Early modern English perceptions of China, as expressed in surviving print materials, occupy a liminal intellectual zone, suspended partway between the wide-eyed credulity of medieval authors and the sneering condescension of the Enlightenment. [1] They are unique sources for those interested in historical spatial imaginaries, as those English sources written between 1480 and 1620 relied entirely on secondhand information, often centuries old, creating a fantasia of China in which verifiable fact and outright myth were combined. Most interesting for historians is how similar accounts of China are across any selection of the sources: certain stories and facts, from the wagons that ‘sailed’ the steppes like ships at sea, to the enormous number of geese consumed daily in Canton, were nearly always repeated. [2]
The subject has languished under-examined for decades, with the last major studies of print materials that reflect English understandings of the world between the medieval era and the Enlightenment having been completed nearly sixty years ago. [3] The sources of this essay have been chosen because of how they converse with each other across decades, from 1570 to 1636, in their accounts of China. [4] At its heart is John Speed’s A Prospect of the Most Famous Parts of the World, published in 1627, which ‘remains little studied’. [5] In the absence of modern forms of citation, tracing where the authors drew their information is undoubtedly challenging, but it is possible to move towards an indication of how further research might solve this riddle. However, any study of the subject must first be put into its proper contexts.
Encounters between Europe and China are rich territory for transnational historians: the two have been aware of each other since at least the parallel Roman / Han eras. Ptolemy wrote of Sinae, the land of silks, while his Chinese equivalents spoke of Da Qin, ‘a kind of counter-China at the other end of the world’. [6] The two formed distant poles of a trade network centred on the Indian Ocean monsoon circuit, though direct contact was unlikely. Following the collapse of the Roman Empire, Europe was isolated from the Asian world-system. By contrast, Arab traders were familiar sights in China during the European ‘dark ages’, as the account of Abū Zayd al-Sīrāfī (completed c. 851-943 CE) colourfully demonstrates. [7] China remained engaged with the outside world, both on the Eurasian steppe and in the maritime sphere, culminating in the spectacular voyages of the eunuch admiral Zheng He, which carried Chinese influence as far as Africa. [8] While the Ming emperors later attempted to ban sea travel and close China off, the orders were regularly ignored, and trade and contact continued at the private level. [9]
Throughout the medieval era, European knowledge of the world atrophied, with regurgitated Classical scholarship, Biblical exegesis, garbled thirdhand narrative and outright myth shaping perceptions of Asia generally, and China in particular. [10] Despite a productive period of contact under the Pax Mongolica, typified by the accounts of ecclesiastical visitors to the courts of the Mongol Khans, and that of Marco Polo, knowledge remained fragmentary. [11] Prester John, the unimaginably wealthy Nestorian priest-king, was confidently expected to be found ruling over an earthly paradise somewhere between Ethiopia and Tartary. [12] Sir John Mandeville’s forgery, The Book of Marvels of Travels (c. 1350), with its dog-headed men and lost tribes of Amazons, remained popular - especially with English audiences, where it was one of the earliest books printed domestically, in 1490. Mandeville was considered reliable for centuries afterwards, with copies of his books carried on voyages by ‘England’s foremost navigators … [who were] as yet unable to discern with certainty the comparative value of the modern writers and the medieval legends’, well into the sixteenth century. [13]
Europe gradually began to reintegrate with the world, during an era often mistakenly thought of as an age of discovery, between 1492 and 1700: what John Hobson has called ‘the myth of the Vasco da Gama epoch’. [14] In reality, Europeans remained bit players in an Asian story. [15] English merchants of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and the authors who existed in a symbiotic relationship with them, appear to have often shown a remarkable, though relative, degree of self-knowledge in their assessments of their place in the world, not least when it came to the lands they referred to as China, Cathay, Scythia, Tartary, or the Empire of the Grand Cham. Understanding its grander scale, they sought information in order to promote voyages there, hoping to become rich from its apparently limitless opportunities for trade. [16]
During the period examined in this essay, England and China existed in a strange equilibrium, aware of one another but without firm direct contact. England had lagged behind the Iberian monarchies and the Dutch in establishing a presence in the east, with much effort dedicated to futile attempts to reach Cathay via the Arctic. What little presence the English had was limited to the Spice Islands, Siam and (briefly) Japan. [17] Like most European involvement in Asia at the time, it was largely indistinguishable from piracy, and the preserve of vagabonds. [18]
