At Amsterdam Antiquarian Bookstore, we bring history to life through stories.
Our new monthly series, The Western Pages of Yulong, follows three travelers in 1800s southwest China: Paul, a book historian and former professor at the University of Amsterdam; Daan, a manuscript historian and poet; and Charlotte, a Chinese scholar, astrologer, and businesswoman who studied literature in Europe.
Together, they trade rare Western books across mountains and mysteries, where fiction meets real book history.
The Western Pages of Yulong
Part I — The Arrival
The monsoon had been late that year. By the time the caravan crossed the stone bridge into Yulong, the sky was already heavy with a bruised dusk. Rain began to fall—not the wild torrent of the southern coast, but a patient, whispering kind that softened even the sound of the mule bells.
Paul was the first to dismount. His boots sank into the clay road, still warm from the day. He looked up at the tiled roofs, the slow smoke curling from the teahouse, and thought—not for the first time—how improbable it was that he, once a professor among the pale shelves of Amsterdam, now carried in his pack a seventeenth-century Bible bound in calf, its corners rubbed smooth by the hands of sailors long dead.
Daan followed, his notebook wrapped in oilskin, his eyes alert for what the road had washed loose—fragments of paper, half-characters on a temple wall, the perishing signs of older stories. He was quieter than Paul, but his silences were never empty.
Charlotte brought up the rear, her horse steady, her coat still dry. She had learned to let the men indulge in their romantic notions—ink, dust, destiny—and she concerned herself with the ledger. Yet tonight, as the rain thickened and the horizon vanished into cloud, she tilted her head toward the hidden stars.
In her saddlebag lay a brass astrolabe, Dutch-made, its edge worn smooth by years of use. She carried it the way others carried a compass or a charm. For Charlotte, the constellations were not superstition but a language: a quiet negotiation between heaven and enterprise.
They took shelter in a low inn beside the river. The keeper was courteous, suspicious, and incurious all at once—the usual combination. Over rice wine, Paul laid their small cargo on the table: four Western books wrapped in waxed cloth. One was a Jesuit’s treatise in Latin, another a Dutch atlas printed in Leiden, its blue ink slightly blurred. The third, a slim volume of poetry bound in crimson silk, was Daan’s private burden. The fourth—Charlotte’s treasure—was a ledger from the East India Company’s Canton factory, its pages brittle with salt air and trade secrets.
As the others debated the safest route northward, Charlotte drew a small notebook from her coat and sketched a star that no longer rose where it should.
“The heavens,” she murmured, “are restless. If the Dragon’s Gate opens early this year, we’ll reach the monastery before the winter passes through.”
Paul looked up. “You still trust your stars more than our maps?”
“I trust what moves,” she said. “Maps only show what’s been lost.”
Outside, thunder rolled softly over the mountains.
Then—a knock.
A young man entered: soaked, breathless, and clearly not local.
He bowed awkwardly and said, in halting Mandarin,
“There is someone who knows the books you carry. He has been waiting for you.”
Charlotte’s pen froze midline.
Paul smiled faintly.
Daan closed his notebook and looked toward the window, where the rain traced thin silver lines like script on glass.
The messenger added, almost as an afterthought,
“He says the stars told him you would come.”
Historical Afterword: Books and Stars in Early Modern Exchange
In the late 17th and 18th centuries, Jesuit missionaries in China became famed not only as scholars of theology but as astronomers and mapmakers. They brought telescopes, atlases, and treatises that fascinated the Qing court, translating the sky itself into a shared language of geometry and faith.
By 1800, however, the Jesuit presence had waned, and Western books—especially those in Latin and Dutch—had become rare curiosities, traded quietly among scholars and merchants along the old caravan routes through Yunnan. These paths connected Tibet, Burma, and the Chinese interior, making them unlikely corridors of both theology and ink.
As for astrology: even in Amsterdam, many learned readers still cast horoscopes alongside their studies. The sky and the page were both seen as archives—each holding a kind of order waiting to be read.
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