TITSINGH, ISAAC

(1745–1812)

Having studied surgery in his na tive city of Amsterdam and law in Leiden, Titsingh left for Batavia (Jakarta, Indonesia) as a merchant in the service of the Dutch East India Company. In the period from 1779 to 1784, he spent more than three years at the Dutch commercial post in Deshima, Japan. From 1785 to 1792, he served as director of trade in Chinsura (Ben gal, India), and in 1794–1795, he was part of a Dutch embassy sent to Beijing, China. He studied the Japanese language and literature and was the possessor of the first extensive Japanological collection in Europe. Titsingh, who twice visited the shogun’s court at Edo (now Tokyo, Japan), was granted the exceptional favor of carrying on a personal correspondence with several individual Japanese. Although his manuscripts have remained unpublished in the archives of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences, Philipp Franz von Siebold made use of them in his Nippon (1832–1851).