SINOPHOBIA VS. SINOPHILIA IN THE 16TH CENTURY IBERIAN WORLD十六世紀伊比利亞世界的恐華和親華傾向
The article examines the coexistence, in the sixteenth-century Iberian world, of contrasting discourses on China, characterized as sinophilia and sinophobia, arguing that European "Sinography" was born not merely from an alleged informational rupture, but from a broader ecology of Portuguese and Cas...
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| Published in: | Review of Culture |
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| Format: | Articles |
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Instituto Cultural de Macau
2014
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| Online Access: | https://www.icm.gov.mo/rc/viewer/pdfViewerParts/40046/2394 |
| Summary: | The article examines the coexistence, in the sixteenth-century Iberian world, of contrasting discourses on China, characterized as sinophilia and sinophobia, arguing that European "Sinography" was born not merely from an alleged informational rupture, but from a broader ecology of Portuguese and Castilian mediations. Instead of presenting the shift from "Cathay" to a more current knowledge as a linear process, the author demonstrates how manuscript sources (such as letters from Portuguese captives in Canton) and records of limited circulation coexisted with printed works of great impact. Methodologically, the analysis articulates historiography, textual criticism, and the history of the book, tracing genealogies of dependence and translation between Castile and Europe: from Fernão Lopes de Castanheda and João de Barros to the Portuguese compilation of Gaspar da Cruz (1569), and from there to the Castilian texts of Bernardino de Escalante (1577) and Juan González de Mendoza (1585), whose broad reception consolidated the sinophilic image of the Middle Kingdom (abundance, political order, merit in the selection of rulers, urbanism, and stability). It concludes that, although sinophilia imposes itself in the printed canon through its legibility and diffusion, sinophobia—less visible and less mapped—remains an alternative response to experiences and observations that strain the utopian and normative model of a European China. |
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| ISSN: | 1682-1106 |