WANG, Dahai.

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The Chinaman Abroad: Or a Desultory Account of the Malayan Archipelago, Particularly of Java. First edition, the first translation into English of portions of this revealing Chinese travel narrative, in which Wang Dahai, a scholarly soldier of fortune, describes foreign and local inhabitants of the archipelago, its flora and fauna, and modern technologies in use. This is among the rarest 19th-century Shanghai imprints: we have traced no other copies in commerce in recent decades.A Fujianese who failed to pass the imperial examinations, Wang, like many Chinese, ventured to south-east Asia to seek his fortune and resided in Java for a decade in the 1780s and 1790s. His six-volume account, titled Haidao Yizhi, appeared in 1806. The sections translated here show the breadth of the 18th-century Chinese worldview. Wang comments on Dutch and English traders, the coastal inhabitants ("they are tall in person, with bushy whiskers" - p. 31), Chinese Muslims, and many other groups of people, his knowledge extending as far as Ceylon, Bengal, and the Cape of Good Hope. He reports on animals such as alligators, boa constrictors, and rhinoceros, as well as more unusual phenomena ("savages with tales", "the flying head, an elf", and "the tooth-extracting tribe"). Of technology, he is particularly taken with European ships, telescopes, and "sky-rockets, or bombs."The translator, Walter Henry Medhurst (1796-1857), was the archetypal missionary-scholar. "His works were numerous, and included th

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