Arthur and Athanasius, Armchair Asianists

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   An Egyptian pyramid from Athanasius Kircher's "Turris Babel" (1679).

In his review of A Man of Misconceptions, on the 17th-century German Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher ("Mistakes? He Made a Few", January 6), Jad Abumrad illustrates Kircher's "sheer chutzpah" in asking, "Who but Kircher would publish an enormous illustrated guide to China (arguing that the Chinese are secretly Christian) without ever setting foot in China?"

   Portrait of Arthur Waley by Roger Fry

A more recent innocent of steamer-trunk Sinology comes to mind: Arthur Waley (1889-1966). Though a Bloomsbury regular, keeper of Asian antiquities at the British Museum, lecturer with the School of Oriental and African Studies, and promoted early by Ezra Pound for the first among his decades of well-anthologized and still-reprinted translations of early Chinese and Japanese classics of drama, fiction, philosophy and poetry (the Analects of Confucius, assorted Nō plays, The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon, The Tale of Genji, and the Tao Te Ching, at iceberg tip) - Waley nonetheless, to adapt the late Red Buttons, "never got a dinner" in the form of having ever set foot in the Far East.