While the Portuguese had secured Macao, and pan-Continental Jesuits were establishing themselves in Peking as advisors to the emperors (kickstarting academic Sinology in the process), the English had no equivalent formal presence in the Chinese world. [19] English privateers had harassed shipping off Macao in 1627, and a Chinese Jesuit, Shen Fuzong, had even visited London and Oxford in 1685; but sustained direct contact with China proper remained out of reach, in the absence of necessary imperial permissions. [20] Instead, English travellers skirted the Chinese world: the ‘pirate and hydrographer’ William Dampier circumnavigated the world three times, left firsthand accounts of Chinese merchant junks, and coined the word ‘chopsticks’, yet never set foot on the mainland. [21] Indeed, the first English-speaker to have definitely reached China was John Bell, a Scot in Russian service, in 1719.[22]
Consequently, the English appetite for information on the East had to be satisfied with secondhand information, typically translated Spanish or Portuguese books, like those of Bernardino de Escalante and Francisco Támara, printed in London in 1579 and 1580, some years after their original publication. [23] European accounts were gathered by English chroniclers like Samuel Purchas, or Richard Eden and Richard Willes. [24] The literature on China, though limited compared to other topics, is still considerable - John Parker identified at least 49 works dealing with either China or Asia (little distinction was made) published in English between 1481 and 1620. [25] Clearly, selections must be made.
Atlases, or rather their textual glosses, remain relatively neglected. Historians tend to focus on their visual elements, the maps, at the expense of the rest of the book. [26] However, the accompanying texts can be interrogated for details in order to help us reconstruct an approximation of Tudor-Stuart spatial imaginaries of China. Good atlases of the sixteenth century were a Continental preserve, usually imported to England, so before we examine Speed, we must turn to his immediate predecessor.
The first truly modern world atlas was Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570), printed in Amsterdam. It ran through dozens of editions until his death in 1598, and has recently been tapped as a source for spatial historians. [27] A London copy made in 1606 can be considered the best English version. [28] Somewhat atypically for the period and genre, Ortelius lists his own sources. Throughout his account of Asia - he only hazily distinguishes between ‘Tartaria, or the Empire of the Mightie Cham’ [29], Cataia (Cathay), and China - he draws heavily from ‘William Rubricius, a Friar … a copy of whose travels in these parts in the Year of Christ 1253, I have by me in written hand’ [30]For China, he relies almost entirely on ‘Bernardinus Scalintus, [who] hath in the Spanish tongue set out a peculiar description of this country’. [31] Ortelius is an exemplar of the early understanding of China in Europe, as a land of infinite wealth: it is ‘the same no doubt with SINAE … a country for rich commodities much talked amongst all ancient Cosmographers … it hath wonderful store of Gold, Silver and Rhubarb … [the waters] abound with all sorts of fish … [it has] infinite flocks of cattle … in Canton, which is one of the least cities of this province, there are spent every day upon their tables ten or twelve thousand ducks and geese’. [32] The cities are of a size unimaginable in Europe, ‘certaine Portugalls do report’. [33] The Chinese language is ‘not much unlike the Hieroglyphickes of the Egyptians’ [34], a comparison that would be echoed for at least the next century. [35] Justice is swift and violent, even by the standards of sixteenth century Europe. As more information became available between editions, Ortelius incorporated it: by the time of the London edition, he could draw from six additional accounts, primarily by Jesuits. [36]
Ortelius’s atlas remained the standard work for decades, and the first fully ‘English’ atlas, as opposed to one translated from a European original - that of John Speed - would not appear until 1627. Speed made Asia the foremost continent in his account, for ‘the greatest part of Divine History was there written and acted’, while in China could be found ‘Quinsay, the greatest Citie in the world’. [37] He relegated Europe to ‘third place of my division … last of the old world’. [38] Speed was backhandedly impressed with China. It was clearly on a vaster scale than Europe, both ancient and advanced, and yet one can see harsher comments creeping in: particularly with regards to the appearance and religious practices he attributes to the people. Speed doesn’t quite seem to know what to make of China. He apes Ortelius, clearly drawing from Escalante as well: China’s riches are described with the same reference to abundant fish and cattle, and the familiar figure of 12,000 ducks eaten every day in Canton. He provides more detail than Ortelius, clearly the result of new sources of information becoming available.
