In Qing Colonial Enterprise, Laura Hostetler shows how Qing China (1636-1911) used cartography and ethnography to pursue its imperial ambitions. She argues that far from being on the periphery of developments in the early modern period, Qing China both participated in and helped shape the new emphasis on empirical scientific knowledge that was simultaneously transforming Europe—and its colonial empires—at the time. Although mapping in China is almost as old as Chinese civilization itself, the Qing insistence on accurate, to-scale maps of their territory was a new response to the difficulties of administering a vast and growing empire. Likewise, direct observation became increasingly important to Qing ethnographic writings, such as the illustrated manuscripts known as "Miao albums" (from which twenty color paintings are reproduced in this book). These were intended to educate Qing officials about various non-Han peoples so that they could govern these groups more effectively.Hostetler's groundbreaking account will interest anyone studying the history of the early modern period and colonialism.

The Chinese Impact upon English Renaissance Literature examines how English writers responded to the cultural shock caused by the first substantial encounter between China and Western Europe. Author Mingjun Lu explores how Donne and Milton came to be aware of England’s participation in ’the race for the Far East’ launched by Spain and Portugal, and how this new global awareness shaped their conceptions of cultural pluralism. Drawing on globalization theory, a framework that proves useful to help us rethink the literary world of Renaissance England in terms of global maritime networks, Lu proposes the concept of ’liberal cosmopolitanism’ to study early modern English engagement with the other. The advanced culture of the Chinese, Lu argues, inculcated in Donne and Milton a respect for difference and a cosmopolitan curiosity that ultimately led both authors to reflect in profound and previously unexamined ways upon their Eurocentric and monotheistic assumptions. The liberal cosmopolitan model not only opens Renaissance literary texts to globalization theory but also initiates a new way of thinking about the early modern encounter with the other beyond the conventional colonial/postcolonial, nationalist, and Orientalist frameworks. By pushing East-West contact back to the period in 1570s-1670s, Lu’s work uncovers some hitherto unrecognized Chinese elements in Western culture and their shaping influence upon English literary imagination.

How did Asia come to be represented on European World maps? When and how did Asian Countries adopt a continental system for understanding the world? How did countries with disparate mapping traditions come to share a basic understanding and vision of the globe? This series of essays organized into sections on Jesuit Circuits of Communication and Publication; Jesuit World Maps in Chinese; Reverberations of Matteo Ricci's Maps in East Asia; and Reflections on the Curation of Cartographic Knowledge, go a long way toward answering these questions about the shaping of our modern understandings of the world.

When European missionaries arrived in East Asia in the sixteenth century, they entered ongoing conversations about cosmology and world geography. Soon after, intellectuals in Ming China, Edo Japan, and Joseon Korea selectively encompassed elements of the late Renaissance worldview, leading to the creation of new artifacts that mitigated old and new knowledge in creative ways. Simultaneously, missionaries and their collaborators transcribed, replicated, and recombined from East Asian artifacts and informed European audiences about the newly discovered lands known as the “Far East.” All these new artifacts enjoyed long afterlives that ensured the continuous remapping of the world in the following decades and centuries. Focusing on artifacts, this expansively illustrated volume tells the story of a meeting of worldviews. Tracing the connections emanating from each artifact, the authors illuminate how every map, globe, or book was shaped by the intellectual, social, and material cultures of East Asia, while connecting multiple global centers of learning and print culture. Crossing both historical and historiographical boundaries reveals how this series of artifacts embody a continuous and globally connected process of mapping the world, rather than a grand encounter between East and West. As such, this book rewrites the narrative surrounding the so-called “Ricci Maps,” which assumes that one Jesuit missionary brought scientific cartography to East Asia by translating and adapting a Renaissance world map. It argues for a revision of that narrative by emphasizing process and connectivity, displacing the European missionary and “his map” as central actors that supposedly bridged a formidable civilizational divide between Europe and China. Rather than a single map authored by a European missionary, a series of materially different artifacts were created as a result of discussions between the Jesuit Matteo Ricci and his Chinese contacts during the last decades of Ming rule. Each of these gave rise to the production of new artifacts that embodied broader intellectual conversations. By presenting eleven original chapters by Asian, European, and American scholars, this work covers an extensive range of artifacts and crosses boundaries between China, Japan, Korea, and the global pathways that connected them to the other end of the Eurasian landmass.