Jesuit-Chinese Interaction and Collaboration in Chinese Sources

The interest in astronomy that we have seen in the Jesuit colleges of Europe was carried into the mission countries. In 1552, at the end of his second journey to Japan, Francis Xavier (1506–1552), the first Jesuit missionary to the East, wrote to Rome asking that Jesuits sent to Japan should have some knowledge of astronomy since the Japanese were a very curious people interested in the motion of the heavens, solar and lunar eclipses, lunar phases, the origin of rain, snow, thunder and lighting and other natural phenomena. However, it was not in Japan, but in China that Jesuit missionaries found astronomy a great help in their work of spreading the Christian faith. As Ferdinand Verbiest, one of the Jesuit Directors of the Beijing Observatory, expressed it in his book Astronomia Europaea: “Holy Religion makes her official entry (in China) as a very beautiful queen, leaning on the arms of Astronomy and she easily attract the looks of all the heathens. What is more, often dressed in a starry robe, she easily obtains access to the rulers and prefects of the provinces.” At the end of the book he repeats the same idea in a more explicit form, “Christian Religion in China is justly represented as a most august queen who appears publicly with her arm leaning on Astronomy ... because she was first introduced in China through Astronomy, because she was left untouched thanks to Astronomy and because after having been banished several times, she was each time called back and successfully restored to her former dignity by Astronomy.” Truly, it was through their interest in astronomical knowledge that the first Jesuit missionaries were able to enter China and influence Chinese society, which was closed in the sixteenth century to all foreigners. Even at times when other missionaries were expelled from China, Jesuit astronomers remained in their posts. Another country to which Jesuit missionaries carried their astronomical observations was India. Some Indian princes were interested in astronomy and the Jesuits collaborated with them, but this collaboration was not as extensive as in China Finally, in a completely different scenario, Jesuits also founded the first astronomical observatory of the western hemisphere in the mission of Paraguay.KeywordsSolar EclipseAstronomical ObservationLunar EclipseAstronomical InstrumentJesuit MissionaryThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

NEWLY RELEASED SOVIET DOCUMENTS reveal that during the 1920s the Soviet Foreign Ministry East Asian specialists assigned growing significance to the British crown colony of Hong Kong. One may credibly argue that, at least in Britain's case, Cold War conflicts with the Soviet Union for influence over existing colonies, for example, Hong Kong, and in such developing countries as China, began in 1920. This article examines the interactions and issues generated by the collision of British Hong Kong, the Soviet Union and China during the 1920s. It investigates the extent of Soviet involvement in Hong Kong and South China, the reasons why the communist movement collapsed so drastically in both places by the late 1920s, divisions between Comintern and Soviet Foreign Ministry (MID) officials over Soviet policy toward the area, and Hong Kong's significance in Soviet policies toward both China and colonial

In the field of the pictorial decoration of Chinese architecture, the decor of the period of the Ming and Qing dynasties is considered the most outstanding since, at that time, the technique was perfect, and the methods of decoration were rich in their diversity, which was not possible in previous eras. The polychrome painting of official buildings during the Ming and Qing dynasties’ reign is quite different from the Song dynasty’s polychrome painting. The transition from the Song dynasty’s polychrome painting to the Ming and Qing dynasties’ polychrome painting was completed during the Yuan dynasty’s reign. Due to the decrease of dougong in size in the Ming dynasty, polychrome painting began to be placed on beams. Xuanzi polychrome painting, which originated from painting beams under the Yuan dynasty, became the primary type. By the Qing dynasty, Hexi polychrome painting and Suzhou polychrome painting, which evolved from the folk polychrome painting of the Jiangnan region of the Ming dynasty, appeared. The Xuanzi type was one of the three main polychrome painting types in the Qing dynasty. It was fully developed compared to the Hexi type as it was used more widely. The article explains the development of the artistic features of the various decorative parts of Xuanzi polychrome painting during the Ming and Qing dynasties, the characteristics of each gradation, and the method of distinguishing it, as well as its place of application.

