The Western Pages of Yulong
Part III — The Man Who Traded Images
They opened the chest at dusk.
The rain had finally ceased, leaving the courtyard glazed and reflective, as if the monastery had been set atop a shallow lake. Daan knelt first, easing the swollen lid upward. The smell that escaped was not rot, as Paul had feared, but oil, resin, and paper—preservation, deliberate and learned.
Inside were no printed books.
Instead: rolled paintings, copper engravings wrapped in linen, and a folio of loose sheets—sketches of saints, planetary diagrams, fragments of altarpieces never completed. Western images, unmistakably so, rendered in a hand that had learned restraint from Chinese brushwork.
Paul frowned. “This is not a library.”
“No,” Charlotte said softly. “It’s a translation.”
Before the abbot could answer, footsteps sounded beyond the gate. Hooves, too well shod for the mountains. A voice followed—cheerful, Dutch, unmistakably at ease.
“Paul van der Meer,” it called. “If you’re here to catalogue ghosts, you’ve beaten me by a day.”
The man who entered the courtyard wore travel-stained wool, cut expensively and worn carelessly. His hair was pulled back with a ribbon that had once been blue. Under one arm he carried a narrow crate marked with chalk symbols used in European ports. He smiled as though arriving late to a dinner party.
“Sander,” Paul said, incredulous. “I thought you were in Batavia.”
“I was,” Sander replied. “Then I heard there were pictures in the mountains that Europe had forgotten how to see.”
Sander was an art dealer by profession, Dutch by inclination, and impossible to place in any single port or decade. Where Paul sought provenance and Charlotte sought alignment, Sander sought circulation. He believed objects only lived if they moved.
He crouched by the chest, unrolling a painted sheet with practiced reverence. A Madonna emerged—her face unmistakably European, her posture Chinese, her halo replaced by a ring of stars labeled in Latin and classical Chinese.
“Extraordinary,” Sander murmured. “Do you know what this would fetch in Amsterdam?”
Charlotte did not look at him. “Do you know what it cost to make?”
Sander laughed gently. “Everything costs something.”
Daan watched them both, then said, “This was never meant to return.”
Sander paused. “Nothing ever is. That doesn’t stop it.”
The abbot spoke at last, his voice calm as rain after thunder.
“These images were hidden when the books became dangerous. Pictures can travel where words cannot.”
Sander straightened. “Then let me help them travel again.”
Paul felt the familiar tightening in his chest—the old argument between rescue and removal. Charlotte closed her astrolabe, the click sharp in the evening air.
“There are moments,” she said, “when movement becomes theft.”
Sander met her gaze, curious now. “And there are moments when stillness becomes burial.”
Above them, the first stars emerged—faint, displaced, indifferent. The monastery bell rang once, and the courtyard seemed to hold its breath.
The question was no longer what lay in the chest.
It was who would decide where it belonged.
Historical Afterword: Art, Trade, and the Afterlives of Objects
By the late 18th century, European collectors increasingly sought Asian and hybrid artworks, often acquiring them through informal networks of merchants, missionaries, and agents operating beyond official trade routes. Paintings, engravings, and religious images were often easier to transport—and conceal—than books, especially during periods of censorship or political tension.
Many such works entered European collections stripped of their original context, valued aesthetically but divorced from their intellectual and spiritual origins. Today, museums and dealers alike continue to grapple with the legacy of these movements: when does preservation become appropriation, and when does circulation erase meaning?