Cultural encounters between East Asia and Europe have received ample attention in various fields of studies, ranging from cultural and literary studies to history and economics. The concept of failure in these encounters, however, has not. Often, the story of encounters between Asia and the so-called West has been told as one of success, of cross-fertilisation, reciprocal stimulation and an exchange of commodities and knowledge. Yet, the history of East–West encounters is riddled with prominent examples of misunderstandings, ignorance, unrealistic expectations or unbridgeable cultural differences that, in certain contexts and for certain purposes, have been framed as failures. This volume opens up new perspectives on such instances by theorising failure in various historical and cultural contexts. Providing examples from different periods and disciplines, it contributes to current debates about the epistemologies of failure and shows how transcultural encounters are sites where personal and collective norms of failure and success are being shaped and challenged.

In its focus on failed encounters, Failures East and West: Cultural Encounters between East Asia and Europe goes beyond the hitherto dominant inter- and transculturality research, which is only beginning to dedicate itself systematically to the failure of cultural contacts. Focusing not so much on forms of successful exchange and the profitable circulation of ideas or knowledge, the contributions gathered here establish a new view of cultural encounters by demonstrating the subtle ways in which failure is staged, represented and charged with meaning, thus revealing the implicit mental horizons of the cultural players involved. While there is a growing interest in failure in other academic fields (e.g. sociology, psychology, visual arts, material culture and gender studies), what we would like to call failure studies is still in the process of establishing itself in the fields of literary and cultural studies. Failures East and West aims to contribute to this process and to open up approaches to cultural encounters in literary and cultural studies that probe the dimensions of failure as a culturally specific concept.

Failure in the context of international contacts is ubiquitous and contributes to a widespread sense of crisis today. Intercultural encounters in particular have become precarious, as is evident in debates on religious conflicts, migration and the integration of cultural minorities, as well as in the rise of isolationist positions that discard notions of multicultural societies.

The history of early English encounters with China is one of repeated failure and misunderstandings, and it begins with the failure of the English to even reach East Asia at all. When in 1497 the Italian Giovanni Caboto, sailing under an English flag and known in the anglophone world as John Cabot, sailed west in the hope of finding a route to China, he ended up in what is Canada today. He had planned to find a westward route to Asia, but instead discovered North America for the English, rather by accident. Later English expeditions between the 1550s and 1580s only got as far as today's Uzbekistan and Malaysia, and Martin Frobisher's repeated attempts in the 1570s to locate a north-west passage to China equally ended in failure. In 1637, the first English expedition reached China, or rather Macao, which was controlled by the Portuguese at the time. However, this expedition can hardly be counted as a success either: after a frustratingly long, and eventually futile, wait in the Portuguese harbour for a permit to sail up the Pearl River and trade there, the expedition decided to push forward without it – a decision that proved entirely detrimental to their plans of establishing trade relations. According to a chronicler on board, Peter Mundy, the Chinese side considered this effrontery, largely refused to deal with the English on mercantile terms and fired cannon balls until the English finally had to beat a humiliating retreat, promising to ‘never return to these shores’.

This contribution would like to focus on what is probably the most influential English text on East Asia from this early period: The Principal Navigations of the English Nation by Richard Hakluyt, first printed in 1589. Arguably, this text was crucial in shaping the English perspective on East Asia in the late sixteenth century, and continued to be so well into the seventeenth century, not least through Samuel Purchas's continuation Hakluytus Posthumus or, Purchas his Pilgrimes (1625). Interestingly, Hakluyt's text was published decades before the English actually set foot in East Asia; with its help I would like to demonstrate in the following that the English failed Asia even before they managed to get there.

Throughout much of the 1570s, Christopher Saxton must have had terrible muscle aches. Day after day, week after week, he marched through the English countryside and climbed the steepest hills; yet he was not seeking personal pleasure but was on a mission: Saxton was the first map-maker in a modern sense to be sent out by an English monarch to measure the extent of the kingdom. His project – a collection of detailed maps created with the help of the latest technology available – was intended to contribute to the aggrandizement, or cult, of Queen Elizabeth, and his maps were supposed to show the vast spatial extent of her power. Thus, it was for political reasons that Saxton grew blisters on his feet – and, indeed, map-making turned out to be political, albeit with the result, at least in the long run, not quite hoped for by Elizabeth. We do not know how content she was with Saxton's maps when they were published in 1579; we do know, however, that neither Elizabeth nor her successor James I funded any of the great cartographic projects that were to follow. None of the major map-makers of late sixteenth-century England, such as William Camden, John Speed or John Norden, received royal funding as Saxton had. Obviously at some point in the late sixteenth century, map-making had gone wrong in the eyes of English monarchy. But where exactly?

An answer emerges when we take a closer look at some of these projects, following for a moment Richard Helgerson’s illuminating discussion of them. My first images show the frontispiece and one sheet of Saxton’s ground-breaking Atlas of England and Wales (Illustrations 1 and 2). As Helgerson forcefully reminds us, the fact that this project was funded by the government and designed as a survey of the queen’s property shows in the map itself. The monarchic claim to the country is clearly visible: each sheet is dominated by the royal arms, reminding readers, as they turn the pages and move from county to county, that each belongs to the queen.