Commands from Heaven: Matteo Ricci's Christianity in the Eyes of Míng Confucian Officials

2003 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 269-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chung-Yan Joyce Chan

Much scholarship on Father Matteo Ricci has been focused on the Jesuit missiological approach of accommodation. This essay investigates how the Chinese scholar officials in the Ming Dynasty perceived Ricci's presentation of the Christianity. The first section of the article deals with the sociopolitical context of Ricci's work. The second section discusses Ricci's presentation of the Christian message. Finally, the third section—through the writings of two key Chinese converts, Xú Guangqi and Yáng Tíngyún—looks at why Christianity won over Buddhism and Daoism (Taoism) as the religion of choice for the Confucian scholars.

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-318
Author(s):  
YONG-SŎNG LI

AbstractThe Huá-yí-yì-yǔ is a general name for the various wordbooks between the Chinese language and its neighbouring languages compiled from the beginning of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). It has broadly 4 different classes. In the wordbooks of the third class the words of each foreign language were transliterated only in Chinese characters and the letters of the language in question were not used. To this third class belongs the manuscript in the collection of the library of Seoul National University. Its seventh volume is for the Uighur language. It contains 19 categories. In this paper the first category of astronomy with 85 entries is treated.There are many scribal errors in these materials. Apart from the shortcomings of the Chinese characters, this may be the main reason why the Uighur word materials in the wordbooks of this class are not highly regarded.


Author(s):  
Megan Bryson

As the Ming dynasty continued and gave way to the Qing, more migrants from the empire’s eastern and central regions made their way to Yunnan. Baijie Furen, the third form of Baijie, emerged as a result of this increasing contact between Han outsiders and Dali locals. This chapter argues that Baijie Furen, portrayed in legend as an eighth-century widow martyr, supplanted the earlier forms of Baijie because of her multifaceted identity: for Dali elites, she signified the region’s long history of Confucian virtues, which marked it as civilized; for Ming and Qing elites, her exceptional example proved that imperial civilizing projects could succeed. In both cases Baijie Furen served as a proxy for the Bai people because male elites correlated a population’s civilization with women’s sexual propriety.


2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 443-457
Author(s):  
Ruihui Han

Compared to other informal social network mechanisms, guanxi is more common in China and is the most typical. Even in daily life, it is indispensable. Hence, in Chinese fiction, the guanxi motif is prevalent and important. Interestingly, before the Ming dynasty, guanxi was not a literary motif in fiction. This article suggests that three factors contributed to the rise of the guanxi motif in fiction in the Ming dynasty. The first was the boom in fiction writing, especially in the genre of realism, that occurred in this era, which expanded the scope of literary representation. The second was the degradation of public morals in the Ming dynasty, a momentous social transition that Ming fiction writers noted and portrayed. Guanxi, as a disruptive social mechanism that dismantled previous models of human connection, became a focus in their works. The third was the fact that the atmosphere of money worship promoted by guanxi, together with official corruption, facilitated widespread social inequality. Guanxi, as the crux of inequity, inspired writers to expose social turpitude. More importantly, the guanxi motif satisfied the need for plot conflict in literary works. Thus, it became a necessary motif in Ming fiction.


Transfers ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan E. Bell ◽  
Kathy Davis

Translocation – Transformation is an ambitious contribution to the subject of mobility. Materially, it interlinks seemingly disparate objects into a surprisingly unified exhibition on mobile histories and heritages: twelve bronze zodiac heads, silk and bamboo creatures, worn life vests, pressed Pu-erh tea, thousands of broken antique teapot spouts, and an ancestral wooden temple from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) used by a tea-trading family. Historically and politically, the exhibition engages Chinese stories from the third century BCE, empires in eighteenth-century Austria and China, the Second Opium War in the nineteenth century, the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the mid-twentieth century, and today’s global refugee crisis.


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