Gifts, like languages, are about sharing, understanding, and bonding. Rhetoric of service and symbolic performance are part and parcel of the function of a gift in situ, and we need to take them into account systematically when addressing the specificity of Oriental gifts in our larger project for this blog and any future research derived from it. Taking the example of two untranslatable words in English travel accounts from the period - “Peshkash” and “Khilat” - I undertake here to take the measure of the interpretive protocol which characterises a transcultural gift beyond its sheer material form in a diplomatic context.