Reviewed by: The Great Manchurian Plague of 1910–1911: The Geopolitics of an Epidemic Disease by William C. Summers Carol A. Benedict William C. Summers. The Great Manchurian Plague of 1910–1911: The Geopolitics of an Epidemic Disease. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012. xiii + 202 pp. Ill. $40.00 (978-0-300-18319-1). In this slim volume, William C. Summers aims to provide a comprehensive and detailed history of the plague outbreaks in northeastern China that caused possibly as many as sixty thousand deaths between 1910 and 1911. Historians of China have previously examined the great Manchurian plague from many angles: as a grave threat to the Qing dynasty’s already shaky sovereignty, as a watershed event in the establishment of Chinese public health institutions, as the beginning of China’s participation in scientific internationalism, and as the critical moment when the new concept of chuanranbing—notifiable infectious diseases recognized and controlled by the state—began to take hold in China. Given that the outbreak occurred in a region of international competition and diplomatic intrigue, Russian and Japanese historians have also focused attention on this exceedingly well-documented epidemic. While Summers seeks to expand upon this earlier scholarship, in the end his account closely parallels what is already known about this historic outbreak of pneumonic plague. As suggested by the book’s subtitle, Summers concentrates primarily on the interplay between geopolitics and the plague. In six brief chapters and an epilogue, he surveys the political, medical, and cultural aspects of the epidemic in order to understand its differential impact on three cities in the northeast (Harbin, Shenyang, and Dalian) and the diverse responses of the Russian, Japanese, and Chinese officials in charge of plague control in their respective areas of administrative authority. He argues that beyond its influence on public health, the crisis provided three major foreign powers (Japan, Russia, and the United States) with new opportunities to test and refine their evolving geopolitical strategies [End Page 701] in northeastern Asia during a time when the Qing dynasty was teetering on the verge of collapse. Likening the plague outbreak to a “bomb detonator” (p. 27), Summers contends that the plague and its aftermath played a pivotal role in the events leading up to the Japanese takeover of Manchuria in 1931 and ultimately to the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937. Summers touches briefly upon ongoing debates over the nature of Japanese colonial medicine in Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria, aligning with those who view Japan’s appropriation of “Western” medicine as a critical “tool of empire.” He argues that the Southern Manchurian Railway authorities, working in conjunction with the Japanese Army, pursued policies that harnessed medical science and public health to Japan’s imperial ambitions. Yet, he also notes that the situation in Manchuria was complicated not only by the involvement of other foreign powers in the region but also by the fact that in 1910–11 the Qing dynasty retained authority over much of its northeastern territory. Management of the crisis required international cooperation and collaboration (as evidenced by the International Plague Conference held in Shenyang in April 1911), a reality that may have slowed Japanese imperial expansion somewhat but could not derail what Summers sees as Japan’s “inevitable” invasion of Manchuria (p. 143). Despite his ambition to build upon the work of earlier scholars (p. 12), Summers does little to revise our current understanding of the Manchurian plague. To be sure, he utilizes an abundance of new source material from the U.S. National Archives and the Public Records Office of the Foreign Office of the United Kingdom. However, his heavy reliance on English-language materials can take him only so far. It is difficult to provide a fresh take on this well-studied event without reference to the Russian, Japanese, and Chinese sources that other historians have recently tapped to excellent effect. The book nonetheless provides a succinct overview of the Manchurian plague, its epidemiological and ecological history, the varied political and social responses to it by different national governments, and its geopolitical impact within the complicated diplomatic context of northeastern Asia. Written for those unfamiliar with the history of modern China...

In 995, Yuanqing 源淸, a renowned master of the Tiantai school in China, requested the Japanese Buddhist community to critique his work, the Guanjing shu xianyao ji 觀經疏顯要記 (Xianyao ji). In response, Genshin 源信 and Kakuun 覚運, two prominent Japanese Tendai scholars, authored the Kan muryōju kyō sho kenyō ki hamon 観無量寿経疏顕要記破文 (Hamon) containing 21 critiques. This paper examines the historical context, content, and influence of the Hamon. The Hamon serves as an important example of Sino-Japanese Buddhist exchange, as it was the Chinese side that first initiated this intellectual engagement with the Japanese monks—and not the other way around. The analysis of the text indicates that the Hamon was not merely a critique but a platform for intellectual exchange. Genshin and Kakuun’s critiques reflect Silla’s Pure Land Buddhism, whereas Yuanqing’s Xianyao ji embodies the Chinese Tiantai commentary tradition on the Guan wuliangshou jing 觀無量壽經. Although not directly recorded in Chinese sources, some records suggest that the Hamon had reached China and potentially influenced Zhili’s 知禮 thought. This study aims to deepen our understanding of Sino-Japanese Buddhist exchanges during the late 10th and 11th centuries, illustrating what may be described as ‘Buddhism on a countercurrent.’

