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This rare and ambitious composition by Johann Christoph Haffner captures the ceremonial reception of Dutch East India Company envoys at the court of Arakan (modern-day Rakhine State, Myanmar). Engraved in Augsburg for the publisher Jeremias Wolff around 1687, it reflects the appetite for exotic subjects among German collectors in the later seventeenth century and draws on firsthand Dutch sources, particularly the travel accounts of Johannes Schouten.
The image is structured in two registers. In the upper panel, Dutch ships ride at anchor off the coast while the embassy is led inland in a grand procession: elephants draped in richly patterned textiles carry the ambassadors and their gifts, escorted by armed guards, musicians, and local dignitaries. The lower scene shows the moment of audience. Beneath an elaborately scrolled pavilion, the king of Arakan receives the Dutch seated in state, surrounded by attendants and courtiers. The visitors approach with reverence, offering tribute in a display of formal subordination to local protocol.
Dutch–Arakanese relations were active from the early seventeenth century until the kingdom’s political and commercial decline in the early eighteenth century. Haffner’s print, one of the few contemporary visual records of this diplomatic theater, offers an important visual account of VOC presence in the Bay of Bengal during its height.
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