By Qiong Zhang
In Making the recent international their very own, Qiong Zhang bargains a scientific research of ways chinese language students within the past due Ming and early Qing got here to appreciate that the earth is formed as a globe. This idea arose from their encounters with Matteo Ricci, Giulio Aleni and different Jesuits. those encounters shaped a desirable bankruptcy within the early glossy worldwide integration of area. It spread out as a chain of together constitutive and competing scholarly discourses that reverberated in fields from cosmology, cartography and international geography to classical reports. Zhang demonstrates how students similar to Xiong Mingyu, Fang Yizhi, Jie Xuan, Gu Yanwu, and Hu Wei appropriated Jesuit rules to rediscover China’s position on this planet and reconstitute their classical culture.
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Additional info for Making the New World Their Own: Chinese Encounters with Jesuit Science in the Age of Discovery
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Pratt shows how Guaman Poma borrowed the language and verbal repertoire employed in the standard Spanish chronicles of the American conquest but fused them with the vocabulary, symbolic grammar, and knowledge reserves of the Quechua peoples to create a “New Chronicle” of world history and the Spanish conquest of the Inca empire. This New Chronicle delivers a powerful indictment of the greed and brutality of the Spanish conquistadors during their conquest of Andean America and gives a version of the Christian view of human history that places the Andeans, not the Europeans, at the center.
Org. 4 Didier, In and Outside the Square, Vol. III, 214–215. 5 I adopt a significantly earlier date—the end of the Spring and Autumn (771–476 bce) and the early Warring States (475–221 bce) period—for the emergence of the Round-Heavenand-Square-Earth cosmology. See the third and fourth sections of Chapter 3 below and the beginning of Chapter 4. Mapping A Contact Zone 29 his work compels us to acknowledge the complexity of premodern Chinese images of the earth and the relatively late date and primarily geopolitical context for the rise of the Square-Earth-and-Four-Seas model as the dominant outlook on the world.
The cartographic representation, legends, and introductory essays on Ricci’s maps also provided a model, in substance, vocabulary, and rhetoric, for subsequent Jesuit works on related subjects to follow. Chapter 2, “Mapping the Contact Zone,” places the production of these maps within the context of the raging vogue of exotica among late Ming scholars, which gave the Jesuits their first opportunity to secure a foothold in the Ming empire and establish a social niche among the intellectual elite.