History of Sinology/Chapter 1

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Chapter 1: Early Encounters — Travelers, Traders, and the First Reports on China

1. Introduction: Before the Discipline

Long before the first university chair of sinology was established at the College de France in December 1814, Europeans had been accumulating knowledge about China for over two millennia. This knowledge was fragmentary, often fantastical, and filtered through multiple layers of intermediaries — Central Asian nomads, Arab merchants, Persian traders, Byzantine chroniclers. Yet it was not negligible. By the time Jean-Pierre Abel-Remusat inaugurated the academic study of Chinese language and civilization in Paris, Europe already possessed a considerable body of writing about China: Greek geographical treatises, Roman natural histories, medieval travel narratives, Jesuit ethnographies, Enlightenment philosophical treatises, and a rich visual culture of chinoiserie. The first chapter of any history of sinology must therefore begin not with the discipline itself but with its long prehistory, the centuries of cultural encounter that made the discipline both possible and necessary.

China and Europe occupy opposite ends of the Eurasian landmass, separated by seemingly endless deserts and formidable mountain ranges. In antiquity, the only connections between these two poles of civilization were maintained by the nomadic peoples of the Central Asian heartland. Oral legends and travelers’ accounts, transmitted from generation to generation, formed the earliest Western knowledge of China — half myth, half hearsay. Yet even this dim awareness had consequences. It shaped European geographical imagination, stimulated trade and diplomacy, and created a repertoire of images — the Seres as a just and peaceful people, Cathay as a land of inexhaustible wealth — that would persist for centuries and profoundly condition the way Europeans approached the study of Chinese civilization when they finally undertook it in earnest.

What follows traces the long arc from the earliest Greek references to the “Seres” through the medieval travel accounts that culminated in Marco Polo, the Portuguese opening of direct maritime contact, the Jesuit mission that produced the first systematic European scholarship on China, and the Enlightenment engagement with Chinese thought and culture. The chapter closes with the counter-reaction — the turn against China in European thought from Hegel onward — and with the question of how these early encounters laid the groundwork for sinology as an academic discipline.

2. Antiquity: The Seres and the Sinae

The earliest European awareness of China was mediated through silk. The Greeks knew of a distant eastern people whom they called the “Seres” (Seres), a name almost certainly derived from the Chinese word for silk. The Greek physician Ctesias of Cnidus, writing around 400 BCE, is generally regarded as the earliest Greek author to use the term “Seres” in reference to the Chinese, though his account was embedded in a broader and largely fabulous description of the East.

Herodotus, the “father of history,” recorded in his Histories (fifth century BCE) that as early as the seventh century BCE, Greek knowledge extended along a trade route running from the northeastern corner of the Black Sea, through the Volga basin, across the Ural Mountains, and into the region between the Irtysh River and the Altai-Tian Shan mountain ranges. Whether this constituted genuine awareness of China remains debated. The French orientalist George Coedes argued that “Herodotus’s knowledge could not have extended to such remote distances.” Yet the existence of long-distance overland trade networks connecting the Mediterranean and East Asian worlds is now well established by archaeological evidence, and it is not implausible that garbled reports about the ultimate source of silk reached Greek ears by the fifth century BCE.

What the Greeks believed about the Seres is revealing less for what it tells us about China than for what it tells us about the Greek imagination of the East. Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century CE, offered the following account in his Natural History:

The first people one encounters there are the Seres, famous for the wool produced in their forests. They spray water on the leaves of trees, washing off the white down, and then their wives complete the twin tasks of spinning and weaving.

Silk, in other words, was imagined as a kind of vegetable wool harvested from trees — an understandable misapprehension for people who had never seen a silkworm. More than a century after Pliny, the Greek writer Pausanias offered a more accurate account in his Description of Greece. He correctly identified the source of silk as a worm:

The Seres use thread for making cloth of silk, which comes not from any plant but from another source… In their country there is a creature which the Greeks call “Ser”… It has eight feet, like a spider… The Seres rear these creatures for four years, feeding them on millet; in the fifth year, they give them green reeds, which is the food the creatures prefer. They live only five years; when they eat too many reeds, they become bloated and burst, and inside is found the silk.

Though still riddled with errors, Pausanias’s account represented a genuine advance in understanding. The Chinese scholar Zhang Xinglang argued that the word “Ser” may derive from the pronunciation of the character for “silkworm” (can) in the Zhejiang dialect; with the addition of Greek and Latin suffixes, this became “Seres” and eventually the Latin “Sericum,” ancestor of the English word “silk.”

