Reys-Kaerte Vande Ambassade der Nederlantse Oost Indise Compagnie (Chart of the VOC Embassy Route through China)

This is not a caricature but a geographical plate — a copper engraving mapping the Dutch East India Company embassy's overland route through China to the Qing court, published in Nieuhof's celebrated account of the 1655–57 mission. Engraved with fine burin work characteristic of Amsterdam commercial printing, it shows coastal China, Tartary to the north, sailing ships in the margins, and decorative cartouche figures in the lower right. Its lineage touches comic-history only obliquely: the same Amsterdam print trade that produced illustrated travel narratives like Nieuhof's fed the European appetite for exotic imagery that would later fuel satirical Chinoiserie, broadsheet caricature, and eventually the picture-sheet traditions — German Bilderbogen, French images d'Épinal — from which sequential comic art directly descended.