The impoverished Zhang Deyi, a student-interpreter, was only sixteen when he set out with Bin-chun in 1866 to Europe, but his experience shows how language training and diplomatic experience could change the meaning of the West in profound ways. The images of Europe and America Zhang painted in his journals, full of internal contradictions and colorful variations, resembled the field-notes of an ethnographer, and filled in the everyday aspects of Western life largely ignored by senior envoys. As a result of adopting different conceptual frameworks, the multitude of objects Zhang described defied order and meaning, but this lack of order was a powerful message which he would share with other student-interpreters in training: that the “West” was a complex entity consisting of multitudinous parts that could not be reduced to a single, coherent image.