What did the Greeks and Romans believe the Seres looked like? Pliny described them as having “bodies taller than ordinary people, with red hair and blue eyes, and rough voices” — a description that obviously has nothing to do with actual Chinese people and may reflect confusion with Central Asian intermediary populations. The Roman writer Lucian claimed the Seres lived to extraordinary ages, “up to three hundred years,” thanks to their practice of drinking cold water constantly.

More interesting than these physical descriptions are the moral qualities attributed to the Seres. As early as the first century CE, Pomponius Mela described them as “a people full of justice, famous for their unique manner of trade: they place their goods in a remote location, and buyers come to take them only when the sellers are absent.” The late second- or early third-century writer Bardesanes offered an even more idealized portrait:

Among the Seres, law strictly forbids killing, prostitution, theft, and the worship of idols. In this vast country, one sees neither temples nor prostitutes nor adulterous women, neither thieves roaming free nor murderers nor victims of murder.

This image of the Seres as a just, peaceful, and morally upright people exercised a lasting influence. The fourth-century Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus echoed it: “The Seres live in peace, without weapons, without war. Quiet and silent by nature, they do not disturb their neighbors. The climate there is temperate, the air clean, the sky rarely obscured by fog. There are many forests, through which one walks without seeing the sky.”

The British scholar Henry Yule synthesized the ancient accounts as follows: “The land of the Seres is of vast extent, with a large population, reaching to the ocean and the edge of the inhabited world in the east, and extending westward almost to the Imaus Mountains and the borders of Bactria. The Seres are a civilized people, mild in temperament, upright and simple, unwilling to enter into conflict with their neighbors, even averse to close contact with others, but willing to sell their products, of which silk is the chief, as well as silk textiles, wool, and excellent iron.”

The Roman period brought some advances in concrete knowledge. The sixth-century Byzantine writer Cosmas Indicopleustes, in his Universal Christian Topography, offered a reasonably accurate account of China’s geographical position:

I may mention that the silk-producing country is located in the most remote part of the Indian lands… This country is called Tzinitza, and its left side is surrounded by the sea… From the sea route to Tzinitza, one must cross the entire Indian Ocean, and the distance is very great. Therefore, those who travel overland from Tzinitza to Persia greatly shorten their journey.

The British scholar Yule observed that Cosmas “spoke of China in terms of genuine fact, without portraying it as a semi-mysterious country.”

Perhaps the most remarkable Roman-era account of China comes from the Byzantine historian Theophylact Simocatta (early seventh century). Drawing on Turkic sources, Theophylact described a people he called the “Taugas” (from the Chinese “Da Wei,” meaning “Great Wei” — a reference to the Northern Wei dynasty). He recorded that the ruler of the Taugas was called “Taisan” — evidently a transliteration of the Chinese “Tianzi” (Son of Heaven) — and described a war between a “black-clothed nation” and a “red-clothed nation” separated by a great river. The Chinese scholar Zhang Xinglang identified this river as the Yangtze and the conflict as Emperor Wen of Sui’s reunification of China in 589 CE: the Sui dynasty in the north favored black, while the Chen dynasty in the south favored red. Theophylact also mentioned that the Taugas built a new city near their old capital, which Zhang identified as the Sui construction of a new capital near the ancient city of Chang’an, known in Central Asian and Western Asian sources as “Khumdan.”

This was, as Zhang argued, “the first truly concrete record of Chinese knowledge in Western history, and it can be corroborated in Chinese historical sources.” Western sinologists subsequently confirmed his analysis. With Theophylact, the dim and mythological European awareness of China began its slow transformation toward historical reality.

The Alexandrian geographer Claudius Ptolemy (c. 100–170 CE) gave the ancient dual nomenclature its most systematic expression in his Geography. Ptolemy distinguished between “Serice” (the land of the Seres, reached by the overland route across Central Asia) and “Sinae” (reached by the maritime route through the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia). Though Ptolemy did not realize that both names referred to the same country, his distinction reflected real geographical knowledge: there were indeed two routes connecting the Roman world and China, one overland through Central Asia and one maritime through the Indian Ocean. The Latin term “Sina,” ancestor of “China” in most European languages, appears to derive from “Qin” — the dynasty (221–206 BCE) that first unified China and whose name became, through Persian and Arabic intermediaries, the standard Western designation for the country. Thus the two ancient names for China — “Seres” (from silk) and “Sinae/Sina” (from Qin) — reflected two different routes of transmission and two different aspects of the Chinese civilization’s encounter with the wider world.

