“With the rise of novels posing as travel accounts in the latter decades of the seventeenth century (most famously Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels), the lines between actual traveler and literary impostor blurred even further. In a world without a reliable method of transmitting information, ordinary people found it difficult to distinguish between actual long-distance travelers — like Michael Shen Fu Tsung, the Qing aristocrat who toured Europe as a Catholic convert — and charlatans whose impostures now strike us as painfully obvious.”