Interpretation of Ming Chinas: An Ethnographic Perspective to Iberian Travelers and their China Texts, 1550-1586
Date Issued
2015
Date
2015
Author(s)
Wu, Hung-Yi
Abstract
In the sixteenth century, Europeans began to explore China coast in search of commercial and evangelical chances. As they returned to Europe, they also brought back not only exotic commodities but what they saw and heard in this Middle kingdom. At first, that information of China was usually transformed into oral stories or into written texts. Travel stories and texts could be printed, transmitted, circulated, and sometimes they could be mixed up, reinterpreted, and synthesized in new codices by other readers and editors. The process described above forms the main story of this thesis, especially on how Iberian travelers constructed their knowledge of China in the sixteenth century. For the purpose of analyzing how Iberians constructed their knowledge of China, It is necessary to introduce some historical and theoretical frameworks. One can be named as “European history of Asian knowledge”, which attempt to describe the social context of European’s knowledge of Asia through its production and consumption. The other can be named as “ethnographic writing”, which includes reflections on “What was ethnography in the early modern period” from both anthropologists and historians. Inspired by those methodological thinking, this thesis would concentrate on the production of Iberian’s China knowledge through examining four Iberian Travel Texts: Galeote Pereira’s Certain Reports of China (1565), Gaspar da Cruz’s Tractado em que se cõtam muito por estẽso au cousas da China (1570), the Relation of Martin da Rada (1575), and Juan González de Mendoza’s Historia de las cosas más notables, ritos y costumbres del gran reyno de la China (1585). In the Chapter 1, I give a short introduction to Portuguese travel text on China in general, and then sketch the historical context of Pereira, Da Cruz, Da Rada and Mendoza’s voyages----their experiences associated with China. Then in Chapter 2, I attempt to demonstrate how travelers’ China experience shaped their China knowledge. For Instance, different travel experiences influenced Portuguese and Spaniard in assimilating the term “China”, the reason of Chinese abundance, and detailed description of jurisdiction. In the last Chapter, by concentrating on Mendoza’s Historia, I illustrated how Mendoza rewrote and edited former travel texts to build a systematic knowledge of China of his own.
Subjects
Iberian’ s China text
Iberian-China encounter
European’s knowledge of Asia
ethnographic writing
Sino-European cross-cultural knowledge
Type
thesis
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