Ptolemy’s geography, rediscovered in Europe in the fifteenth century, exercised enormous influence on the Renaissance geographical imagination. His placement of “Serice” and “Sinae” at the eastern extremity of the known world stimulated European curiosity about what lay beyond and contributed to the impetus for the great voyages of discovery.

3. Medieval Travelers: From Legend to Eyewitness

The rise of the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth century transformed the relationship between Europe and East Asia. When Temujin was proclaimed Chinggis Khan in 1206, a process began that would, within decades, unite the Eurasian landmass under a single political authority to a degree never achieved before or since. The Mongol conquest, terrifying as it was to the peoples in its path, created conditions of unprecedented connectivity. The vast network of relay stations (yam) that sustained Mongol communications made it possible, as contemporaries reported, to walk from the eastern end of the earth to the west carrying a plate of gold on one’s head in perfect safety. “It was during the Mongol era that China first became truly known to Europe,” as Yule observed.

The first European to leave a substantial written account of the Mongol world was Giovanni di Pian del Carpine, an Italian Franciscan friar. In the aftermath of the Mongol devastation of Eastern Europe, Pope Innocent IV dispatched Carpine in 1245 on a diplomatic mission to the Mongol court, hoping to ascertain the Mongols’ military intentions and negotiate a peace. After an arduous journey, Carpine reached the Mongol capital of Karakorum and witnessed the enthronement of the Great Khan Guyuk. He returned to Lyon in 1247, bearing a letter from the Khan to the Pope.

Carpine’s Historia Mongalorum was the first European work about the Mongols, and scholars have judged it to be, “in terms of the reliability and clarity of its introduction to the East and China, without peer for a considerable period of time.” Two qualities distinguished it from earlier accounts. First, it was based on direct observation: Carpine had lived in the Mongol Empire for over three years, and most of what he recorded was either personally witnessed or reported to him by other Europeans (Ukrainians, Frenchmen) who had lived among the Mongols for years. This marked a fundamental break from the tradition of oral transmission that had characterized earlier European accounts of the East. Second, Carpine displayed an admirable impartiality. Though a Franciscan friar, “he did not present the Mongols with the spirit of a missionary”; he “did not burden his readers with bloated doctrinal commentary,” and his “evaluation of the virtues and defects of the local people was objective, while his assessment of their social moral codes was prudent and measured.”

Carpine’s description of “Cathay” — the name by which Europe then knew China — included the observation that the Cathayans “are pagans who possess their own special script, and seem to have both the New and Old Testaments… they are people of refined manners and almost humane behavior. They do not wear beards, and their facial features are very reminiscent of the Mongols, though not as broad.” He also noted that “no craftsmen more skilled in any trade can be found in the world” and that “their country is rich in wheat, wine, gold, silk, and all the necessities of human nature.” The French sinologist Paul Pelliot regarded Carpine’s description of the Cathayans as “the very first made by a European” and noted that “he was also the first person to introduce the Chinese language and literature,” though the references to temples and monks suggest he was describing Chinese Buddhist texts.

William of Rubruck (Willem van Rubroeck), a Flemish Franciscan, traveled to the Mongol court on behalf of King Louis IX of France. He departed from Constantinople on 7 May 1253, reached the Great Khan Mongke, and returned to Paris on 15 August 1255. His Itinerarium ad partes orientales advanced European knowledge of both the Mongols and China in several important respects.

Rubruck’s most consequential insight was his identification of “Cathay” with the ancient “Seres”: “Great Cathay, whose people I believe to be the ancient Seres. They produce the finest silk (which the people call ‘si’).” Scholars have recognized this as a landmark in the European understanding of Asia. Rubruck “was the first European to identify with considerable accuracy the relationship between the ‘Seres’ of ancient geography and the Chinese — that is, a country and its people”; “he reconnected the Western tradition of the image of China that had been interrupted.”

Rubruck also introduced several aspects of Chinese civilization that no European had previously reported: Chinese medicine (“their physicians are very knowledgeable about the properties of herbs and skillfully diagnose by feeling the pulse; they do not use diuretics, nor do they examine urine”), Chinese Buddhism (“the idol-worshipping monks all wear wide red robes”), paper money (“the currency in Cathay is paper, the length and width of a palm, with several lines of characters printed upon it”), and block printing (“they write using brushes, as painters paint; they combine several characters into a single form, making a complete word”).

Rubruck had not himself visited China, but many Chinese from the north lived in Karakorum at the time, and his information was likely gathered from them.

