@histodons In the early 1700s, Voltaire, the French Enlightenment philosopher, fell in love with China. He extolled the virtues of the faraway land, calling it the “wisest and best-behaved nation” in the world.
Fashionable French people became enamored of Chinese goods, Chinese culture, and Chinese philosophy. Chinoiserie — European imitations of Chinese styles — became all the rage. You can see the French fascination with China in paintings like Francois Boucher’s 1742 The Chinese Garden:
@histodons Right around the same time, the Qianlong Emperor in China was building a new summer palace. He included in the grounds an elaborate area called the Xiyang Lou, or “Western Mansions” — an area full of buildings and gardens designed to mimic European palaces. He, like many wealthy and powerful Chinese people, had become fascinated by European culture. The complex looked something like this:
@histodons Jesuit missionaries were some of the first westerners to enter China in the 1500s. They made a sincere attempt to understand Chinese culture.
One of the Jesuits’ first projects was to learn Chinese in order to translate Western works into Chinese and vice versa. Here’s a page of a Portuguese-Chinese dictionary compiled by two Jesuits, Matteo Ricci and Michele Ruggieri:
@histodons Chinese people were just as fascinated with the discovery of the Americas as Europeans were, so the Jesuits filled them in on what was known about the lands across the Pacific:
@histodons In the 1670s, the Jesuit astronomer Ferdinand Verbiest — after a lengthy rivalry with Chinese astronomer Yang Guangxian that saw both men thrown in jail (!) — impressed the Kangxi Emperor by defeating Yang in an astronomy-prediction contest. The emperor then tasked Verbiest with revamping the imperial observatory, where he installed the latest instruments:
@histodons The Jesuits were instrumental in translating and dispersing the philosophy of Confucius in Europe. By the late 1600s, their translated versions of Confucius’ works were widely available. Soon after, Voltaire would read Confucius and declare that his philosophy was a more humane and tolerant worldview than Christianity.
@histodons Europeans were also fascinated by Chinese society and culture more generally. A Jesuit named Athanasius Kircher — who had never been to China, but used the reports of those who had — published one of the more popular books of the 1600s, China Illustrata, which contained many scenes from China. He depicted wildlife (no, I do not know why that turtle is airborne):
@histodons By the middle of the 1700s, the Jesuits had made enemies in the Catholic Church -- partially because of their acceptance of nonchristian elements of Chinese culture. Tensions rose between the church and the Chinese government. As the Qing Dynasty weakened, European merchants began to push their way into China, often in spite of rules that prohibited them from doing so. Many of these merchants sold opium, addicting millions of Chinese people and unleashing all sorts of social problems.
@histodons By 1860, British and French troops occupied the Summer Palace. Incensed at the news that the Chinese had tortured and killed some Westerners — and hoping to get some valuable loot — they stole many of the palace’s treasures and burned much of the complex to the ground.
@histodons If you visit Beijing today, you can see the ruins of the old Summer Palace’s “Western Mansions.” They were built as an homage to European culture, designed at the emperor’s request by the Jesuit Giuseppe Castiglione, and then destroyed by European imperialists — as succinct an encapsulation as you can find of the complex relationship between Europe and China between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.
@worldhistory@histodons You are looking at the edge of earth in flat earth model... the sky must wrap at the edge thus a turtle can walk on the sky. And China was at the edge of world isn't it ?
@worldhistory@histodons That's really cool, and took me on a little historical research trip that made me much more kindly disposed to the Jesuits in general, they seem much more beneficial than I supposed.
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