ABSTRACTBy reviewing the Chinese theological publications in the twentieth century, especially during the 1920s–1930s and after the 1980s, this article aims to show that it is not a zero-sum game between the translation of western theological works into Chinese and the publication of original Chinese theological works. The selection of the western works for translation exhibited a certain creativity from the Chinese side, and in turn, the translated works also inspired original Chinese theological works. In the twenty-first century, the Chinese studies of Christianity developed rapidly. Many Chinese Christian theologians published pro-actively in western languages. Due to the recognition of the importance of Christianity in contemporary China and the awareness of the global context for Christian theology, there was a growing interest among western theologians in non-western Christian theology, including Chinese Christian theology. The exchange and collaboration between Chinese and western theologians were particularly prominent on global and public issues.

In the late Ming Dynasty, a family of the Po, who was a Mongolian military officer, emerged in Xuanfu. At first, they served as “Yi Ding(Tatar Soliders)” in Jiubian(nine-frontier fortification system of the Ming Dynasty). Unlike the Mongolians who joined the Wei Suo system in the early Ming Dynasty, the Po family served as private armed servants of Ming Dynasty border defense generals. They not only serve as frontline soldiers for border defense generals, but also serve as Mongolian language translators for them. In short, they have a lot of effectiveness.At the same time, they were incorporated into the military status of the garrison in Xuanfu, and became officials in the camp step by step from the positions of garrison and guerrilla.Its members took part in a series of eastern expeditions and western wars in the late Ming Empire, such as the Imjin War, and participated in the battles of Jigsan and Ulsan to expel the Japanese army, while the father and son of Pou Tingxiang participated in the war between the Ming Dynasty and the Later Jin Dynasty and sacrificed their lives on the battlefield. After the change of Dynasties in the Ming and Qing Dynasties, the members of the Po family chose to become officials in the Qing Dynasty for the sake of family interests, and tried to let the next generation continue to engage in the army and maintain their glory. However, due to the collapse of the former Ming Dynasty’s military officer system, the Qing Dynasty’s vigilance against the former Ming Dynasty’s generals, and the characteristics of the Qing Dynasty’s military system and military officer system itself, the Po family did not get the same position of power as the former Ming.In the end, like other generals on the Jiubian(nine-frontier), the former Ming generals, who were born as adherents, gradually withered away in the Qing Dynasty.

The chapter heading for chapter fictions in Ming and Qing Dynasties is an important part of the novel and has distinct characteristics. The main manifestations are as follows: First, the language is concise and clear. Second, the syntactic structure is fixed. Third, it covers the elements of people, things, and verbs. In the process of translating the chapter fictions in Ming and Qing dynasties, translators need to master the characteristics of the chapter fictions in Ming and Qing dynasties, effectively and skillfully use parts of speech conversion, amplification and omission and attach importance to the translation of adverbs in chapter fictions. The translation of chapter fictions in Ming and Qing Dynasties will be more in line with their own characteristics and more accurate through the mastery and use of these translation techniques.

Chinese export porcelain was a great wonder in the long history of the world. During Ming and Qing dynasty, it was exported in large quantity beyond China, which led to a taste for Chinese designs and made different cultures encountered, exchanged and integrated. At the same time, Chinese export porcelain actively influenced passively recipient foreign consumers, which made the world civilization be promoted. The utensils are used to convey Daoism. While spreading Chinese culture, Chinese export porcelain carried the world's religious culture such as Christian culture, Islamic culture, Buddhist culture and Chinese local Taoist culture, bursting with colorful light. By collecting a large number of images of the Chinese export porcelain in religious culture during Ming and Qing dynasty, this article uses historical research method and the method of anthropology to make a specific and comprehensive analysis of the religious culture on exported porcelain so as to reappear the splendid global history. This article also elaborated on the design semantics, acceptance, and innovative development of religious culture on exported porcelains during the Ming and Qing Dynasties under the environment of the source language and target languages in China and beyond China. This article also analyzes the transportation routes and specific loading methods of porcelains during the Ming and Qing Dynasties, which better reflects the movement of Chinese Ceramics and its appropriation in world history. The methods of iconology are used in this article and the narrative stories on porcelains are analyzed. Chinese exported porcelain is functional and its spiritual enlightenment is appreciated by human-beings. The world civilization, human-being’s wisdom, spiritual connotation, communication integration and mutual development of all the world’s nations are witnessed by Chinese export porcelains in Ming and Qing Dynasties.