No medieval travel account approached the influence of Marco Polo’s Divisament dou Monde (Description of the World), also known as Il Milione. Marco Polo, son of the Venetian merchant Niccolo Polo, traveled to China with his father and uncle in 1271, at the age of fifteen. They arrived at the court of Kublai Khan in 1275 and remained in China for seventeen years. Marco enjoyed the Khan’s favor, serving in various administrative and diplomatic capacities. The Polos returned to Europe in 1291–1295, traveling by sea from Quanzhou (Zayton) through Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. In 1298, imprisoned in Genoa after a naval battle between Venice and Genoa, Marco dictated his account to the Pisan writer Rustichello da Pisa.

The book was an immediate sensation. Copied and translated into numerous European languages, it became what contemporaries called “a great wonder of the world.” Marco Polo died in 1324; his book lived on for centuries.

The Divisament dou Monde comprised four books totaling 229 chapters, covering more than a hundred countries and cities. Its treatment of Yuan China was unprecedentedly detailed. Marco described the political struggles of the Yuan dynasty — the rebellion of Nayan, the affair of Ahmad Fanakati — in terms that can be verified against Chinese historical sources. He explained the Mongol military system of tens, hundreds, thousands, and ten-thousands (mingghan). He described the twelve provinces (xingsheng), the elaborate relay-station (zhan) system with “more than 10,000 stations, more than 200,000 horses, and more than 10,000 magnificently appointed relay palaces,” and the Grand Canal transport system. He offered detailed accounts of the paper currency system, the Khan’s palace (“the walls and rooms are all covered with gold and silver, and decorated with dragons, beasts, birds, riders, and other figures”), the imperial hunting grounds, and the annual festivals.

Marco’s account was not confined to the court. He described numerous Chinese cities — Hangzhou, Suzhou, Fuzhou, Quanzhou, Xi’an, Chengdu, Yangzhou, and many others — offering what amounted to a panoramic survey of Chinese civilization that far transcended the Yuan dynasty itself. He described Chinese funerary customs, the twelve-animal zodiac, cuisine and drinking culture, the silk trade, and the extraordinary commercial vitality of the great cities. Of Hangzhou he wrote that it was “the greatest city in the world,” with “twelve thousand bridges” and a population and wealth that dwarfed anything in Europe.

The mainstream of Western scholarship has long regarded Marco Polo’s account as fundamentally reliable, despite acknowledged exaggerations and errors. The Chinese scholar Yang Zhijiu noted that “Marco Polo’s book records a great quantity of material about Chinese politics, economy, social conditions, personalities, and customs, the vast majority of which can be verified in Chinese documents.” As early as 1941, Yang found Chinese documentary evidence directly corroborating specific details in Marco Polo’s narrative — a discovery that the scholar Xiang Da praised as providing “reliable evidence for the authenticity of the Travels.”

Skeptics have periodically questioned whether Marco Polo ever visited China at all, pointing to his failure to mention the Great Wall, tea, foot-binding, or the Chinese writing system. However, the weight of scholarly opinion remains in Marco Polo’s favor. As Yang Zhijiu summarized: “He was the first person to cross the entire Asian continent and make a detailed record. Regarding the internal regions and frontier areas of China, and the political, social, religious, and commercial conditions of other Asian countries and peoples, he recorded everything. Though his style was plain, his account was vivid and interesting. No other work before or after his matched it in breadth and scope.”

The impact of the Divisament dou Monde extended far beyond the domain of geographical knowledge. It must be understood in the context of the Italian Renaissance, then in its early stirrings. Marco Polo’s book expanded the European worldview beyond the confines of the Mediterranean, breaking what one scholar called “the myth that Europe was the world” and presenting “a China of flesh and blood before European eyes, making them so astonished that they dared not believe it.” The 1375 Catalan Atlas — a landmark in the history of European cartography — was essentially a cartographic rendering of Marco Polo’s geography.

The book also stimulated secular desire. The wealth of Cathay, the beauty of its women, the exotic customs of the East — all this “became a symbol of a new Italian dream-life, an ideal kingdom of worldly aspiration.” Most consequentially, the Divisament dou Monde helped inspire the Age of Discovery. Christopher Columbus was one of its most avid readers; his annotated copy survives in the Biblioteca Colombina in Seville. Columbus sailed west in 1492 in search of Cathay, carrying letters of introduction from the Spanish monarchs to the Great Khan. When he reached the Caribbean, he believed he had found the coast of Asia. “This conviction did not die out until more than twenty years after Columbus’s death.”

