This is a set of pioneering studies on Chinese encyclopaedias of modern knowledge (1870-1930). At a transitional time when modern knowledge was sought after yet few modern schools were available, these works were crucial sources of information for an entire generation. This volume investigates many of these encyclopaedias, which were never reprinted and are hardly known even to specialists, for the first time. The contributors to this collection all specialize in the period in question and have worked together for a number of years. The resulting studies show that these encyclopaedias open a unique window onto the migration and ordering systems of knowledge across cultural and linguistic borders.

This book explores the dissemination of knowledge around Chinese medicinal substances from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries in a global context. The author presents a microhistory of the caterpillar fungus, a natural, medicinal substance initially used by Tibetans no later than the fifteenth century and later assimilated into Chinese materia medica from the eighteenth century onwards. Tracing the transmission of the caterpillar fungus from China to France, Britain, Russia and Japan, the book investigates the tensions that existed between prevailing Chinese knowledge and new European ideas about the caterpillar fungus. Emerging in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europe, these ideas eventually reached communities of scientists, physicians and other intellectuals in Japan and China. Seeking to examine why the caterpillar fungus engaged the attention of so many scientific communities across the globe, the author offers a transnational perspective on the making of modern European natural history and Chinese materia medica.

Kniha "Crossing Between Tradition and Modernity" představuje soubor třinácti esejů k uctění památky Mileny Doleželové-Velingerové (1932–2012), členky pražské sinologické školy a významné odbornice na čínskou literaturu, která zastávala přední místo při zavádění literární teorie a její důsledné aplikace v sinologii. Milena Doleželová-Velingerová byla jedním z těch vzácných vědeckých pracovníků, kteří psali se stejnou erudicí a stejně kvalifikovaně jak o moderní, tak i o klasické literatuře. Eseje následují příkladu Mileny Doleželové-Velingerové v tom smyslu, že se zabývají širokým spektrem historických období, literárních žánrů a témat - od Tangových cestovatelských esejů až po kulturní identitu postkoloniálního Hong-Kongu. Eseje jsou strukturovány do dvou částí Language, Structure, and Genre a Identities and Self-Representations. Jsou motivovány soustředěným zájmem o problematiku jazyka, narativní struktury a komplexní povahy literárního významu, tématy, které byly středobodem práce Mileny Doleželové-Velingerové.

Chinese Visions of Progress, 1895 to 1949 offers a panoramic view of reflections on progress in modern China. Since the turn of the twentieth century, the discourses on progress shape Chinese understandings of modernity and its pitfalls. As this in-depth study shows, these discourses play a pivotal role in the fields of politics, society, culture, as well as philosophy, history, and literature. It is therefore no exaggeration to say that the Chinese ideas of progress, their often highly optimistic implications, but also the criticism of modernity they offered, opened the gateway for reflections on China’s past, its position in the present world, and its future course.

This book is the winner of the Marthe Engelborghs-Bertels Prize for Sinology 2023, awarded by the Academy for Overseas Sciences (ARSOM), Brussels. In John Fryer and The Translator’s Vade-mecum, Tola offers for the first time a comprehensive study of the collection of scientific and technical glossaries, with English-Chinese parallel translation, compiled by the English scholar John Fryer (1839–1928). Other than contributing to the history of modern Chinese lexicon and translation in late Qing China, Tola analyses the role of The Translator’s Vade-mecum in the diffusion of ideas and terms between China and the West, at the same time providing new insights on the connection between religious efforts by missionaries in late Qing China and their secular attitude towards translation. The great number of resources presented also show a new perspective on the transcultural flows of knowledge, China’s modernisation process in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the history of nineteenth-century Protestant missions in China.

China’s past and present have been in a continuous dialogue throughout history, one that is heavily influenced by time and language: the temporal orientation and the linguistic apparatus used to express and solidify identity, ideas, and practices. Presenting a host of in-depth case studies, Time and Language: New Sinology and Chinese History argues for and demonstrates the significance of “New Sinology” by restoring the role of language/philology in the research and understanding of how modern China emerged. Reading the modern as a careful and ongoing conversation with the past renders the “new” in a different perspective. This volume is a significant step toward a new historical narrative of China’s modern history, one wherein “ruptures” can exist in tandem with continuities. The collection accentuates the deep connection between language and power—one that spans well across China’s long past—and hence the immense consequences of linguistic-related methodology to the comprehension of power structures and identity in China. Each of the essays in this volume tackles these issues, the methodological and the thematic, from a different angle but they all share the Sinological prism of analysis and the basic understanding that a much longer timeframe is required to make sense of Chinese modernity. The languages examined are diverse, including modern and classical Chinese, as well as Manchu and Japanese. Taken together they bring a spectrum of linguistic perspectives and hence a spectrum of power relations and identities to the forefront. While the essays focus on late Qing and early twentieth-century eras, they refer often to earlier periods, which are necessary to making real sense of later eras. The methodological and the thematic do not only converge, but also generate a plea for fostering and expanding this approach in current and future studies.

The book addresses for the first time the dynamics associated with the modernization of mathematics in China from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century from a transcultural global historical perspective. Rather than depict the transformations of mathematical knowledge in terms of a process of westernization, the book analyzes the complex interactions between different scientific communities and the ways in which the past, modernity, language, and mathematics were negotiated in a global context. In each chapter, Andrea Bréard provides vivid portraits of a series of go-betweens (such as translators, educators, or state statisticians) based on a vast array of translated primary sources hitherto unavailable to a non-Chinese readership. They not only illustrate how Chinese scholars mediated between new mathematical objects and discursive modes, but also how they instrumentalized their autochthonous scientific roots in specific political and intellectual contexts. While sometimes technical in style, the book addresses all readers who are interested in the global and cultural history of science and the complexities involved in the making of universal mathematics. “While the pursuit of modernity is in the title, entanglement is of as much interest. Using the famous ‘Nine Chapters’ as a framework, Bréard considers a wide range of that entanglement from divination to data management. Bréard’s analysis and thought-provoking insights show once again how much we can learn when two cultures intersect. A fascinating read!” (John Day, Boston University).