This paper explores memory and representation of the past in geographical writings about distant places, in particular, a description of China by an otherwise unknown merchant, written in Persian, with the form and content of a political treatise, dedicated and presented to the Ottoman sultan, Selim I in 1516 (and then to Suleyman I in 1522). This and other Ottoman texts commemorate certain notions of China, asserting in the process both imperial claims, and criticisms of Ottoman governance. The claims and the critiques both appeal to an understanding of history in which the Ottoman Empire is the culmination of desires for a just society, referring to both recent and distant, legendary pasts. While a sense of time and history is crucial for locating one's self and one's community in larger webs of meaning, anyone wanting to describe or understand a distant and culturally foreign community faces an additional challenge: there may not be a shared framework of meanings and historical referents in which that community's self-understandings and sense of history are mutually intelligible with one's own. The fact that a traveler's view is a mere a snapshot of a distant, foreign society at the time of the voyage puts any deeper, historical understanding of that society at the mercy of both its own, particular agendas of self-presentation, and the mirage of stasis. Thus, representations of Chinese history in Persian texts written for or reproduced by the Ottoman state during the late 15th and early 16th centuries, situate the ascendant Ottoman Empire, now based in Constantinople, the former capital of “Rome”, within a canonical geographical-political framework, alongside other monumentalized empires. In this act of legitimizing by memorializing, our texts draw not only on (relatively) local textual traditions of commemoration, but on the commemorative/memorial practices and more recent historical memory of China's own Muslim diaspora, who, by means of a shared social technology of commemoration, both established their place in and connection to the larger 'ummah, and effectively mediated the Chinese and Anatolian Muslims' historical memories. That this possibility existed for our main author suggests not only a significant institutional and cultural continuity between Muslim communities in China and Anatolia, but also effective channels of communication, which may be said to constitute part of a far-flung Islamicate public sphere.