Returning to Europe, after a residence in the East of thirty-three years, Titsingh designed to publish the result of his Japanese researches, in both Dutch and French; but, before having done it, he died at Paris, in 1812, leaving his large fortune and his collections and manuscripts to an only child of his, by an Eastern woman, by whom the fortune was soon spent, and the manuscripts and curiosities sold and scattered, though some of them ultimately fell into appreciating hands.[70] Among his translations, the one to which Titsingh ascribed the greatest importance was that of the “Nippon Ōdai Ichiran,” an abridged Japanese chronicle, from 600 B. C. to A. D. 1611, compiled in the year 1652, and printed at Miyako. Having been carefully compared by Klaproth with the original,—a task, as he says, from the manifold defects of Titsingh’s version, almost equivalent to a new translation,—and having been enriched with an introduction, a supplement and notes, this work was published in 1834, in French, at the expense of the Oriental Translation Fund, under the title of “Annales des Empereurs du Japan.” Though highly valuable as a specimen of what Japanese histories are, and though Klaproth’s introduction and notes contain some curious information, this performance is, on the whole, exceedingly dry, while it adds but little to the abstract given by Kämpfer of this or some other similar work. A criticism which Titsingh himself makes upon it, in a letter to the prince of Tamba, to whom he had intended to dedicate his translation, is worthy of notice, as going to show how little, with all its formal precision of years and months, the earlier Japanese chronology is entitled to historical respect. “Must we not suppose,” says Titsingh, “that the Japanese, so jealous of their neighbors, the Chinese, have, in writing their own history, endeavored to fill up many gaps in it by prolonging the reigns of their earlier Dairi? There is in your history a period of one thousand and sixty-one years occupied by the reigns of only sixteen Dairi. The duration of the life of Jimmu, of the reigns of Kōan, of Suijin, and the life of Ōjin, appear altogether improbable. The first died at the age of one hundred and twenty-seven years. The second reigned one hundred and two years, the third ninety-nine years. The last lived one hundred and ten years. These statements are too extraordinary to be blindly believed. Grant, even, that a chaste and frugal way of living may have secured for these princes a very advanced age, but how does it happen that, after Nintoku Tennō (the seventeenth Dairi), none exceeded the ordinary limit of human life?