The paper aims to identify place names in illustration titles in John Nieuhoff’s An Embassy from the East-India Company of the United Provinces, to the Grand Tartar Cham Emperour of China (English in 1669, Dutch in 1665). Nieuhoff’s text was very popular with the 17th century European public. After its first publication in Dutch it was translated into French, German, Latin and English and reprinted fourteen times in many European countries. In particular, his illustrations were highly appreciated because they provided realistic and vivid images of China to Europeans at a time when there had been little information about China. It had a great influence on the fever for Chinese style in Europe in the 18th century. Nieuhoff’s illustrations were frequently applied to everyday painted objects such as furniture, screens, wallpaper, textiles, and dishes. About 80% of illustrations present scenery in the area where the Dutch embassy anchored or passed by on their journey from Guangdong to Beijing. However, the place names which were transliterated into Dutch and other European languages are a major obstacle for following Nieuhoff’s travelogue. It is not easy to infer the Chinese regional names from either the Dutch or the English text. Therefore, the paper identifies Chinese regions in the text by mainly comparing Nieuhoff’s information and transliteration with Martino Martini’s Novus Atlas Sinensis (1655).

John Webb’s An Historical Essay Endeavoring a Probability that the Language of the Empire China is the Primitive Language is regarded as the first extensive European treatise on the Chinese language and among the earliest sinological studies. Webb’s argument in Historical Essay is that the Chinese language is the primitive language and Noah in the Genesis is Emperor Yao from the ancient Chinese history. For proof of his hypothesis, he gathered up various intellectual discourses circulating in seventeenth-century England, which inversely allows us to approach the pre-sinological discourses of his time. Through this, we can find to what extent he intervened in the current discourses and deviated from them. Webb enthusiastically responded to the reports from Jesuit missionaries, one of whose main aims were to collect mission fund enough to propagate their religion, which was carried out by first portraying China as an ideal nation to appeal to the Europeans. His idealization of the Chinese language conceals the anxiety of his time as the Europeans first encountered Eastern civilizations in the seventeenth century. We can see the symptoms when Webb wishes to attribute the ideal qualities of China delivered by the Jesuit authors to Noah. While he attempts to prove the primitiveness of the Chinese language, he incorporates Chinese civilization into European discourses by making pious Noah the common ancestor of England and China and by asserting that all the superiorities of Chinese civilization are derived from the figure of Noah in the Genesis.