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 The Rites Controversy had profound consequences for the history of sinology. It generated an enormous polemical literature in Europe, much of it containing detailed discussions of Chinese religion, philosophy, and ritual practice. It also demonstrated the limits of the missionary approach to the study of China: the Jesuits’ idealized portrayal of Chinese civilization was always in tension with their evangelical purpose. As one scholar observed, “the Jesuit’s approach was still ethnocentric and cultural relativist, because by portraying China as a seemingly ideal state suitable for mission work, they contributed to subjective views on China.”<ref>On the Hán Nôm Institute, see the Wikipedia article “Chữ Nôm”; the Omniglot entry “Vietnamese Chu Nom script.”</ref>
-Yet the Jesuits’ contribution to European knowledge of China was immense. They were the first Europeans to achieve genuine mastery of classical Chinese. They produced the first Chinese-European language dictionaries and grammars. They translated the Chinese Classics into Latin and European philosophical and scientific works into Chinese. They mapped China with unprecedented accuracy. Their letters and reports constituted the richest body of firsthand European observation of Chinese civilization before the nineteenth century. Whatever the limitations of their perspective, the Jesuits laid the essential foundations upon which academic sinology would later be built.
+Yet the Jesuits’ contribution to European knowledge of China was immense. They were the first Europeans to achieve genuine mastery of classical Chinese. They produced the first Chinese-European language dictionaries and grammars. They translated the Chinese Classics into Latin and European philosophical and scientific works into Chinese. They mapped China with unprecedented accuracy. Their letters and reports constituted the richest body of firsthand European observation of Chinese civilization before the nineteenth century. Whatever the limitations of their perspective, the Jesuits laid the essential foundations upon which academic sinology would later be built. As Zhang Xiping has argued, the return to this period of "first encounters" between China and Europe is essential for understanding how Western knowledge and images of China were formed, since "once we trace from the roots the source of their Eastern knowledge, a clear line of thought gradually comes into view" (一旦我们从根上摸到了他们东方知识的源头，一条清晰的思路就会逐步地呈现出来).<ref>Zhang Xiping 张西平, ''Ouzhou zaoqi Hanxue shi'' 欧洲早期汉学史 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2009), 1.</ref>
 == 6. Chinoiserie and Counter-Images ==
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 The Jesuit reports stimulated an intense European fascination with China that reached its peak in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. For the philosophers of the Enlightenment, China represented something extraordinary: a great civilization, ancient, stable, and prosperous, governed not by priests and kings claiming divine right but by a meritocratic bureaucracy selected through competitive examination and guided by a rational, secular moral philosophy. In an age when European thinkers were seeking to liberate politics and ethics from ecclesiastical control, China seemed to offer a living proof that a well-ordered society could exist without Christianity — indeed, without any revealed religion at all.
-'''Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz''' (1646–1716) was among the earliest and most enthusiastic European philosophers to engage with China. His ''Novissima Sinica'' (Latest News from China, 1697) drew on Jesuit reports to present China as a civilization worthy of the deepest respect and study. Leibniz was fascinated by the binary structure of the ''Yi Jing'' hexagrams, which he saw as anticipating his own binary number system, and he advocated a program of cultural exchange between Europe and China, arguing that each civilization had much to learn from the other.
+'''Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz''' (1646–1716) was among the earliest and most enthusiastic European philosophers to engage with China. His ''Novissima Sinica'' (Latest News from China, 1697) drew on Jesuit reports to present China as a civilization worthy of the deepest respect and study. Leibniz was fascinated by the binary structure of the ''Yi Jing'' hexagrams, which he saw as anticipating his own binary number system, and he advocated a program of cultural exchange between Europe and China — what Perkins has called a "commerce of light" — arguing that each civilization had much to learn from the other. For Leibniz, the Chinese excelled in "practical philosophy, that is, in the precepts of ethics and politics adapted to the present life and use of mortals," while Europeans excelled in theoretical sciences — a complementarity that made exchange mutually beneficial.<ref>Franklin Perkins, ''Leibniz and China: A Commerce of Light'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 142.</ref>
 '''Voltaire''' (1694–1778) went further. He made China a central element in his critique of European religious intolerance and political absolutism. In his ''Essai sur les moeurs'' (Essay on Customs, 1756), he presented China as “the most reasonable empire the world has ever known,” governed by a philosopher-emperor who ruled through moral example rather than coercion. Voltaire’s play ''L’Orphelin de la Chine'' (The Orphan of China, 1755), based on the thirteenth-century Chinese drama ''Zhaoshi gu’er'' (The Orphan of Zhao), brought a Chinese subject to the French stage and used it as a vehicle for criticizing European barbarism. Voltaire idealized Confucius as a sage who taught pure morality without recourse to miracles or mysteries.
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 * Wood, Frances. ''Did Marco Polo Go to China?'' London: Secker &amp; Warburg, 1995.
 * Yang Zhijiu. ''Make Boluo zai Zhongguo'' [Marco Polo in China]. Tianjin: Nankai daxue chubanshe, 1999.
-* Zhang Xiping. ''Ouzhou zaoqi Hanxue shi'' [History of Early European Sinology]. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2007.
+* Perkins, Franklin. ''Leibniz and China: A Commerce of Light''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
 * Zhang Xiping, ed. ''Oumei Hanxue de lishi yu xianzhuang'' [History and Present State of Euro-American Sinology]. Zhengzhou: Daxiang chubanshe, 2005.
 * Zhang Xiping. ''Ta xiang you fuzi: Hanxue yanjiu daolun'' [Confucius in Foreign Lands: An Introduction to the Study of Sinology]. Beijing: Waiyu jiaoxue yu yanjiu chubanshe, 2006.

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