The Florentine geographer Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, another devotee of Marco Polo, had drawn a map suggesting that only 2,550 nautical miles separated Lisbon from the port of Zayton. In a letter to Columbus he described the wealth of Cathay in rapturous terms borrowed directly from Marco Polo: “The trade of that place is so great that the commerce of the entire rest of the world could not equal that of the single great port of Zayton.” As the English historian John Raleigh wrote: “The quest for Cathay was indeed the theme of the long poem of adventure, the will and soul of centuries of seafaring.”

In 1603, the Jesuit missionary Bento de Goes finally proved that “Cathay” and “China” were one and the same. His epitaph read: “Seeking Cathay, he found heaven.” For Columbus, the formulation might be: “Seeking Cathay, he found America.”

Between Rubruck and Marco Polo, and in the decades that followed, numerous other Europeans traveled to the Mongol Empire and to China itself. Their accounts, though individually less influential than Marco Polo’s, collectively transformed European knowledge of the East.

John of Montecorvino (1294–1328), an Italian Franciscan, was the first Catholic missionary to reach China. Carrying letters from Pope Nicholas IV to the Yuan emperor, he arrived in Dadu (Beijing) in 1294. Over the following decades, he built churches, baptized thousands, and effectively founded the Catholic Church in China. His three letters to Europe constitute authentic documentary evidence about Yuan-dynasty China.

Odoric of Pordenone (1318–1328), another Franciscan, traveled extensively through southern China for six years, visiting Guangzhou, Quanzhou, Fuzhou, Hangzhou, Yangzhou, and Nanjing. His descriptions of Chinese cities were the most geographically wide-ranging that any European had yet produced. Of Hangzhou he wrote: “I came to the city of Hangzhou, whose name means ‘City of Heaven.’ It is the greatest city in the world… its circumference is a hundred English miles… it has twelve thousand bridges.” He described the commercial vitality of Guangzhou (“all of Italy does not have as many ships”), Chinese cuisine, Buddhist monasteries, Tibetan sky burials, and the daily life of wealthy Chinese families.

Giovanni de’ Marignolli (1342–1353), also a Franciscan, arrived in Dadu in 1342 as a papal envoy and was received with great ceremony by the last Yuan emperor, Toghon Temur. He presented the emperor with a horse on behalf of the Pope, an event that inspired five poems and odes about “heavenly horses” in the Yuanshi xuanji (Selected Yuan Dynasty Poems). His account was incorporated into a history of Bohemia and was translated into German in 1820.

Arab and Persian travelers also produced significant accounts of China. The great Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta visited China in the 1340s, and Arab geographical and commercial literature contained substantial information about Chinese ports, trade goods, and customs. However, most of these Arabic-language accounts were not translated into European languages until the eighteenth or nineteenth century, and their influence on the European image of China before the modern period was therefore indirect, mediated through the broader Islamic geographical tradition that served as an intermediary between East and West.

4. The Portuguese Opening (Fifteenth–Sixteenth Centuries)

The fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the consolidation of Ottoman power over the eastern Mediterranean trade routes gave new urgency to the search for alternative sea routes to Asia. Portugal, positioned on the Atlantic edge of Europe, led the way. Vasco da Gama’s arrival in Calicut in 1498 opened the sea route to India; within two decades, Portuguese ships had reached the coast of China.

In 1513, Jorge Alvares became the first Portuguese to reach the southern coast of China. In 1517, Tome Pires arrived in Guangzhou (Canton) as the first official Portuguese ambassador to China, though his embassy ended disastrously — the Chinese court, suspicious of foreign intentions, imprisoned his delegation. The Portuguese established themselves at Malacca (1511), from which they traded with Chinese merchants, and eventually secured a permanent foothold at Macau in the 1550s, when the Ming government granted them the right to establish a trading settlement on the peninsula in exchange for assistance in suppressing piracy.

Macau would become the essential gateway between Europe and China for the next three centuries — the point through which missionaries entered China, through which Chinese goods flowed to Europe, and through which European knowledge of China was filtered and transmitted. It was from Macau that the Jesuit mission to China was launched, and it was in Macau that some of the earliest European-language publications about China were produced. The Portuguese presence also established the first direct, sustained contact between European and Chinese people, creating a community of interpreters, traders, and cultural intermediaries whose role in the transmission of knowledge has only recently begun to receive the scholarly attention it deserves.

