Prior to the nineteenth century, the west occupied an anomalous space in the chinese imagination, populated by untamable barbarians and unearthly immortals. First-hand accounts and correspondence from qing envoys and diplomats to europe unraveled that perception. In this path-breaking study, jenny huangfu day interweaves the history of qing legation-building with the personal stories of china's first official travelers, envoys and diplomats to europe.爏he explores how diplomat-travelers navigated the conceptual and physical space of a land virtually unmapped in the chinese intellectual tradition and created a new information order. This study reveals the fluidity, heterogeneity, and ambivalence of their experience, and the layers of tension between thinking, writing, and publishing about the west.