Isaac Titsingh was a Dutch scholar, merchant-trader and ambassador.
Background
Isaac Titsingh was born on January 10, 1745 in Amsterdam, Netherlands. He was the son of Albertus Titsingh and Catharina Bittner (Albertus Titsingh's second wife). His father, Albertus Titsingh was a successful and prominent Amsterdam surgeon.
Education
Isaac Titsingh became a member of the Amsterdam Chirurgijngilde (Barber surgeon's guild) and received the degree of a Doctor of Law from Leiden University in January 1765.
Career
At Dejima Island in Japan, Titsingh was the head of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or "VOC" in Dutch) during 1779-1780, 1781–1783, and 1784. In these years, the Japanese policy of seclusion of isolation (sakoku) limited all contact with non-Japanese. In this highly-controlled context, the VOC traders became the sole official conduit for trade and for scientific-cultural exchanges between Japan and the West.
In 1785–1792, Titsingh was appointed director of the trading post at Chinsura in Bengal. Titsingh was described by William Jones, the philologist and Bengal jurist, as "the Mandarin of Chinsura".
Titsingh’s return to Batavia (1792–1793) (now Jakarta, Indonesia) led to new positions as Ontvanger-Generaal (Treasurer) and later as Commissaris ter Zee (Maritime Commissioner).
Titsingh was appointed Dutch ambassador to the court of the Emperor of China (1793-1795) for the celebrations of the sixtieth anniversary of the reign of the Qianlong Emperor. In Peking (now Beijing), the Titsingh delegation included Andreas Everardus van Braam Houckgeest and Chrétien-Louis-Joseph de Guignes, whose complementary accounts of this embassy to the Chinese court were published in the US and Europe. On 1 March, 1796 the Dutch East India Company, already in decline, was nationalized by the new Batavian Republic. In that year, Titsingh returned to Europe.
After 33 years of service in the East he retired in 1809. Among his works are "Japanese Marriages and Funerals", "Lives of the Shogun", "Pictorial Japan" and "Chronicle of Japanese Emperors".