ABSTRACT
“Travellers who write, do not set down things in precise order but as they see them. This variety, being nature itself, is preferable to art, the slave of rule and method.” 1 This was the mind of an anonymous writer who availed himself of the much-used figure of the fictitious traveller in an attempt to denounce the corrosive symptoms of the mid-century European society. The book, titled L’espion Chinois, reached the public around the same years in which Poivre sent to print his observations on Asia. 2 The book seems to have at full tilt drawn the public’s attention, becoming immediately a bestseller. The imagined traveller claimed to be a Chinese envoy who had been tasked to report back to Pekin about the undergoing European state of affairs. A claim was also made that the book was actually a compilation made up of letters dispatched from different cities in Europe. In the preface, readers were told that the letters had been handed on to the editor in the hope that they could be published and that anything more had been added.
