Oh, yes. This is not merely a plausible link—it gives the entire Caserta narrative its missing foundation.
Sammi and Eriko do not arrive in Bourbon Naples as picturesque curiosities who conveniently become scholars. They enter through an institution already built upon the uneasy conversion of human displacement into useful knowledge.
Matteo Ripa had worked at the Kangxi emperor’s court from 1711 to 1723 and returned through Europe with four young Chinese Christians and a Chinese teacher. They reached Naples in 1724; the institution that grew around them received formal papal approval as the Collegio dei Cinesi in 1732. Its purpose was principally to educate Chinese clergy for missions in China, while also teaching Chinese language and preparing Europeans for Asian work. It became the ancestor of today’s University of Naples “L’Orientale.”
That means that by Eriko’s arrival—perhaps in the late 1750s, when she and Sammi are about fourteen or fifteen—Naples already possesses a bureaucratic category into which officials can attempt to force her:
an Asian youth capable of becoming linguistically, diplomatically and religiously useful.
The problem is that Eriko is Japanese, female, intellectually independent, and very definitely not an object conveniently delivered for Bourbon improvement.
The best version of their arrival
I would make Eriko the daughter or young dependent of a scholarly household connected to Nagasaki’s interpreter community.
Nagasaki is the right doorway. Under Tokugawa restrictions, Dutch contact was concentrated at Dejima, where Japanese interpreters, officials, suppliers and scholars mediated the flow of goods and knowledge. Dejima was tightly controlled, but it nevertheless functioned as Japan’s principal European conduit and helped support the emerging study of Dutch science and medicine.
Eriko’s father—or perhaps her maternal uncle—could be:
- a junior Japanese interpreter attached to Nagasaki;
- a physician interested in Dutch medical books;
- a copyist of Chinese and Japanese maps;
- a scholar suspected of possessing prohibited Christian material;
- or a merchant whose work crossed the Chinese, Dutch and Japanese communities.
Eriko grows up among characters, glossaries, diagrams and maps. She learns literary Chinese as an educated Japanese girl plausibly might within an exceptional scholarly household; she acquires fragments of Dutch from vocabulary books, interpreters and overheard speech. Her real education happens at the edge of official permission.
Then something goes wrong.
A shipwreck is possible, but I think a darker human chain is stronger. After her household is disgraced or destroyed, a European intermediary takes custody of her. The records call this:
“rescue,” “protection,” “purchase of maintenance,” or “transfer into Christian care.”
Eriko calls it what it was:
She was obtained.
That word should remain in the story in quotation marks whenever officials use it. It exposes how every institution sanitizes what happened.
Sammi’s origin
Sammi should come from the British East India Company world—but not necessarily from a formally established military orphan asylum, since the largest recognizable Company orphan-school systems belong somewhat later.
A good earlier arrangement is a charity-school child or unofficial Company orphan at Madras:
- her father was a ship’s gunner, clerk, surveyor or warehouse officer;
- her mother died earlier, perhaps of fever or childbirth;
- after her father’s death, Sammi passed among a chaplain’s household, a Company widow and a ship captain;
- nobody quite owned responsibility for her, although several adults claimed authority over her.
Early eighteenth-century Company settlements did sponsor schools and charitable arrangements for vulnerable European and mixed-descent children, though the institutional landscape was uneven and changing.
Her “violent red hair” becomes the one fact every record preserves correctly.
A clerk describes her as:
“Samuelina McNew, an English orphan of approximately thirteen years, healthy, ungovernable, and possessed of hair of an unusually inflammatory colour.”
Sammi insists she is not English but “from everywhere the Company has misplaced me.”
How they meet
Their meeting should happen at Batavia, or aboard a ship leaving the Dutch Asian network.
The Dutch, rather than the British, maintained the authorized European connection with Nagasaki. Therefore Eriko would most plausibly leave Japan through a Dutch-controlled chain: Nagasaki to Batavia, willingly or otherwise. Sammi could have reached Batavia from Madras aboard a Company-connected vessel, or through a private merchant operating between British and Dutch ports.
They meet in a warehouse compound, missionary residence, ship’s sickroom or temporary lodging.
Eriko is silent because she understands that each word she reveals increases her usefulness—and therefore another person’s claim over her.
Sammi interprets the silence not as docility but danger.
Someone reaches for Eriko’s arm.
Sammi bites him.
From that moment onward, Sammi appoints herself Eriko’s protector. Nobody authorizes this. Nobody successfully revokes it.
She possesses perhaps twenty words of Malay, ten of Dutch, no Japanese, and the unwavering conviction that every adult around them is concealing something.
Eriko initially thinks Sammi is appalling.
Within three days she has also concluded that Sammi is the only person present whose motives are comprehensible.
Why they are sent to Naples
A missionary or commercial intermediary hears of Matteo Ripa’s establishment in Naples.
The paperwork describes Eriko as:
- Japanese;
- capable of reading Chinese characters;
- perhaps acquainted with some Dutch;
- possibly of Christian background;
- suitable for instruction;
- potentially useful in the study of “the languages and customs of the Indies.”
This is historically imperfect from the institution’s point of view: the Collegio was founded specifically around Chinese clergy and missionary preparation, not as a modern multicultural Asian-studies university. But by 1747 it had begun accepting students from Ottoman territories, showing that its institutional remit could expand beyond its initial Chinese nucleus.
Eriko’s admission would therefore be exceptional, contested and improvised.
She might not initially be admitted as a regular student at all. She could be lodged:
- with a religious women’s house associated with the College;
- in the household of a patron;
- under the nominal guardianship of a priest;
- or as a linguistic “subject” whose instruction and interrogation occur privately.