The Chinese are, Speed writes, ‘crafty and excellent engineers’, intolerant of ‘idle drones’. ‘Excellent practical wits … beyond any other nation’, they make ‘purslaine’ [porcelain], ‘their special skill, which we much admire but cannot imitate’. [39] However, they ‘have a confused knowledge of God, heaven, and the creation’, arising from their ‘priests’, who ‘live obscenely [as] swaggerers’. [40] Speed was, like many others of the period, sceptical of the supposed antiquity of Chinese civilization: ‘I give not full credit … to their own records, which reckon two hundred threescore and two kings … [over] about four thousand year.’ [41] (Despite Speed’s incredulity, this estimate is actually more or less accurate). He concluded ‘they must either vary from us in their measure of times, as we from the Germans in length of miles, else we must commit a foul error, to look beyond the Flood for their origin … surely I think they were not exempted from the general deluge’. [42]
Despite his gripes about ‘their ignorant vainglory’, Speed readily attributes the invention of gunpowder and moveable type to the Chinese, decades if not centuries before this was accepted as common knowledge: ‘much quarrel hath been about the invention of guns and printing … the masterpiece of man’s wit: but without doubt, they were both used here, long before any of Europe pretended to knowledge of either.’ [43] This comment is unique to Speed’s atlas, and a great contrast to his contemporary Francis Bacon’s pronouncements on the ‘mechanical things’ - bombs, books and compasses - that made Europe modern. [44]
Speed’s account of China - built from secondhand information, sceptical of its challenge to his own Reformation worldview, half admiring and half critical - is an excellent case study of a key point in the intellectual history of European spatial imaginaries of China. It deserves closer examination than could be achieved in this essay. One can already see the traces of the attitudes that would define the Enlightenment perspective - a distaste for the Other, disbelief in the antiquity of Chinese civilisation, and contempt for its religions and languages - while still hearing echoes of the medieval. Speed’s maps and text are more redolent of Mandeville than of John Bell; contemporary Jesuit accounts gave a better picture. It is perhaps best thought of as a culmination of the medieval tradition, produced by a world on the brink of greater contact, contact that would shatter the illusions of the medieval and usher in the disappointment, swiftly curdling into hostility, of the Enlightenment.
Once the Iberian monopoly on Chinese information had been broken, English audiences came to realise that China ‘could no longer be regarded as a prodigy of serene paternal government and flourishing agriculture … [while] no mighty Khan lived in Tartary’.[45] In sources like Speed’s atlas, we can see the last high-tide mark of the medieval imagination, the point where the intellectual surf finally broke. In further examination, we might be able to discern the potential there may once have been for a different, unbeaten, path in the the history of English spatial imaginaries of China.
Sean Paterson is currently studying towards an MLitt in Transnational, Global and Spatial History at the University of St. Andrews.