At the turn of the Ming (1368-1644) and the Qing (1644-1911) dynasties, playwrights of the Soochow school created many scripts of high drama. Among them, the legend Qianzhong lu, a story based on the life of Emperor Hui (Jianwen) of the Ming dynasty, made Kunju Opera popular and encouraged Qing dynasty playwrights to write more Chuanqi stories on Emperor Hui of the Ming dynasty.Emperor Hui's whereabouts has become a mystery ever since Emperor Chengzu of the Ming dynasty (r. 1403-1424) ascended the throne. Emperor Hui died in conflagration when Emperor Chengzu launched the ”Battle of Jingnan.” However, Emperor Hui's body was never found (or the body could not be identified). Therefore, it was rumored that Emperor Hui somehow escaped the carnage. This unsolved mystery still resonates to this date.At the turn of Ming to Qing, playwright Li Yu and his colleagues used the story of Emperor Hui to remind people that they should still be loyal to the Ming throne. However, the present author believes that this is a reflection of diaspora among the former Ming officials.For Emperor Hui, the final destination was to return to his homeland. To Li Yu and his fellow playwrights, to find a home for their souls were the wishes of all dissipates.On the basis of this theory, we find more depth into the diaspora narrative by the Soochow school playwrights. The present article attempts to reconstruct its multi-faceted implications from the diaspora narrative perspective.

From his arrival in China in 1888 to his departure in 1930, Canadian missionary, Donald MacGillivray (季理斐), was in China for more than 40 years. According to changes in the Chinese missionary situation, the key target of his mission was frequently adjusted. From his initial work in the early days in North Honan, to his work with officials and intellectuals in Shanghai in the late Qing Dynasty, then to students, women, and children in the Republic of China, Donald MacGillivray continued to preach to both the masses and the elites. His approach was flexible, ranging from oral preaching to academic publications. Relying on his interpersonal network, MacGillivray paid close attention to the social changes occurring in modern China. An evaluation of his activities in China can not only reveal the impact of individual missionaries in the process of Western learning and the transformation of Chinese knowledge in modern times, but also provide insight into the integration of Christianity into the indigenization process of China.

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English. 明清易代之際，結社逃禪之風日漸濃厚，結社行爲在晚明的去政治化、去功利化特徵，是心學、佛學衝擊傳統儒家思想的結果。復社是明代科舉制度影響下的文社，但一些復社成員卻同時結有禪社，可見儒學和佛學兩股風潮在當時並非完全對立或此消彼長的關係，而是借助文學活動展開各自的影響路徑。陸世儀、陳瑚等人在崇禎初年拒不入復社，代表了當時不同的聲音。儘管復社參與政治鬥争，由明入清的文人學者仍肯定了復社對文章創作的積極作用，試圖重申儒家思想以推動清初社事回歸訂文字交的正常軌道。基於盟社觀、文學觀，清代文人也對社事與國家興亡之關係發表看法。復社的衰落、明朝的滅亡都引起了詩人們對生命價值和歷史政治的再思考，也涉及朋友相交的基礎、結社訂盟的形式、文章創作的宗旨等問題。乾隆以後文人的盟社觀，受到清朝嚴控文網的影響。 In the transition of the Ming and Qing dynasties, there was a thriving trend for poets to join societies and worship Buddhism. The depoliticization and getting rid of utilitarianism of the societies in late Ming times were the result of the impact of the philosophy of Wang Yangming (1472 1529) and Buddhism on traditional Confucianism. The Fu Society was formed under the influence of the imperial examination system in the Ming Dynasty for creative writing, but some members of the Fu Society also joined Buddhist Societies. It can be seen that Confucianism and Buddhism were not completely opposed in the late Ming, but exerted their influence with the help of literary activities. Lu Shiyi (1611 1672), Chen Hu (1613 1675), and others refused to join the Fu Society during the early Chongzhen era (1627 1644), representing the different voices at that time. Although the Fu Society participated in political struggles, writers and scholars from the Ming Dynasty still recognized its positive role in literary creation, and its efforts to reiterate the importance of Confucianism to promote the society by leading it back to concentrate on writing in the early Qing Dynasty. Based on the society’s view of literature, the Qing-dynasty literati also talked about the relationship between society and the rise and fall of the empire. The decline of the Fu Society and the collapse of the Ming Dynasty caused poets to rethink the value of life, history, and politics. It also involved the basis of friendship, the form of association, and the purpose of writing. After the Qianlong era (1736 1796), the writers’ view of alliance and community was influenced by the Qing Dynasty’s strict control of literary networks.

