Professor John Curry (History) has successfully released his new translated book titled The Book of China: A Persian Merchant's Description of the Ming State for the Ottoman Court, by Columbia University Press. Curry worked with his co-editors Kaveh Hemmat and Hyunhee Park to produce an annotated version of the text of `Ali Akbar Khatayi, a Central Asian merchant who traveled to the Ming Dynasty court in Beijing and resided there for six years in the first decade of the sixteenth century. He later fled from his homeland to the Ottoman ruler Sultan Suleyman I, where he compiled several versions of his account for submission to the royal court. The publication of these accounts is the final product of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, and took several years to complete after Prof. Curry discovered Khatayi's own translated copy of the text in Istanbul's manuscript libraries-- a text that remained unknown until recently.