Notes: [1] The best account of how European intellectuals soured on Asia remains Jürgen Osterhammel, Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment’s Encounter with Asia. Trans. Robert Savage. (Princeton, 2017; German second edition 2013). Also of note: PJ Marshall and Glyndwr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind: British Perceptions of the World in the Age of Enlightenment(London, 1982), pp. 1-184; and Jonathan Spence, The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds (New York, 1999), especially pp. 1-100. [2] Joseph Needham and Wang Ling (eds), Science and Civilisation in China, Vol. 4: Physics and Physical Technology, Pt 2: Mechanical Engineering (Cambridge, 1965), pp. 274-276. Chinese land-sailing appears in the atlases of Ortelius, Speed, and Mercator, examined below; and was mentioned in Paradise Lost. [3] John Parker, Books to Build an Empire: A Bibliographical History of English Interests Overseas to 1620 (Amsterdam, 1965); and Donald Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, Vol 1: The Century of Discovery (Chicago, 1965), esp. bk. 1, pp. 148-227, and bk. 2, pp. 730-821. The last full studies of the theoretical aspects are EGR Taylor, Tudor Geography (London, 1930) and Late Tudor and Early Stuart Geography (London, 1934). [4] I have modernised spelling throughout this essay. [5] Timothy Brook, Mr. Selden’s Map of China: The Spice Trade, a Lost Chart, and the South China Sea (London, 2013), p. 197. [6] Edwin Pulleybank, ‘The Roman Empire as known to Han China’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 199, no. 1 (January 1999), p. 71. See also: André Bueno, ‘Roman Views of the Chinese in Antiquity’, Sino-Platonic Papers, no. 261 (May 2016). [7] Abū Zayd al-Sīrāfī, Accounts of China and India. Ed. trans. Tim Mackintosh-Smith (New York, 2017). [8] Zheng Yangwen, China on the Sea: How the Maritime World Shaped Modern China (Leiden, 2012), pp. 50-51. Zheng He and his chronicler Ma Huan were Muslims, allowing them ready connections across the Indian Ocean littoral. [9] Andrew Wilson, ‘The Maritime Transformations of Ming China’, in Andrew Erickson, Lyle Goldstein and Carnes Lord (eds), China Goes to Sea: Maritime Transformation in Comparative Historical Perspective (Annapolis, 2009), pp. 238-287. The assumption that China and Japan were totally isolated is demolished by the accounts gathered in Yoneo Ishii (ed. trans), The Junk Trade from Southeast Asia: Translations from the Tôsen Fusetsu-gaki, 1674-1723 (Singapore, 1998). [10] Lach, Asia in Making of Europe, vol. 1, bk. 2, p. 730. [11] See accounts collected in Christopher Dawson (ed), Mission to Asia (Toronto, 1980); and Antti Ruotsala, Europeans and Mongols in the Middle of the Thirteenth Century: Encountering the Other (Helsinki, 2001). [12] Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol 1, bk 1, p. 27. [13] Parker, Books to Build an Empire, p. 62 [14] John Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization (Cambridge, 2004), p. 135. [15] See Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley, 1998). [16] Stephen Alford, London’s Triumph: Merchant Adventurers and the Tudor City (London, 2017), pp. 65-79. [17] Anthony Farrington (ed), The English Factory in Japan (London, 1991, 2 vols); Anthony Farrington and Thīrawat Na Pomphet (eds), The English Factory in Siam (London, 2007, 2 vols) provide primary sources. [18] GV Scammel, ‘European Exiles, Renegades and Outlaws and the Maritime Economy of Asia, c. 1500-1750’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 26, no. 4 (1992), pp. 641-661. It’s likely anonymous Englishmen in foreign service encountered China in the sixteenth century, but left no reliable records. [19] DE Mungello, Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology (Honolulu, 1989), pp. 354-358. M Howard Rienstra (ed. trans) Jesuit Letters from China, 1583-1584 (Minneapolis, 1986) for earliest Jesuit accounts of China published in Europe, as an annexe to annual reports on Japan