If the success of Zungchin, Thamas Koelikan, and Agon is gauged by their reception by the general public, they were admittedly unsuccessful plays. But they lay claim to success of a different kind. This study argues that in dramatizing contemporary historical events in Asia, each of these plays was the embodiment of a lively and complex process of information transfer from and about the Orient. The plays were third-generation retellings of the stories they told. The themes that they dealt with had been written and rewritten about, imagined and reimagined by scribes of the Dutch East India Company and by authors of published histories and accounts of travel to Asia. These dramas, as a result, constituted a phase in the evolution of information and images about the Orient in the Republic. The Dutch stage, in consequence, became a register of the VOC's encounter with Asia.

Charting the transcontinental passage and metamorphosis of Oriental information and imagery in this channel constituted the crux of this study. It is revealed that this phenomenon, like the Oriental plots that the plays dealt with, had its beginnings in Asia in the workings of the VOC. As committed a chronicler as it was a trader, the historical events that Zungchin, Thamas Koelikan, and Agon engaged with invited the Company's undivided attention. The fall of Ming China and the defeat of the Mughals by Nadir Shah were thought to have significant consequences for VOC trade in these domains. In the Banten War, the Company was a protagonist and the stakes were, quite logically then, far greater. In the acquisition of information about the political crises in Mughal India and Banten, the VOC displayed consummate skill. It integrated itself into established channels of information procurement in these kingdoms and recruited the services of native, Dutch and other European informants. The Company displayed the greatest variety in its information-gathering practices in Mughal India. The knowledge shared with them by their European correspondents De Voulton and Toretti and their paid agent, Sampatram, in Delhi was supplemented by intercepting official and personal correspondence of other parties. In Banten, an Islamic cleric, Abdulha, and a Company steward, Huigh Booy, were indispensable sources of information for the Company. During the war, the VOC experienced a landfall of information about its adversary's activities when the number of its informants increased tenfold.