A Dutch trade mission to China

This was the topic of my contribution to a recently published book on The Dutch Trading Companies as Knowledge Networks.

What particularly interested me was not so much the mission itself, as the way that the report of it published a decade later was co-opted in different ways by certain Catholics in both Antwerp and Amsterdam as a way of giving a more positive spin to the activities of Jesuit missions in China.

That report, it must be said, was not only compendious, but also copiously and beautifully illustrated.