Autor: José Miguel Vidal (2026)
Abstract: This paper examines how early modern Chinese literati integrated Jesuit knowledge of the Americas through a dynamic process of cultural negotiation, challenging reductive narratives of passive reception or unilateral European diffusion. Beginning in the late 16th century, amid growing global interconnectedness and a vibrant Chinese print culture, Jesuit missionaries, together with Chinese collaborators, developed a strategic approach centred on printed works, including world maps and geographical treatises. The paper first argues that they consciously “encoded” foreign knowledge by appropriating Chinese terminology, formats, and cosmological frameworks, adapting their descriptions of the Americas to resonate with local conceptions of the strange, the marvellous, and the exotic. Conversely, Chinese scholars did not merely adopt or reject this material, but instead they actively “decoded” and reinterpreted it within their own intellectual horizons. It is further argued that this process led to the assimilation of the Americas into established categories of the unknown and the extraordinary, often in association with distant and unfamiliar lands, producing complex forms of domestication and integration. While official compilations preserved Jesuit accounts primarily for their heuristic value as divergent observations of the world, privately authored historical-geographical texts and maps reimagined and reframed knowledge about the Americas through creative engagements with traditional Chinese geographic and historical imaginaries. By foregrounding the interpretative agency of Chinese scholars, this study highlights a multipolar model of knowledge exchange, driven not by linear diffusion, but by cultural translation, selective appropriation and intellectual trends within early modern Chinese geographic and historical discipline.