast between Cape Shelagskoy and North Cape must curve westward, and that almost nothing remains unknown. Wrangel went to find out. From 1820 to 1824, he set out from the Kolyma, Deshnev's own river, and pushed out onto the sea ice by dog sledge four times, searching for the land the Chukchi said they could see to the north. He never found it, came close more than once to being lost on a drifting ice floe, but finally surveyed the coast King had guessed at. The island he never reached now bears his name.

• William Ellis, Polynesian Researches (1822-1825)

  A missionary at Huahine and then in Hawaii in the 1820s, Ellis saw both archipelagos of this volume at the hinge of their upheaval. He speaks the languages, gathers genealogies and myths, describes the temples before their demolition and the rites at the moment they are abandoned. His testimony confirms, corrects, and completes almost everything Cook noted in haste, and lets us understand afterward what the sacrifice of Attahooroo meant.

• John Williams, Récit d'entreprises missionnaires dans les mers du Sud (1823)

  The missionary who lands at Rarotonga in 1823 and travels through the Cook Islands and the Friendly Islands opens the century that will transform these societies from top to bottom. His book, a bestseller in Victorian England, tells with fervour what Cook had left untouched and what the mission sets out to remake. Between the two accounts lies everything that shifts: the gods abandoned, the bark cloth replaced, the taboo abolished. Williams pays with his life, at Erromango, for the work he believes he is bringing.

• Frederick William Beechey, Narrative of a Voyage to the Pacific and Beering's Strait (1825-1828)

  In 1826, the Blossom pushes farther than Cook had been able to go. Beechey rounds Icy Cape, reaches Point Barrow, the northwesternmost point of America, and waits there for a Franklin coming overland who never arrives. He completes, mile by mile, the chart this volume left unfinished at the wall of pack ice, and describes the Esquimaux of the coast and their dealings with the Chukchi across the water. His account closes, half a century later, the line Cook had traced to the exact point where the ice had turned him back.

• Egor Timkovski, Voyage à Péking, à travers la Mongolie, en 1820 et 1821 (1827)

  Exactly a century after Unverzagt, Egor Timkovsky, an official of the Russian Asiatic Department, escorts the new Orthodox ecclesiastical mission to Peking, just as Izmailov's embassy had already led an archimandrite there. Setting out from Kiakhta in 1820, he follows the caravan road through Urga, the Gobi and Kalgan, then spends the winter in the Qing capital. His account, translated into French in 1827, abounds in observations on the Mongols, the lamas, the steppe relay stations and the city of Peking. One can measure what has changed in a hundred years, a fixed frontier and trade regulated at Kiakhta, and what endures: the same ceremonial and the same mistrust.

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• Jules Dumont d'Urville, Voyage au pôle Sud et dans l'Océanie (1827-1840)

  The French navigator crosses New Zealand twice, in 1827 and again in 1840, and anchors in Queen Charlotte's Sound on the eve of the Treaty of Waitangi. He knows his Cook by heart and quotes him at every cove. Sixty years lie between the two accounts: the muskets, the missions, the wars that empty the bays, and chiefs who now know very well what a ship's arrival means.

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• Charles Wilkes, Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition (1840)

  What Cook's expedition had missed, America accomplished in 1840. Wilkes led two hundred men and tons of instruments to the summit of Mauna Loa, camped there for weeks in the snow, and measured gravity with a pendulum. The account of that ascent, with its Hawaiian porters, its frozen tents and its smoking crater, answers directly to the aborted climb of chapter 8, when three officers turned back before a field of scorched stone. Sixty years separate the two attempts, and the same volcano measures them both.

• Évariste Huc, Souvenirs d'un voyage dans la Tartarie, le Thibet et la Chine (1850)

  In 1844, the Lazarist priests Évariste Huc and Joseph Gabet leave their mission at Xiwanzi, north of the Great Wall, not far from Kalgan where Unverzagt entered China. Dressed as lamas, they cross the Mongolian steppes with their camels, sharing the yurts, the tea and the festivals of the nomads, then press on to Lhasa, from which they are expelled. Their account, full of humour and lived detail, was one of the great bestsellers of the century. It brings to life what Unverzagt notes in passing: the camps, the lamas, the caravans and the immensity of the steppe between China and the Russian world.