Sammi is even less categorizable.
The authorities repeatedly try to separate them:
The Japanese girl belongs with the College.
The British orphan belongs with an English household, convent or charitable institution.
Sammi refuses.
Eriko, who has until then survived by revealing as little as possible, speaks her first complete Italian sentence:
“She remains with me.”
That is the founding declaration of their shared life.
Their first years in Naples
At first, Eriko is treated as an ethnographic resource rather than a scholar.
Men ask her questions like:
- Do Japanese people worship the sun?
- Can she read Chinese?
- Are the Chinese and Japanese languages identical?
- Does the emperor of Japan own all the land?
- Are Japanese women educated?
- Are there secret Christians in Nagasaki?
- Can she explain a Japanese object with no provenance that is actually Chinese?
She answers carefully and begins keeping a second notebook.
The official notebook records what Europeans ask her.
The private notebook records what their questions reveal about Europe.
That notebook becomes the seed of the older Eriko’s method:
Never study only the society being described. Study the desires of the person constructing the description.
Sammi meanwhile learns Italian rapidly through markets, kitchens, arguments and unauthorized friendships. Eriko learns it through grammar, Latin parallels and written correspondence.
Sammi speaks first.
Eriko speaks better.
Their relation to the Chinese College
The Chinese priests and students should not exist merely as background scenery. They would immediately recognize something that Neapolitan patrons do not:
Eriko is not “almost Chinese.”
Her Japanese use of characters differs. Her pronunciation differs. Her education and cultural references differ. She possesses affinities with Chinese learning, but she is not interchangeable with China.
Some members of the College might be kind to her. Others might resent the intrusion, especially because they themselves live within a paternal system that evaluates their obedience, orthodoxy and prospective utility.
That tension has real historical grounding. Scholarship on the College describes racial, cultural and disciplinary conflicts between Chinese and European clergy; it was not simply a serene paradise of intercultural exchange.
An older Chinese priest could become Eriko’s first serious teacher in Naples. He tells her:
“They will praise you whenever your learning confirms what they already believe.”
Eriko asks, “And when it does not?”
“Then they will praise your youth.”
He teaches her how institutions neutralize inconvenient intelligence without openly rejecting it.
How Eriko reaches Caserta
By the 1760s, Eriko has become impossible to dismiss.
She can work across:
- Japanese;
- literary Chinese;
- Italian;
- Latin;
- Dutch;
- eventually French;
- perhaps some English, mostly learned because Sammi keeps using words she claims have no Italian equivalent.
She corrects a catalogue entry for an Asian manuscript. Then she identifies several supposedly Chinese objects as Japanese—or several supposedly Japanese objects as Chinese export work. She prepares a report explaining the distinction between:
- language;
- writing system;
- place of production;
- artistic style;
- commercial route;
- and the identity assigned by European collectors.
A Bourbon minister notices.
That is how she passes from the Chinese College’s orbit into the wider royal scholarly apparatus.
Her early official title might be deliberately modest:
Assistente nelle Lingue Orientali
Assistant in the Oriental Languages
Her actual work is much larger.
By 1775, when she writes the Magna Graecia dossier, she is around thirty-five. She has spent two decades watching Naples convert peoples, ruins, manuscripts, plants and manufactures into categories of state usefulness.
This explains exactly why her dossier is so perceptive.
She recognizes what is being done to Magna Graecia because it was first done to her.
Ancient cities are “discovered,” classified and appropriated.
Eriko was “obtained,” classified and appropriated.
Vases lose their excavation histories and become beautiful royal objects.
Eriko loses her history and becomes “the Japanese scholar.”
Her insistence that objects must not be made to confess more than they know emerges from a deeply personal knowledge:
People had spent years making Eriko confess meanings they had already selected for her.
Sammi’s place in this progression
Sammi becomes the guardian of provenance.
Not officially, at first. Officially she may assist with drawings, engravings, costumes, objects and visual catalogues. But Sammi remembers stories:
- who sold an object;
- where a manuscript was acquired;
- what name a woman used before a priest renamed her;
- which collector omitted the tomb from which a vase came;
- which official called coercion “custody”;
- which servant actually translated the conversation later attributed to a diplomat.
Eriko organizes knowledge.
Sammi refuses to let knowledge forget the people it consumed.
This makes them a perfect scholarly partnership.
Eriko asks:
“What can be responsibly concluded?”
Sammi asks:
“Who got hurt while everyone was concluding it?”
The central story arc
Their story can now operate across three linked institutions:
The Collegio dei Cinesi
The institution that gives Eriko safety, education and intellectual access—but tries to define her through missionary usefulness.
The Reggia di Caserta
The institution that recognizes her genius—but tries to convert that genius into an organ of enlightened monarchy.
Magna Graecia
The ancient world she studies—and through which she gradually understands her own history of removal, classification and survival.
The grand theme becomes:
Can knowledge enter an institution without becoming its possession?
And the emotional answer is Sammi and Eriko themselves.
Naples continually tries to assign them separate useful places:
- Asian informant;
- Christian pupil;
- royal scholar;
- Company orphan;
- artist’s assistant;
- companion;
- dependent;
- curiosity.
But they form what Eriko later calls:
an unauthorized connection between departments.
They preserve the knowledge institutions want while quietly preserving one another from the institutions’ claim to own them.
And yes—these should absolutely be the same Sammi and Eriko already present in the Reggia narrative. Their arrival is not a side-story. It is the origin that makes everything Eriko later writes about hierarchy, classification, empire, antiquity and usefulness feel earned.
