Sir John Chardin's Travels in Persia

Sir John Chardin's Travels in Persia is an abridged translation of the original French edition, which describes in great detail the people, places, politics, governments, and culture John Chardin encountered during his many years of travel in the Near East. It was originally published in full in 1711 under the title Voyages de monsieur le chevalier Chardin en Perse, et autres lieux de l'Orient, or The Travels of Sir John Chardin in Persia and the Orient. It is considered an authority among academics; Persian scholar John Emerson said, "[Chardin's] information on Safavid Persia outranks that of all other Western writers in range, depth, accuracy, and judiciousness." The complete works have never been translated in English, though there are many editions. This volume contains the hard-to-find original 1720 translation, presented in two parts. SIR JOHN CHARDIN (1643-1713), also known as Jean Chardin, was a French jeweler and traveler who authored the ten-volume book The Travels of Sir John Chardin, one of the most well-regarded early scholarly works on the Near East and Persia by a Westerner. Chardin was trained to be a jeweler like his father, but instead set out with a fellow merchant for Persia and India in 1664 at the ripe age of 21. He spent most of his time traveling in Persia from 1664-1673, before finally settling in England to escape the French prosecution of Protestants in 1681. It was there that he published the first part of The Travels of Sir John Chardin in 1686, which was presented in full in Amsterdam in 1711, two years before his death.