In the seventeenth century, China and Europe were becoming more than indistinct figures on each other's horizon. They were establishing a measure of cultural presence. Names were becoming known and new words were being romanized or sinicized, depending on the direction in which they traveled. Things were being exchanged and examined, books no less than porcelain and clocks, and entering the collections of the wealthy and curious. The shapes and colors of faces, hair, and bodies were being recorded and discussed, their particularities noted, their peculiarities puzzled over. The knowledge that either had of the other was incomplete, yet however uneven and misconceived, images and ideas of China were coming into view in Europe, and of Europe into China.

The interculturality of these global linkages has engaged scholarly interest since the 1960s, when Joseph Needham, Donald Lach, Charles Boxer, and Étiemble, among many others, began to track the flows of people and ideas in both directions, to general curiosity. Cultural questions—how people saw their others, how they interacted with them, how they represented and interpreted and borrowed from them—dominated that early literature. By 2000, interest had shifted more to economic, political, and geostrategic issues of this early engagement between Chinese and Europeans in tandem with the rise of global history. In his introductory chapter to this eclectic volume of essays, Thijs Weststeijn argues that the book attempts “to introduce a cultural dimension to the approach of global history” (3). As that dimension has been present for decades, I would suggest that the stronger case for this volume is its attempt to approach that cultural dimension in terms of processes of entanglement rather than outcome. Weststeijn's other, less theoretical claim is that the volume highlights the Dutch as perceivers of Chinese culture and as perceived representatives of European culture.

The historical baseline for Dutch-Chinese encounter is given in the book's second chapter, in which Djoeke van Netten insightfully examines Dutch framings of China and the navigational technologies that enabled their first voyages in the 1590s. In the next chapter, Lennert Gesterkamp turns the direction of contact by examining an early Chinese account of Dutchmen published in 1617, a moderately accurate translation of which is provided in an appendix. The fourth chapter, by Dong Shaoxin, reverses the gaze to examine how European (not just Dutch) missionaries understood a group they called Tartars, and that we know après la lettre as Manchus. Weststeijn's own chapter then reverses the gaze again by exploring the experiences of early Chinese visitors to the Netherlands, arguing that these destabilizing encounters promoted greater critical inquiry among the Dutch than elsewhere in Europe. His appendix of Chinese objects and books in the Low Countries is enthralling.

With its sixth chapter, the book turns to a series of particular topics: Joris van den Tol's surprising study of Chinese petitions to the Dutch on Taiwan regarding gambling; Willemijn van Noord's analytically alert account of Constantijn Huygens's attempt to prevent a Chinese screen from being dismembered to panel a room; and Trude Dijkstra's fascinating inquiry into the reception of a Jesuit volume on Confucianism in the new literature of learned journals of the 1680s, though she is mistaken in her claim that James II requested a copy of the book on his visit to Oxford in 1687 (he already had a copy). These studies are then followed by China-centered chapters: Chen Yufang on the Jesuits’ networks with provincial officials; Noël Golvers's report on library holdings of European books in China; Sun Jing's study of European images at the Qing court (which in my view seriously misunderstands the political functions of these images); and, finally, a long chapter by Cai Xiangyu on the circumstances surrounding a Dutch embassy to Beijing in 1794 (in which the theme of culture rather disappears).

That Dutchmen were devils and Chinese philosophers, to reference the book's title, were tropes that flourished and faded depending on the nature and quality of the contacts between them. A more consistent attention to the historicity of the cultural productions that this volume addresses might have lent it greater coherence. But there is much here to engage the interested reader.