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• Richard Francis Burton, Goa, and the Blue Mountains (1851)

  In 1847 the young Lieutenant Burton, ill, obtains leave and goes down to Goa before climbing to breathe the air of the Nilgiris, the Blue Mountains. He finds a Portuguese capital almost abandoned, Old Goa overrun by vegetation, its churches and convents silent, far from the rich city where Orta received his visitors. Ironic, curious about everything, already fascinated by languages and customs, Burton describes the Canarins, the half-castes, the priests and the plantations. His book takes the measure of time passed: three centuries after the Colloquies, Goa has become a setting of ruins.

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• George Kennan, Tent Life in Siberia (1865-1867)

  In 1865, an American company set out to link New York to Moscow by telegraph, routed through Alaska, the Bering Strait and Siberia. Kennan, twenty years old, was tasked with surveying the line from Kamchatka to the Anadyr. He lived for two years among the nomadic Koryaks and the Chukchi, described their reindeer herds, their jourts and their shamans, and found himself one day a thousand versts from anywhere, learning that the transatlantic cable had just been laid and that his telegraph line no longer had any purpose. The country of Chapters 11 to 14, a century later, almost unchanged.

• Mark Twain, Letters from the Sandwich Islands (1866)

  In 1866 a young journalist lands at Honolulu for a Sacramento newspaper and stays four months. Twain visits the plantations, descends into the crater of Kilauea, tries surfing and drinks the cup, then has himself taken to Kealakekua, before the monument to Cook, where he writes a few cold pages on what the captain did or did not deserve. The comedy poorly covers a real melancholy: the kingdom he crosses is that of this volume, but depopulated, converted, indebted, and already turning toward California.

• Isabella Bird, Six Months in the Sandwich Islands (1873)

  In 1873, a forty-year-old Englishwoman, sickly and fearless, travels across Hawaii on horseback, sidesaddle then astride, sleeps in huts, descends to the rim of the Kilauea crater, and rides up the valleys of Kauai. A century after Cook, she finds a Christian kingdom, a constitutional monarchy, sugar plantations, and beneath all of it the same volcanic land and the same names. The contrast with the beach at Waimea in January 1778 fits into a single book.

• Nikolaï Prjevalski, Mongolia i strana tangutov (1875-1876)

  In 1870, the Russian officer Nikolai Przhevalsky sets out from Kiakhta, close to the Selenginsk where Unverzagt awaited Chinese permission, and crosses the Gobi by way of Urga and Kalgan to Peking. It is the start of a three-year expedition that carries him on into the Ordos, the Alashan, the Koko Nor and the borders of Tibet. A naturalist as much as a soldier, he describes the steppe, the wells, the sandstorms, the birds and the plants with new precision. His book, translated into English as early as 1876, moves the road of the embassies from court narrative to exploration: the same steppe, now regarded for its terrain and wildlife rather than its ceremonial.

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• Ernst Haeckel, A Visit to Ceylon (1881-1882)

  Two centuries after Burckhardt, another German discovers Ceylon with wonder. The zoologist Ernst Haeckel, a professor at Jena and a great champion of Darwin, lands in Colombo on 21 November 1881, after a voyage by way of Bombay, and stays on the island until March 1882. He sets up a laboratory at Belligemma, today's Weligama, on the south coast not far from Matara, where Burckhardt had capsized, visits Kandy and the Peradeniya garden and climbs the island's highest peak. His letters, collected under the title Indische Reisebriefe, celebrate the jungle, the sea and the wildlife, with the racial prejudices of their time.

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• Percival Lowell, Chosön, the Land of the Morning Calm (1886)

  Percival Lowell, later famous as the astronomer of Mars, spent the winter of 1883-1884 in Seoul, after accompanying the Korean diplomatic mission of 1883 to the United States. His book, published in 1886, describes the capital, its gates closed at nightfall, its palaces and its court life, just as the kingdom was beginning to open to Western treaties. The Seoul that Gwon Beol left in 1539 amid farewell cups is still, in essence, the one Lowell photographed: the same walls, the same rites, the same scholars. But the road to Beijing is no longer the kingdom's only door, and the world centred on the Chinese imperial court is beginning to come apart.

