"By the time of his first visit to Arakan in 1999, Van Galen had already read about Southeast Asia and Arakan for several years. At a young age, he had read the children's book, De Scheepsjongens van Bontekoe, which was based on the seventeenth-century travel logs of an East India ship's captain named Bontekoe, who was shipwrecked in the Indian Ocean. 'The story had become a classic already during the seventeenth century. Of course, I never realized just to what extent the stories were true until I started doing my research on Arakan, and going through the archival material I came across his name again,' he recalls. But visiting the country one studies as a historian is felt by Van Galen to be a vital part in the process of understanding it..."