The Spanish colonization of the Philippines from the 1560s onward created a second major point of contact between European and Chinese civilizations. Manila’s Chinatown (Parian) became one of the largest Chinese communities outside China, and the Manila galleon trade (1565–1815) connected China, the Philippines, Mexico, and Spain in a global trading network. Between 1593 and 1607, the Spanish Dominican mission in Manila operated a press and produced four books on Christian belief in Chinese — among the earliest examples of Chinese-language printing outside China. Though less celebrated than the Jesuits in the history of sinology, the Spanish Dominicans and Franciscans in Manila made significant contributions to European knowledge of Chinese language and culture.

The first attempt to provide a thorough description of China for European readers was Juan Gonzalez de Mendoza’s Historia de las cosas mas notables, ritos y costumbres del gran reyno de la China (History of the Most Notable Things, Rites, and Customs of the Great Kingdom of China), published in Rome in 1585. Though Mendoza himself never visited China, he compiled his account from Portuguese, Spanish, and missionary sources. The work was widely read and translated into numerous European languages. Scholars have judged that “these accounts described with great vividness and accuracy the main features of China at that time. Some of these features belong to the imperishable essence of Chinese traditional culture, while others were specific to that century — the period of the late Ming dynasty’s zenith and incipient decline. Mendoza’s work touched upon the substance of life in ancient China; its publication marked the beginning of an era in which a usable compendium of knowledge about China and its institutions became available to the European scholarly world.”

5. The Jesuit Mission as Proto-Sinology

If the medieval travelers provided Europe with its first eyewitness accounts of China, it was the Jesuit missionaries of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries who produced the first systematic European scholarship on Chinese language, history, philosophy, and culture. The Jesuits were, in a meaningful sense, Europe’s first sinologists.

The Jesuit mission to China was inaugurated by Michele Ruggieri, who arrived in Macau in 1579 and began studying Chinese, and by Matteo Ricci, who arrived in Guangzhou in 1583 and spent the rest of his life in China, dying in Beijing in 1610. Ricci’s genius lay in what later scholars have called the “accommodation strategy” (accommodatio): the policy of adapting Christian teaching to Chinese cultural forms, presenting Christianity not as a foreign religion but as compatible with — indeed, a completion of — the best elements of Chinese philosophy, particularly Confucianism. This strategy required the Jesuits to undertake a profound study of the Chinese language and the Chinese classics, a study that produced, as a scholarly by-product, an enormous body of knowledge about China.

Ricci learned classical Chinese, adopted the dress of a Confucian scholar, and engaged Chinese intellectuals in philosophical dialogue. He translated Euclid’s Elements into Chinese (with the help of the scholar-official Xu Guangqi), produced a world map in Chinese (Kunyu wanguo quantu, 1602) that introduced Chinese readers to the full extent of the world’s geography, and wrote treatises on friendship (Jiaoyou lun, 1595) and moral philosophy in elegant classical Chinese. His Tianzhu shiyi (The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, 1603) attempted to demonstrate the compatibility of Christianity and Confucianism through philosophical argument rather than dogmatic assertion. For European audiences, Ricci’s journals and letters — published posthumously by Nicolas Trigault as De Christiana Expeditione apud Sinas (1615) — provided the most detailed and sophisticated account of Chinese civilization that Europe had yet received.

The scholarly by-products of the Jesuit mission were extraordinary in their range and depth. Over the course of two centuries, the Jesuits in China produced Chinese-Latin and Chinese-Portuguese dictionaries, grammars of the Chinese language, translations of Chinese historical and literary texts, detailed maps of the Chinese empire, astronomical observations, botanical and zoological descriptions, and voluminous correspondence reporting on Chinese politics, society, customs, and intellectual life. They introduced European mathematics, astronomy, and cartography to the Chinese court, where several Jesuits served as official astronomers and advisors — most notably Johann Adam Schall von Bell and Ferdinand Verbiest under the early Qing emperors. In return, they transmitted to Europe an unprecedented wealth of information about Chinese civilization.

The Jesuits’ most consequential scholarly achievement was the translation and interpretation of the Chinese Classics. The publication of Confucius Sinarum Philosophus (Confucius, Philosopher of the Chinese) in Paris in 1687 was a landmark event. Compiled by Philippe Couplet, Prospero Intorcetta, Christian Herdtrich, and Francois de Rougemont, the work presented Latin translations of three of the Four Books — the Analects, the Doctrine of the Mean, and the Great Learning — together with a biographical essay on Confucius and a chronological table of Chinese history. It was dedicated to Louis XIV.

The Confucius Sinarum Philosophus made Chinese philosophy accessible to European intellectuals for the first time. The image of Confucius as a rational moral philosopher, teaching virtue and good government without recourse to revelation or supernatural authority, proved enormously attractive to Enlightenment thinkers seeking alternatives to the European theological tradition. The book’s impact on European intellectual history can scarcely be overstated.