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• Henry E. M. James, The Long White Mountain, or, A Journey in Manchuria (1888)

  In 1886 the British official Henry E. M. James travelled through Manchuria with the officer Francis Younghusband and the diplomat Harry Fulford, as far as the Changbai Mountains, the Long White Mountain sacred to the Manchus. His book, published in 1888, describes the Chinese settlers now moving onto formerly reserved lands, the inns, the markets and the cart roads. Min Jeong-jung had crossed a ruined Liaodong in 1669, emptied by the conquest; two centuries later James found a region resettled and cleared. The comparison measures how far this frontier had travelled, from military wasteland to pioneer country.

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• Robert Louis Stevenson, In the South Seas (1888-1890)

  Ill and seeking a climate, the Scottish writer sails from 1888 to 1890 from the Marquesas to the Gilberts, listens, questions, and refuses the postcard view. He describes societies that still remember the tabou and the morai, and a depopulation he attributes plainly to European contact. On the Society Islands, and on what Cook left there without meaning to, his pages are worth more than many treatises.

• Basil Thomson, Les Distractions d'un premier ministre (1890-1891)

  At the end of the nineteenth century, a young British official becomes, almost by chance, prime minister of the kingdom of Tonga, the only Polynesian state never to have been colonised. His book, witty and perceptive, describes a monarchy heir to the old order of Poulaho's Tu'i Tonga, with its rites, its ranks and its taboos still very much alive. Beneath the Christian veneer, one recognises the archipelago that Cook had believed he understood, and the sacred kingship he had sensed behind the pomp of Feenou.

• Isabella Bird, Korea and Her Neighbours (1898)

  During her Korean journeys of 1894 to 1897, the English traveller Isabella Bird pushed on as far as Mukden in the middle of the Sino-Japanese War. Her book, published in 1898, describes the city Kim Jong-jeong had known, now filled with soldiers, wounded men and missionaries. The comparison shows what a hundred and thirty years had changed: Manchuria, guarded by the Eight Banners and closed by the Palisade, had become a battlefield between empires, and Korea, which Kim had defended inch by inch before the Manchu judges, had ceased in 1895 to be China's vassal. The foreign eye records the end of an order the journal of 1764 believed eternal.

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• Dugald Christie, Thirty Years in Moukden, 1883-1913 (1914)

  A Scottish medical missionary, Dugald Christie settled in Mukden, the former Shenyang, in 1883 and stayed thirty years, founding a hospital and then a medical school. His memoirs, published in 1914, tell the story of the Manchu capital from within, through epidemics, the Sino-Japanese War, the Boxer rising, the Russo-Japanese War and the plague of 1910-1911. We find again the city, its yamens and its courts, where Kim Jong-jeong watched his prisoners' confessions being rewritten, this time through the eyes of a foreigner who cared for its inhabitants and shared their trials for a generation.

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• Raymond Rallier du Baty, Aventures aux Kerguelen (1907-1909)

  In 1907, a young Breton buys an old dundee, names her the J.-B. Charcot, and sets off with five men to spend more than a year on the land Cook called the Island of Desolation. He hunts sea-elephants, draws charts, winters in the fjords, and describes the same blue rock, the same kelp, the same penguins by the thousand. No other book better conveys what Cook only skirted for eight days.

• Luigi Barzini, La metà del mondo vista da un'automobile. Da Pechino a Parigi in 60 giorni (1908)

  On 10 June 1907, Prince Scipione Borghese launches his Itala in the Peking-to-Paris race, and the journalist Luigi Barzini keeps the crew's chronicle. The car leaves China by way of Kalgan, crosses the Gobi, passes through Urga and Kiakhta, skirts Lake Baikal, goes through Irkutsk, Tomsk and the Urals, then reaches Moscow and Saint Petersburg: Unverzagt's itinerary, or nearly, in reverse and in two months. Barzini tells of broken tracks, collapsing bridges, Siberian villages and crowds rushing out to see. Two centuries later the same road is still an ordeal, but it is now run for speed rather than for a treaty.

