KAEMPFER, ENGELBRECHT German traveller and physician, was born on Sept. 16, 1651 at Lemgo in Lippe-Detmold, Westphalia, where his father was a pastor. He studied at Hameln, Luneburg, Hamburg, Lubeck and Danzig, and after graduating Ph.D. at Cracow, spent four years at Konigs berg in Prussia, studying medicine and natural science. In 1681 he visited Uppsala in Sweden, and became secretary to the em bassy which Charles XI. sent through Russia to Persia in 1683.
He reached Persia by way of Moscow, Kazan and Astrakhan, land ing at Nizabad in Daghestan after a voyage in the Caspian ; from Shemakha in Shirvan he made an expedition to the Baku penin sula. In 1684 he arrived in Isfahan, then the Persian capital. When after a stay of more than a year the Swedish embassy prepared to return, Kaempfer joined the fleet of the Dutch East India company in the Persian gulf as chief surgeon, and in spite of fever caught at Bander Abbasi he saw something of Arabia and of many of the western coast-lands of India. In September 1689 he reached Batavia ; spent the following winter in studying Java nese natural history; and in May 1690 set out for Japan as physician to the embassy sent yearly to that country by the Dutch.
The ship in which he sailed touched at Siam, whose capital he visited ; and in September 1690 he arrived at Nagasaki, the only Japanese port then open to foreigners. Kaempfer stayed two years in Japan, during which he twice visited TokyO. In 1693 he returned to his native city where he died on Nov. 2, 1716.
Kaempfer's Amoenitatum exoticarum politico-physico-medicarum fasciculi V. (Lemgo, 1712), contains invaluable observations in Georgia, Persia and Japan. At his death the unpublished mss. were purchased by Sir Hans Sloane. Among them was a History of Japan, translated from the manuscript into English by J. G. Scheuchzer (London, 2 vols., 1727). This book contains a description of the political, social and physical state of Japan in the 17th century. For upwards of a hundred years it remained the chief source of information for the general reader, and is still not wholly obsolete. A life of the author is prefixed to the History. Another work was Icones selectae Plantarum, quas in Japonia collegit (1791).