Around 1720, the French Jesuit Jean-Francois Noel as even produced a Latin translation of the Dao de jing, though this version deviated significantly from the original, reading Christian Trinitarian theology into the Daoist text — a revealing example of the hermeneutic difficulties that attended early European engagement with Chinese thought.

The culmination of the Jesuit project of describing China for Europe was Jean-Baptiste Du Halde’s Description geographique, historique, chronologique, politique et physique de l’Empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise (Geographical, Historical, Chronological, Political, and Physical Description of the Empire of China and of Chinese Tartary), published in Paris in four volumes in 1735. Du Halde himself never visited China; his work was a massive compilation of Jesuit reports, letters, and studies, organized into a wide-ranging encyclopedia of Chinese civilization. It covered geography, history, government, religion, customs, language, literature, science, arts, and manufactures. Translated into English, German, Dutch, and Russian, the Description became the standard European reference work on China for the rest of the eighteenth century and deeply shaped the Enlightenment image of China as an orderly, rational, and well-governed empire.

The Jesuit enterprise in China was ultimately undermined by the Chinese Rites Controversy (Querelle des Rites), a prolonged and bitter dispute within the Catholic Church over whether Chinese converts to Christianity could continue to practice ancestral rites and venerate Confucius. The Jesuits, following Ricci’s accommodation strategy, argued that these practices were civil and social in nature, not religious, and were therefore compatible with Christianity. The Dominican and Franciscan orders disagreed, contending that the rites constituted idolatry.

The controversy escalated from a local missionary dispute into a major confrontation involving the papacy, the French and Portuguese crowns, and the Kangxi Emperor himself. In 1704 and again in 1715, Pope Clement XI ruled against the Jesuit position. The Kangxi Emperor, outraged by what he perceived as papal interference in Chinese affairs, restricted missionary activity in China. The controversy dragged on until 1742, when Pope Benedict XIV definitively condemned the Chinese rites, effectively ending the Jesuit accommodation strategy. In 1773, the Society of Jesus itself was suppressed by Pope Clement XIV.

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.”

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.

6. Chinoiserie and Counter-Images

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.

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.

Christian Wolff (1679–1754), the influential German philosopher, delivered a lecture at the University of Halle in 1721 (Oratio de Sinarum philosophia practica, Discourse on the Practical Philosophy of the Chinese) in which he argued that the Chinese had achieved a high level of moral philosophy through reason alone, without divine revelation. The lecture provoked a scandal: Wolff’s Pietist colleagues at Halle accused him of atheism, and King Frederick William I of Prussia expelled him from the university on pain of death. Wolff’s case became a cause celebre for Enlightenment advocates of intellectual freedom.

The philosophical engagement with China was accompanied by an aesthetic one. From the late seventeenth century onward, European elites developed an intense taste for Chinese decorative arts and design, a phenomenon known as chinoiserie. Chinese porcelain, lacquerware, silk, and tea became fashionable luxury goods. Chinese-style gardens, pagodas, and pavilions were built in the parks and estates of European aristocrats. Chinese motifs appeared in painting, furniture, textiles, and interior decoration.

“The fever-like admiration of a China image, which certainly was not the true China, is called Chinoiserie,” as one historian of sinology has noted. “The Chinoiserie even involved European philosophers like Voltaire and Leibniz, who compared China to an ideal country without religion and still moral values, represented by a wise emperor.”

The chinoiserie phenomenon was significant for the history of sinology because it created a broad European audience for things Chinese and generated demand for more and better information about China. At the same time, it was fundamentally superficial: chinoiserie was more about European fantasy than Chinese reality. The Chinese objects and motifs that circulated in European culture were detached from their original contexts and meanings, appropriated as exotic decoration. European imitations of Chinese art reveal, in their similarities and differences from the originals, the principles that Westerners believed to govern Chinese aesthetics — principles that often said more about European taste than about Chinese artistic traditions.

The idealized image of China that had served the Enlightenment philosophers so well did not survive the turn of the nineteenth century. As European power grew and direct contact with China increased — culminating in the humiliations of the Opium Wars (1839–1842, 1856–1860) — the image of China as a model civilization gave way to its opposite: China as a stagnant, backward, and despotic society.

