Region and period
Travelers in Asia in the 18th Century
In the eighteenth century, East Asia was dominated by an empire at its height. Under the Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong emperors, Qing China reached its greatest extent and received the world on its own terms: foreigners came as tributaries, and from 1757 European merchants were confined to the single port of Canton. To travel in Asia almost always meant going to Beijing, or running up against its borders.
The most regular travelers were not European. Every year a Korean embassy left Seoul for Beijing through Manchuria, and several of its members kept journals. These accounts of the journey to Yanjing, the old name for Beijing, form a genre of their own, noting relay stations, customs posts, markets and court rituals. They raised a question that troubled the scholars of Seoul: could anything be learned from the Manchus, whom they regarded as barbarians? Hong Dae-yong, who met the Jesuits of Beijing in 1766, and Park Ji-won, who followed the embassy to the summer residence at Jehol in 1780, answered yes, and inspired the school of Northern Learning.
Beijing was also Europe's outpost. Jesuits served the emperor as astronomers, clockmakers, mapmakers and painters: Giuseppe Castiglione worked at court for half a century, and in 1743 Jean-Denis Attiret described the gardens of the Yuanmingyuan in a letter that launched the European fashion for Chinese-style gardens. Their letters, published in Paris, shaped the Enlightenment's image of China. When Lord Macartney arrived in 1793 at the head of a large British embassy and refused to perform the full kowtow before Qianlong, the failure of his mission marked the end of that admiration.
Elsewhere, Asia was closed or had to be earned. In Japan, the Swedish physician Carl Peter Thunberg, attached to the Dutch trading post in 1775-1776, collected plants and talked with Japanese scholars who had just translated, in 1774, a European anatomy treatise: knowledge passed through a few interpreters and a handful of books. In the north, Russia sent naturalists across Siberia as far as Kamchatka. In Tibet, the Jesuit Ippolito Desideri lived in Lhasa from 1716 to 1721; in 1774 the Scot George Bogle was sent by the East India Company to the Panchen Lama.
This collection brings together our editions and a directory of related texts, to see eighteenth-century Asia from several vantage points: from Seoul and Beijing, from trading posts and missions, from the passes of the Himalaya.
Our titles on this subject
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.
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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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Ippolito Desideri, Notizie istoriche del Thibet (1727-1733)
While Izmailov negotiates with Kangxi, the emperor is playing another game far to the west: in 1720 his armies enter Lhasa to drive out the Dzungars, who have held the city since 1717. The Tuscan Jesuit Ippolito Desideri, who reached Lhasa in 1716, lives through these war years in Tibet, learns the language, studies in the monasteries and debates doctrine with the scholars, before being recalled in 1721. His account, written after his return and unpublished until the twentieth century, ranks among the great European descriptions of Tibet. It shows Kangxi's empire from its margins, while Unverzagt discovers it at its centre.
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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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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.