ROBERT MARKLEY. The Far East and the English Imagination 1600-1730.

Abstract

The last Chinese Emperor call’d Soungchung , hath from the Year 1623, till 1640, receiv’d yearly the following Revenues, viz . 4756800 Tail of Gold; one Tail of Gold is ten of Silver; in Silver, 3652120 Tail ; in Pearls, the value of 2926000 Tail ; in Precious Stones, the value of 1090000 Tail ; in Musk and Amergreece, to the value of 1215000 Tail … This conjuring of the wealth of the Chinese emperors of the late Ming dynasty in Olfert Dapper's Atlas Chinensis —a second edition of the Dutchman Nieuhoff's account of a Dutch East India Company embassy to China in the years 1655–1656, which was translated into English by John Ogilby in 1671—illustrates what Robert Markley denotes as ‘a kind of socioeconomic sublime—wealth that strains or exceeds the very bounds of representation’ (p. 110). Three ‘tails’ were the equivalent of an English pound. The telling of tails/tales is central to the European imagination in its encounter with the distant and foreign as any reader of the adventures of Robinson Crusoe knows; to narrate is also to tally. In the seventeenth century, Markley reminds us, England's expenditures and revenues were less than 10% of those of China. Markley's book shares with the materials he discusses this kind of ‘strain’ in moving between the rhetoric of imagination/aestheticism and the rhetoric of economics/trade. His reader must navigate between difficult, sometimes indigestible, numerical figures and the rhetorical figures of sublimity and longing summoned by seventeenth-century writings about the Far East.