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) was among the first to challenge the Enlightenment enthusiasm for China. In his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Humanity, 1784–1791), Herder argued that Chinese civilization, for all its antiquity, lacked the dynamism and creative energy of European culture.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) delivered the most influential philosophical dismissal of China. In his Vorlesungen uber die Philosophie der Geschichte (Lectures on the Philosophy of History), Hegel placed China at the very beginning of world history — not as a compliment but as a condemnation. China represented the stage of “Oriental despotism,” in which only one person (the emperor) was free; it was a civilization that had entered history early and then stopped, remaining essentially unchanged for millennia. “The Chinese have as a general characteristic a remarkable skill in imitation,” Hegel wrote, “but the Exalted, the Ideal and Beautiful is not the domain of their art and skill.”

Hegel constructed a geographical-philosophical schema in which world history progressed from East to West — from China through India, Persia, the ancient Near East, Greece, and Rome to the Germanic peoples of Europe, where the fullest realization of human freedom was achieved. Chinese philosophy, despite the fact that Confucius had articulated a “Golden Rule” comparable to Kant’s categorical imperative, was declared inferior to European philosophy.

This Hegelian dismissal had enormous consequences. It provided intellectual legitimacy for the European sense of superiority over China that accompanied the age of imperialism. At the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, China was widely regarded as “the sick man of Asia” — static, unable to modernize, a civilization that had once been great but had been surpassed and left behind by the dynamism of the West. This image, no less ideologically constructed than the Enlightenment idealization, would dominate European thought about China well into the twentieth century and would deeply condition the way in which academic sinology developed as a discipline.

7. From Curiosity to Discipline

The long history of early encounters traced in this chapter — from the Greeks’ dim awareness of the Seres, through the medieval travelers’ firsthand reports, the Portuguese opening of direct maritime contact, the Jesuits’ systematic scholarship, and the Enlightenment engagement and counter-reaction — created the conditions for the emergence of sinology as an academic discipline. By the early nineteenth century, Europe possessed a substantial body of knowledge about China: translations of the Chinese Classics, detailed geographical and historical descriptions, dictionaries and grammars, and a rich visual and material culture of Chinese art and design. It also possessed a set of unresolved questions about China’s place in world history, the nature of Chinese thought and religion, and the meaning of China’s apparent difference from European civilization.

The establishment of the first Chair of Chinese and Manchu Languages and Literatures at the College de France on 11 December 1814 — a date that was, “not only for French sinology but for the entire European field, of decisive significance” — marked the institutionalization of these inquiries within the framework of the modern university. The first holder of the chair, Jean-Pierre Abel-Remusat, was a self-taught scholar of Chinese who had never visited China; he worked primarily from Chinese texts held in Parisian libraries. The word “sinologie” itself first appeared in French in 1814, in an article on the “histoire de la sinologie” published in the journal Mercure etranger, though it did not enter the French dictionary until 1878 or the English dictionary (as “Sinology”) until 1882.

In Italy, the Neapolitan missionary Matteo Ripa (1692–1746), who had served as a painter and copper-engraver at the court of the Kangxi Emperor between 1711 and 1723, returned to Naples with four young Chinese Christians and founded the “Chinese Institute” in 1732 — the first sinological school on the European continent and the precursor of today’s Universita degli studi di Napoli L’Orientale (Naples Eastern University). In France, the study of China benefited from the patronage of Louis XIV, who in 1711 appointed a young Chinese man, Arcadio Huang, to catalog the royal collection of Chinese texts. Huang’s collaboration with Etienne Fourmont resulted in a Chinese grammar published in 1742. In Russia, the first Chinese language instruction began at the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg on 23 March 1741, when the lecturer Ilarion Rossokhin, who had been part of an ecclesiastical mission to China, began teaching Chinese studies.

The word “sinology” itself encapsulates this transition from curiosity to discipline. As the German sinologist Herbert Franke observed, the use of “-ology” suffixes to designate academic fields was largely a nineteenth-century development. In English, “Sinology” first appeared in 1838, was used again in 1857, and was defined as “the study of Chinese things” only from 1882. “The Greek-Latin hybrid ‘Sinology’ became a standard term only between 1860 and 1880. During this period, the study of China and China itself gradually came into sharper focus as a specialized academic subject.” The etymological root “Sin-” derives from the Greek rendering of “Qin,” the dynasty whose name, transmitted through Persian and Arabic intermediaries, became the standard Western designation for China.

How exactly the raw material of early encounters was transformed into a formal academic discipline — how missionary sinology gave way to professional sinology, how the study of China was organized and institutionalized in different European countries, and how the field’s intellectual agenda was shaped by the broader currents of nineteenth-century thought — is the subject of the chapter that follows.

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References

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