and India. [20] Brook, Mr. Selden’s Map, pp. 48-54. [21] William Dampier, A New Voyage Around the World (London, 1697), in Gerald Norris (ed), William Dampier: Buccaneer Explorer (London, 1994), pp. 110-113, p. 171. Dampier also accidentally discovered Australia, but remained unaware of its significance, introduced the avocado to English audiences, and rescued the castaway Alexander Selkirk, the model for Robinson Crusoe. [22] John Bell, Travels from St Petersburg in Russia to Various Parts of Asia (Glasgow, 1763, 2 vols); Jonathan Spence, Chan’s Great Continent, pp. 45-52. [23] Bernardino de Escalante, Discourse of the Navigation Which the Portugales Doe Make to the Realmes and Provinces of the East Partes of the World. Trans. John Frampton (London, 1579); Francisco Támara, A Discoverie of the Countries of Tartaria, Scithia & Cataya, by the Northeast. Trans. John Frampton (London, 1580). Támara’s work was itself mostly a translation of Johann Boemus, Repertorium Librorum Trium [Repertory of the Three Books] (Augsburg, 1520), demonstrating quite how dated much English knowledge of the east was, and raising questions of what was lost across two translations. The first major published source was a six-page translated Spanish pamphlet, published as Thomas Nicholas, Strange and Marveilous News Lately Come From the Great Kingdome of China (London, 1577), of which ten originals survive today. [24] Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimage, or Relations of the World (London, 1613), pp. 342-353 for Tartary, pp. 366-378 for China; Richard Eden, A History of Travayle in the West and East Indies. Ed. Richard Willes (London, 1577). [25] Parker, Books to Build an Empire, pp. 243-265. [26] As in Jerry Brotton, A History of the World in Twelve Maps (London, 2013). [27] Eivind Heldaas Seland, ‘Spaces, Places and Things: The Spatial Dimension of Early Indian Ocean Exchange’, in Franck Bille, Sanjyot Mehendale and James Lankton (eds), The Maritime Silk Road: Global Connectivities, Regional Nodes, Localities(Amsterdam, 2022), pp. 27-30. [28] Abraham Ortelius, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum: The Theatre of the Whole World: Set forth by that Excellent Geographer, Abraham Ortelius (London, 1606; facsimile Amsterdam 1968). [29] Ortelius, Theatre, p. 105. [30] Ibid. Better known as Intinerarium fratris Willielmi de Rubruquis de ordine fratrum Minorum Galli, MCLIII ad partes Orientales [Account of the Journey of Brother William of Rubruck, of the Order of Friars Minor in Gaul, to Eastern Parts in the Year 1253]. See The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck. Ed. trans. Peter Jackson and David Morgan (London, 1990). [31] Ortelius, Theatre, pg. 106. Presumably Bernardino de Escalante; see note 20. [32] Ibid. Rhubarb was one of the most valuable substances on earth, and believed to grow only in ‘Tartary’. [33] Ibid. [34] Ibid. [35] See Robert Hooke, ‘Some Observations and Conjectures Concerning the Chinese Characters’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, vol. 16, no. 180 (April 1686), pg. 64. Hooke was sceptical of the supposed length of Chinese history, as it defied Biblical chronology. Abū Zayd al-Sīrāfī had raised the same issue, only to be told that the Chinese believed the Flood had not reached them, thus solving the problem their existence provoked in Biblical-Koranic accounts of world history. Accounts of China and India, 2.4.3. Mackintosh-Smith, p. 38. [36] Ortelius, Theatre, p. 107. [37] Speed, Description, pp. 3-4. Quinsay is modern Hangzhou. [38] Ibid, p. 7. [39] Ibid, p. 37. [40] Ibid, p. 38. [41] Ibid, p. 37. [42] Ibid. The parallels with al-Sīrāfī and Hooke are irresistible. [43] Ibid. [44] Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (London, 1620), book 1, aphorism 129. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne (eds. trans.), The New Organon (Cambridge, 2000), p. 100. [45] Marshall and Williams, Great Map, p. 300.
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