Reviewed by: Chinese and Tibetan Esoteric Buddhism ed. by Yael Bentor and Meir Shahar Geoffrey C. Goble Yael Bentor and Meir Shahar, eds., Chinese and Tibetan Esoteric Buddhism. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017. xii, 450 pp. €125 (HB). ISBN 978-90-04-34049-7 Chinese and Tibetan Esoteric Buddhism is an ambitious and promising volume that is exciting for several reasons. In addition to its stated purpose of considering the vast sweep of ritual technologies, soteriologies, and ontologies that fall under the rubric of Esoteric Buddhism, the volume also implicitly promises to reorient the commonplace association of Chinese and Japanese articulations of Esoteric Buddhism by instead considering Tibetan and Chinese Esoteric Buddhist traditions side by side. Consisting of seventeen individual essays grouped into seven parts, the book contains material that ranges temporally from the eighth century to the present day, and geographically from the Chinese Tang Dynasty, to the Dali Kingdom of presentday Yunnan, to Tibet, and the Western Xia. Part 1 of the volume consists of three essays concerning the origins of Esoteric Buddhism as read through Chinese materials. Charles Orzech reads eighth-century tantric ritual as performances that shape individual subjectivities through scripted liturgical actions of purification and confession in addition to visualizations, mudra performances, and mantra recitations. Heinrich Sørensen traces the development of Esoteric Buddhism “prior to the comprehensive structural and institutional formations reflected in the tradition associated with” Śubhākarasiṃha 善無畏, Vajrabodhi 金剛智, and Amoghavajra 不空 (p. 43). Lü Jianfu’s contribution similarly seeks to trace the emergence of “Esoteric” or “Tantric Buddhism” by tracking the shifting semantic meanings of the terms “esoteric teaching” (mijiao 密教) and “Tantra” (variously transliterated) in Chinese scriptural sources. Part 2 of the book, with contributions by Robert Sharf, Lin Pei-ying, and Meir Shahar, addresses Esoteric Buddhism in relation to other Chinese religious traditions. Sharf studiedly eschews the label “esoteric Buddhism” in favor of “Buddhist Veda”, a term he adopts in order to signal his interpretation of Chinese Esoteric Buddhism as a Brahmanicized ritual technology rather than a “tradition set apart by its distinctive teachings” (p. 86). This ritual technology, he argues, was characterized in part by the use of mantra and spell incantations, master-disciple transmissions, the trope of the luminous mind, precept altars (or mandalas), and a large pantheon of deities that informed the subsequent development of the indigenous Chan tradition. Lin Pei-ying identifies a number of elements in the Śubhākarasiṃha’s Essentials of Meditation (Wuwei sanzang chanyao 無畏三藏禪要; T 917) that are continuous with “Northern” Chan ideas and concludes that there was a “doctrinal affiliation between the Chan school and Esoteric Buddhism” (p. 144). Meir Shahar demonstrates the influence of Tantric Buddhism on Daoism and popular Chinese literature through a case study of Hayagrīva Avalokiteśvara, the Horse-headed Avalokiteśvara. [End Page 71] Part 3 contains essays addressing Tantric Buddhist scriptures in the Tibetan context by Dan Martin, Eran Laish, and Yael Bentor. Martin’s contribution is a consideration of the gya-log teachings of Padampa Sangye, teachings that generally involve stating the opposite of the intended meaning, or, as Martin presents it, teachings predicated on presumed unexpected causal relationships between internal practices and external results and vice versa; for example, “the basis of disease gets turned into one of the [seven] elements of the healthy body” (p. 203). Eran Laish takes the assertion of a non-dual, primordially pure (ka-dag) reality in Tantric texts as a fundamental challenge to the “prevailing Buddhist view” that sees consciousness as a state of delusion requiring purification and Yael Bentor’s essay is a study of how the practice of body maṇḍalas (the divinization or realization of the divinization of the body through tantric saddhana, emplacing or realizing deities within the body) was variously understood through their representation in polemical writings from the Sakya and Geluk traditions of the eleventh through the fifteenth century. Part 4 of the volume consists of essays by Shen Weirong and Ester Bianchi, whose contributions concern Tibetan Buddhism in China during the Ming Dynasty and the eighteenth to nineteenth century, respectively. Shen’s essay, a study of Chinese Ming Dynasty texts demonstrated to be translations from Tibetan...

