Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"A Fortune Best Book of the Year"
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The Last Embassy is rare in the field of academic history, in that it works just as well as a story as it does as a work of significant historical investigation. The story of the Dutch embassy to Beijing—the last to the Imperial Chinese court—has everything: competing protagonists, trials and tribulations, and imperial pomp and circumstance. Andrade’s work is a wonderfully written work about a neglected event in diplomatic history."
---Nicholas Gordon, Fortune"One of the best academic studies in terms of both scholarship and writing-style I have read in ten years or more. . . . [A]n accessible, exciting, and illuminating book, written with consummate verve and enthusiasm."
---John Butler, Asian Review of Books"An animated account."
---Peter Neville-Hadley, South China Morning Post Magazine"Its lively writing, quick chapters, and the descriptions of the various parts of the empire that the embassy travels through, give readers a panoramic view of the empire at its height."
---Reid Wyatt, World History Connected"An excellent entry point for readers seeking a nuanced understanding of China’s global presence in the eighteenth century, and a useful corrective to those specialists who still tend to regard Qing relations with Britain as the totality of Qing relations with the ‘West.’"
---Pamela Kyle Crossley, Journal of Early Modern History