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• Rabindranath Tagore, Japan-Jatri (1919)

  In May 1916, Rabindranath Tagore, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature three years earlier, leaves Calcutta aboard the Tosa Maru, a small Japanese cargo ship, and follows Mallick's route through Rangoon and the seas of Asia to Japan. His travel letters, first published in Bengali magazines and collected in 1919 as Japan-Jatri, tell of the storm in the Bay of Bengal, the deck passengers who came aboard at Rangoon, then a country that modernized without giving up its beauty. Twelve years after Mallick, another Bengali looks at East Asia as a mirror held up to India, between admiration for the energy of peoples and unease before the European model.

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• William Somerset Maugham, The Gentleman in the Parlour (1930)

  In 1922 and 1923, William Somerset Maugham lands at Rangoon, travels through Burma to Mandalay, then goes by mule to the Shan States and the Siamese border, before continuing through Bangkok and Cambodia to Haiphong. His account, published in 1930, mixes river and jungle landscapes, chance encounters, small portraits of British officials and stranded adventurers, and reflections on the art of travel. It revisits the British Burma that Mallick had observed a generation earlier, with its pagodas, monks and bazaars, this time through the eyes of an Englishman ironic and clear-sighted about the colonial world to which he belongs.

• Owen Lattimore, Manchuria: Cradle of Conflict (1932)

  After travelling through Manchuria in 1929 and 1930, among Chinese settlers, Mongols and forest peoples, Owen Lattimore published in 1932 a book drawn from his roads and encounters. He presents Manchuria as a succession of frontiers, where the Willow Palisade, which Kim Jong-jeong crossed in 1764, once separated the lands reserved for the Manchus from those open to Chinese farmers. The book appeared just as Japan was seizing the region. It sheds light, a century and a half later, on the logic of partition that the Korean investigator endured at every guard post without naming it.

• Henri Michaux, Un barbare en Asie (1933)

  In 1930 and 1931, the Belgian poet Henri Michaux travels through India, Southeast Asia, China and Japan. A Barbarian in Asia, published in 1933, is nothing like a guidebook: it is a series of vivid, partial notes on gestures, faces, crowds, theater, writing and religions. Like Mallick before the Chinese of Hong Kong and Amoy, Michaux marvels at Chinese energy and restraint, wonders about the place of women and the power of written characters, and constantly compares what he sees with his own world, with a humor that spares no one, not even himself.

• Peter Fleming, One's Company: A Journey to China (1934)

  In 1933 the young journalist Peter Fleming reached China by the Trans-Siberian and crossed Manchukuo, the state created by Japan a year earlier, before heading south to the war zones between Nationalists and Communists. One's Company, published in 1934, is a funny and clear-sighted narrative. On the lands Min Jeong-jung crossed under the eye of the victorious Manchus, Fleming watches a new conqueror install his garrisons and his officials. Nearly three centuries after the fall of the Ming, Manchuria remains what it was for the Korean ambassador: a land of passage, held by force and by those who wield it.

• Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar (1975)

  In 1973, the American Paul Theroux leaves Victoria Station in London and reaches Tokyo almost entirely by train, through Iran, Afghanistan, India, Burma, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam, before returning on the Trans-Siberian. His book, published in 1975, has become a classic of modern travel writing: compartment companions, platform conversations, rails crossing countries at war or on their last legs. Seventy years after Mallick, the same mosaic of peoples parades between Rangoon and Singapore, and the same taste for portraits caught on the fly, tender or cruel, holds the whole narrative together.

• Jan Morris, Hong Kong (1988)

  Jan Morris, who had covered the conquest of Everest in 1953 for the British press, devoted a major book to Hong Kong in 1988, nine years before its handover to China. She tells of the colony's birth after the Opium War, the rule of the great trading houses, the sampans of the harbor, the Peak and its villas, Kowloon and the frontier, and the Chinese crowd that keeps the city alive under the British flag. The settings Mallick discovered at the turn of the century, the funicular, the botanical garden, the opium customs house, take on their full historical depth here, down to the twilight of Empire.