Buddhist monasteries have played important roles in the development of both the culture of and urban planning in ancient Chinese cities. In this paper, the Buddhist monasteries in the city of Xi’an, Shaanxi Province, during the Song (宋), Yuan (元), Ming (明), and Qing (清) dynasties are collated from historical documents. The characteristics of the spatial distribution of Buddhist monasteries are analyzed by using kernel density estimation (KDE), and the evolution of that spatial distribution is explored by documentary analysis. The results show that Buddhist monasteries are closely surrounded by cultural buildings and warehouses, discretely surrounded by administrative buildings. The spatial distribution evolution of Buddhist monasteries has evolved evenly during the expansion of the Xi’an city area, through the Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties. This study provides a reference for the preservation of Buddhist monastery spaces in the historical context of Xi’an city area.

Background During the Ming and Qing dynasties, as a mature period of traditional Chinese society, the education system dominated by the imperial examination system deeply penetrated the social fabric. Existing research mostly focuses on explicit issues such as the evolution of the education system and cheating in the imperial examination system, with insufficient empirical research on its value shaping and psychological impact, and a lack of quantitative support. The study focuses on the Ming and Qing imperial examination archives, local chronicles, and literati diaries as core historical materials, combined with quantitative statistics and text analysis methods, to explore the mechanism of the impact of educational content and form on social core values and group psychology, aiming to provide a new perspective for exploring the modern value of traditional education. Methods The study selected local chronicles from 286 counties in 13 provinces during the Ming and Qing dynasties, 432 imperial examination answer sheets, 156 literary diaries, and 307 family education records as research samples, including different educational levels and regions. Using content analysis method to encode core textbooks and answer texts such as "Annotations to the Four Books, Chapters and Sentences," and extract values keywords; Use historical demographic methods to analyze the correlation data between sample education level, occupation, and social behavior. The study first uses bibliometric methods to screen representative historical materials, removing non first-hand materials with a credibility of less than 85%; Then use Nvivo software to encode the values dimension of the text; Finally, correlation analysis was conducted using SPSS to explore the correlation between education years, scores of various values, and psychological representations. Results Data shows that among those who receive systematic Confucian education, 83% of respondents list "loyalty to the monarch and filial piety" as their core values, which is much higher than the 21% of those who have not received formal education; There is a significant positive correlation (r = 0.76, p<.01) between the length of education and the value of valuing righteousness over profit. The score of this dimension is 2.3 times higher for the Jinshi group than for the Tongsheng group. On a psychological level, the frequency of scholars and above mentioning adversity and striving in their diaries is 3.1 times higher than that of young students per year, and the frequency of expressing anxiety about fame and achievements in the juren class is 1.8 times higher than that of the Jinshi group. Discussion The research results indicate that traditional education has a strong shaping power on social values, and the cultivation model of both morality and talent has reference significance for contemporary moral education. Psychological phenomena such as fame anxiety provide a historical mirror for modern education pressure relief. The limitation of this study lies in the insufficient attention paid to folk education forms such as private schools, free schools, and clan education in the Ming and Qing dynasties. Future research can explore the value transmission path of grassroots education by sorting out first-hand materials such as local clan account books and private school teaching logs.