This book deals with the origins of the present-day National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden, and covers the period from 1816 to 1883.

With the foundation of the Royal Cabinet of Rarities in The Hague in 1816, a transformation took place from mainly private collections to national state-owned collections. The founding of the Royal Cabinet was one of the first attempts to create something like a National Museum. This book traces the purposes and motives of private collecting and the emergence of cabinets of curiosities, the composition of the collections, and the move towards a National Museum. At the time of its establishment, the Royal Cabinet of Rarities consisted of a bequest of mainly Chinese objects, objects from the Royal House, and objects concerning the national history of the Netherlands. However, the first director of this Royal Cabinet, R.P. van de Kasteele, actively stimulated civil servants and travellers to collect for the cabinet and before long, the focus moved to Japan. Through the VOC settlement at Deshima, VOC officials had a unique access to things Japanese. The three main collectors in Japan in the first half of the nineteenth century were Jan Cock Blomhoff, Johannes van Overmeer Fisscher, and Philip Franz Von Siebold.

Von Siebold established himself and his private collection in Leiden in 1832. This collection was considered a branch of the cabinet in The Hague, initially known as Rijks Japansch Museum Von Siebold. Conrad Leemans, then director of the Rijksmuseum voor Oudheden (National Museum of Antiquities), took over the management from Von Siebold in 1859. In 1864, the name changed to Rijks Ethnographisch Museum (National Museum of Ethnography). Leemans concentrated on the Netherlands East Indies, present-day Indonesia. His successor, Serrurier, who took over in 1880, was the first director with an ethnological background. Meanwhile, The Royal Cabinet in The Hague was popular with the public until its closure in 1883 when the ethnographic collections were finally united in Leiden, and where they still form the basis of the National Museum of Ethnology.

Rudolf Effert studied Cultural Anthropology in Leiden and obtained his Ph.D. in 2003. His research concerns the history of Dutch Ethnography and Cultural Anthropology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, on which he has published several monographs and articles, including Vol. 7 in the CNWS Publications Series. This book is based on extensive research in the archives of the Royal Cabinet of Rarities. In this book, Effert proposes new perspectives on the relationship between the three main collectors in Japan in the first half of the nineteenth century and he argues that the scholarly contributions of two of them, Cock Blomhoff and Overmeer Fisscher, have been seriously underestimated.