In 1835, Qing scholar Cai Tinglan (蔡廷蘭, 1801–1859) was traveling from Fujian back to his home in the Penghu Islands when his vessel was caught in a violent typhoon. Blown far off course, the ship drifted at sea for more than a week before reaching the coast of central Vietnam. What began as an unexpected maritime disaster turned into a months-long journey through Vietnam during the reign of Emperor Minh Mạng. Cai recorded his experiences in 《海南雜著》 (Hainan zazhu, Vietnamese: Hải Nam Tạp Trứ), first published in 1837. From clothing, food, religious practices, and marketplaces to roads, geography, and the workings of government, the book offers a rare glimpse of Vietnamese life in the 1830s through the eyes of a Chinese scholar. Particularly fascinating is the role of writing as a means of crossing linguistic boundaries. Although Cai could not speak Vietnamese, he was able to communicate with Nguyễn officials in literary Chinese through written conversations known as “brush talks” (bút đàm). His literacy transformed him, in the eyes of Vietnamese officials, from a suspicious foreign castaway into a recognized scholar with whom they could exchange poetry and writings—and whom they would assist on his journey home. The work also reveals a Vietnam deeply connected to the maritime worlds of East and Southeast Asia, where networks of merchants, migrants from Fujian and Guangdong, officials, scholars, texts, and commodities regularly moved across what we now regard as national and political boundaries. Nearly two centuries later, Hải Nam Tạp Trứ received its first English translation as Miscellany of the South Seas: A Chinese Scholar’s Chronicle of Shipwreck and Travel through 1830s Vietnam, translated and introduced by Kathlene Baldanza and Zhao Lu and published by the University of Washington Press in 2023. Notably, the translation is based primarily on a handwritten copy now preserved at the Institute of Hán-Nôm Studies in Hanoi, under the shelf mark HVv.80. From a shipwreck in 1835, to a book published in 1837, to a text transmitted across multiple languages and now accessible online around the world, the journey of Hải Nam Tạp Trứ is nearly as remarkable as that of its author.