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Thévenot, a well-connected scholar who became Royal Librarian to Louis XIV of France in 1684, drew together travel writings from many previously unpublished sources. A contemporary reviewer was impressed by the scope of the  information provided in the book:
How the Kingdom of China is peopled; there being according to the best computation above 58 millions  of Men, not counting Magistrates, Soldiers, Priests,  Eunuchs, Women and Children ... Many other curious informations might be borrow’d from this Author, concerning the Customs, Studies, Exercises of the Chinese [and] of the Structure and Antiquity of their Wall…
One of Thevenot’s sources was the Polish Jesuit missionary, Michał Piotr Boym (c.1612–59), one of the first Westerners to travel widely on the Chinese mainland, and to study Chinese botany. Here we see Boym's depiction of the lychee and the giam-bo or rose apple, labelled with Chinese characters. Boym writes that the lychee is produced in the southern provinces and exported to the north during the winter, and that the Chinese make a wine from it and use the seeds in medicine. The variety of rose apple Boym associates with the Chinese has a yellow fruit with a fragrance like a rose.

Citation:
10. Melchisedec Thévenot, Relations de divers voyages curieux, Vol. I (Paris, 1696),
Marsh's Library Exhibits,
accessed December 6, 2025,
https://www.marshlibrary.ie/digi/items/show/565