Russian-Chinese Cultural Exchanges in the Early Modern Period

This chapter investigates the development of Sino-Russian exchanges from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. The author emphasizes the role of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Beijing for transmitting social-cultural information between the two neighboring empires. Through their writings on late imperial China, missionaries like Archimandrite Iakinf (Bichurin) played a key role in the burgeoning of Russian Sinology and created an idealistic image of China in political, legal, and educational terms. The author further ponders at the diverse and even conflicting perceptions of China among Russian missionaries and intellectuals. They did not represent China as it was but as what they expected it to be—a symbolic mirror image for them to reflect upon the reality in Russia.

Boundary-Crossing Words, Beliefs, and Experiences

The rise of China as a leading power in today’s world has attracted increasing scholarly attention to the country’s encounter with the West (primarily referring to Europe and North America in this volume) in the modern era, i.e., from the late sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries. While more recent research began to shift away from the model of a tradition–modernity polarity in explaining late imperial Chinese history, new approaches have been proposed to explore a broader range of subjects tied with the richly documented exchanges between China and the West since the sixteenth century. However, there is still a lack of collaborative effort to examine how Western culture, long shaped by the dominant Christian religion, was conceptualized and imagined by late imperial Chinese people, and vice versa, how Confucian-based Chinese culture was understood and interpreted in modern Europe and North America. Indeed, the multilayered two-way flows of words, beliefs, and experiences in such a significant cross-cultural encounter open up intriguing possibilities for further investigation. This volume, which consists of seven studies, presents cutting-edge research on the formation and transformation of different types of knowledge, perceptions, and representations exchanged between China and the West through the modern period. It aims to shed new light and provide refreshing perspectives for future exploration of related subjects in this field....

“Sacred Heart” and the Appropriation of Catholic Faith in Nineteenth-Century China

This chapter analyzes several rarely seen letters written in 1871 by three Catholic women from a village in Northeast China. The letters were addressed to a member of the Société des Missions Etrangères de Paris who had been the priest of their church. In these letters, the author detects the underlying sense of feminine piety mingled with the Du women’s purposeful borrowing of religious vocabularies to articulate personal feelings and emotional requests. The displacement between the spiritual devotion to Jesus and the sensible attachment to an absent Western priest signifies the new boundary of Christian religiosity being shaped by these village women. Private writing became an alternative means of self-empowerment for them to redefine faith, passion, and collective identity in late Qing society.

“Supreme Nation”

This chapter explores how Karl F. A. Gützlaff, a leading Protestant missionary to China in the early nineteenth century, consciously created an idealistic image of Great Britain in his novels Shifei lüelun (1835) and Dayingguo tongzhi (1834). Through intentional reinterpretations of two sharply different cultures, Gützlaff challenged the Sinocentric world order on the one hand and presented Britain as the “Supreme Nation” on the other. Moreover, the author reveals that Gützlaff’s narrative of the model image of Britain involved conscious appropriation of certain popular Chinese terms and thinking. The Anglo-Chinese intercourse therefore exhibited a complex destruction–reconstruction process, in which the two-way flow of words and ideas gave shape to one imagined in-between reality.

“Sinarum gentes … omnium sollertissimae”

This chapter presents a penetrating survey of the multilayered cultural exchanges between China and the Low Countries during the seventeenth century. It highlights the intermediary role of the Low Countries in transacting cultural products between two ends of the world. The author pays particular attention to a group of leading Dutch Jesuits who travelled to China, then called the Middle Kingdom, and transferred the newly acquired knowledge of Chinese language, philosophy, arts, and history to the Dutch Republic. Their collaborative efforts in translating Confucian classics disclosed a carefully reinterpreted version of Confucianism, filtered through the Christian truth, which in turn aroused a number of later translations and commentaries bouncing between ancient Chinese wisdom and post-Renaissance humanism.

The Wind Qin

This chapter examines the history of the pipe organ in late imperial China. Using a selection of official accounts, travel writings, and literary texts from the 17 and 18th centuries, the author argues that Chinese understandings of this fantastic Western object did not take any simple form of exoticism or indifference, but rather a mixture of diverse transcultural experiences shifting between intellectual openness and ideological resistance. The intersection of religion, music, and science brought to light a typical Chinese cultural centricity encountering the otherness of Western high culture, from which a new mode of in-between existence emerged along the process of dynamic mutual perceptions and evaluations.

A Religious Rhetoric of Competing Modernities

This chapter examines the complicated notions of modernity propagated through the flourishing Christian print culture in late Qing and early Republican China. Western missionaries had introduced modern print technology to China in the first half of the nineteenth century. This technology was not only a symbol of the scientific ethos of rationalistic modernity, but also a convenient and widely utilized tool for propagating charismatic Christian practices, as seen in the Church News, the Chinese Christian Intelligencer, and other nationally distributed Christian publications. The coexistence of technological advancements and supernatural experiences gave rise to a paradoxical in-between situation, where multiple expressions of modernity could be attached to both old and new ideas frequently crossing the borders of cultural, religious, and material entities.

Local Magistrates and Foreign Mendicants

This chapter explores the drastic change of Chinese views on the Franciscan mission in Shanxi before and after the Boxer Uprising. The author makes use of archival sources from late Qing provincial and missionary ecclesial collections to put together a two-sided narrative of what occurred during the fevered pitch of Chinese-Western antagonisms. By comparing two obviously opposite images of Christianity in late Qing political discourses, one as a heterodox religion and the other as an orthodox and victimized religion, the author brings to light a vivid example of how the same religious identity might be misread and represented in a sequence of ideologically sensitive cross-cultural exchanges.