ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the iconic images of the Asian mystique that represented admiration and apprehension of a mystically, sometimes exaggeratedly described unknown land, “Asia,” in early modern European textual history. These images came to be unbelievable yet compelling stories early modern European travelers and writers conceived, and then ceaselessly circulated in their narratives. The idea of an alien Asian “other” filled a void in early modern European textual worldviews and supplied stock characters that satisfied a need to know something about the exotic, rapidly expanding world. Those characters had their roots in ancient Roman texts, such as Pliny the Elder (23-79 CE), that peopled non-European spaces with pygmies, one-eyed monsters, and people who had feet on their heads.1 An ancient Chinese text, Classic of Mountains and Seas, likewise depicts many weird animals and humanoid creatures inhabiting non-Chinese space.2 The idea of an exotic “Asia” gradually gained ground among enterprising merchants and the learned in early modern Europe through texts, particularly with the influx of travel narratives into the European market. Marco Polo’s tales of his time in Asia both depended upon earlier narratives and provided a great deal of material about Asia and Asians that his contemporaries adopted to embellish their own versions of this exotic, alien place. Thus, the fictional history of Asians can be read in parchmentmanuscripts with fantastic illustrations and elaborate printed texts brimming over with unheard-of stories, both of which widely circulated in early modern Europe.3
