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While the Peking Gazette is relatively well-documented for the late nineteenth century, information about the gazette for earlier times remains very scarce. Only a very limited number of original copies from before 1800 is still extant. Other - so far hardly explored - sources about the gazette are the European texts mostly compiled by missionaries who lived in China in the early Qing. On the one hand, they shed light on the early existence, form, structure, content, and use of the Chinese gazette, and they contain information that is not provided by Chinese sources. On the other hand, they inform on how these Europeans read the gazette within China, on how they, as global agents, informed Europe about China, thus making the Chinese gazette part of a global information network. This article focuses on the European sources from the Yongzheng era (1723 - 1735). It analyses three letters by the Jesuit Cyr Contancin (1670 - 1732), and studies the reception history of the Chinese gazettes in Europe, thus showing h

The death of the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci in China in 1610 was the occasion for demonstrations of European rituals appropriate for a Catholic priest and also of Chinese rituals appropriate to the country hosting the Jesuit community. Rather than burying Ricci immediately in a plain coffin near the church, according to their European practice, the Jesuits followed Chinese custom and kept Ricci's body for nearly a year in an air-tight Chinese-style coffin and asked the emperor for burial ground outside the city walls. Moreover, at Ricci's funeral itself, on their own initiative the Chinese performed their funerary rituals, thus starting a long and complex cultural dialogue in which they took the lead during the next century. The Interweaving of Rituals explores the role of ritual - specifically rites related to death and funerals - in cross-cultural exchange, demonstrating a gradual interweaving of Chinese and European ritual practices at all levels of interaction in seventeenth-century China. This includes the interplay of traditional and new rituals by a Christian community of commoners, the grafting of Christian funerals onto established Chinese practices, and the sponsorship of funeral processions for Jesuit officials by the emperor. Through careful observation of the details of funerary practice, Nicolas Standaert illustrates the mechanics of two-way cultural interaction. His thoughtful analysis of the ritual exchange between two very different cultural traditions is especially relevant in today's world of global ethnic and religious tension. His insights will be of interest to a broad range of scholars, from historians to anthropologists to theologians.

This article narrates the history of Belgian Sinology both before and since the birth of Sinology (1814) and of Belgium (1830). The overview also embraces a broader group of scholars by including Sinologists who were from Belgium but did not necessarily work there. The first part of the article focuses on Sinological practices by the early missionaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The second part covers the nineteenth and twentieth centuries until the Open-Door Policy of the 1970s. This part combines a broad chronological perspective with the history of individual persons and institutions. It includes topics such as the development of oriental studies and studies of religion, the teaching of Chinese language for commercial reasons, and the establishment of Chinese and Oriental institutes within and outside the universities.

Abstract The publicly available government gazette (often called dibao 邸報) that was published in a variety of formats in imperial China has recently caught new academic interest both in China and in the West. While most of these studies focus on the Peking Gazette (jingbao 京報) in the (late) nineteenth century, information about the gazette for earlier times remains very scarce. To address this gap, the present study focuses on the gazette from the Qianlong period (1736-1795). It uses and describes both Chinese sources, specifically the tizou shijian 題奏事件, and European sources, especially the French translations of gazettes by Jean-Joseph-Marie Amiot (1718-1793). A case study of translated reports on the Siku quanshu 四庫全書 sent to Europe shows how the Chinese gazette became part of a remarkable and lively global information network.

In The Intercultural Weaving of Historical Texts Nicolas Standaert analyses an early case of \"intercultural historiography,\" in which various Chinese views on marvellous births are interwoven with their European interpretations in the seventeenth and eighteenth century.

This article focuses on the circulation of Chinese books by looking at the books which François Foucquet carried from China to Europe. By examining different \"booklists,\" it investigates how books circulated not only from one concrete place to another, but also through different \"lists\": bookseller lists, transportation lists, cataloguing lists, lists of forgotten books, or quotation lists. In addition, by linking the various catalogues and book lists to the holdings of European libraries and, in turn, Foucquet's library to the other systematic transfers of books from China to Europe, this study reconstructs the \"communication circuit\" of a library. This reconstruction is an \"intercultural\" communication circuit, which runs from the Chinese bookseller over the shipper to the European reader. On the basis of this analysis, this article shows the important role Foucquet and other Europeans played in a new epoch of interest in Chinese culture: the constitution of Chinese libraries in Europe.

Since 1582 there has been a continuous presence of Jesuits in China, except for the suppression period and its aftermath (which corresponds to the years 1775-1842). This period without Jesuits may provide various challenging insights. It shows that Chinese Christian communities and their leaders played a pivotal role in the continuation and vitality of Christian life. The three events of the suppression, absence, and restoration of the Society of Jesus in China illustrate the contribution of these Christian communities and their leaders.

When Jesuit missionaries went to China in the seventeenth century, they discovered that Chinese history was in many regards apparently longer than the history as presented by the Bible. Subsequently, they started to translate Chinese histories, which they sent back to Europe, and which in the eighteenth century were adopted by Enlightenment thinkers for their own purposes. The European side of this story is quite well known, but what about the Chinese side? What sources did the Jesuits use and how did these sources interpret ancient history? As part of a larger project, these questions about the Chinese sources are answered from an intercultural perspective. The missionaries not only used classical Chinese histories written during the Song dynasty (960-1279), but also numerous newly edited or newly composed works from the seventeenth century. While they themselves originated from a Europe in which the ars historica was in full transition, they met a situation in China where new approaches to history had emerged. They used comprehensive histories, such as the one by the late Ming scholar Nan Xuan 南軒, or the more wide-spread genres, such as gangjian 綱鑑 (outline and mirror) histories, which from the late eighteenth century fell into oblivion. In fact, the sources used by the Jesuits not only throw light on their own compilations that were ultimately sent to Europe, but also on the writing of history in China in the late Ming (1368-1644) and the early Qing dynasties (1644-1911).