20.11.: Vortrag im Rahmen der Agorá: „A New World with a Spin: Discourses on the Globe in Early Modern China“
Vortrag im Rahmen der Agorá
„A New World with a Spin: Discourses on the Globe in Early Modern China“
Vortragende: Frau Prof.in Qiong Zhang
Zeit: Mittwoch, 20. November 2019, 18.00 Uhr
Ort: Bibliotheksaula, Universitätsbibliothek, Hofstallgasse 2-4, 5020 Salzburg
During the Age of Discovery, the Chinese encountered a New World, too! It was the new notion that the world is shaped as a globe, with multiple continents and oceans on it. Until then, their dominant tradition held the earth to be a square space framed by the Four Seas, on which China occupied the physical and cultural center. Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) and other European Jesuits worked hard to broadcast this new idea among the Chinese in order to undermine their Sinocentric conceit and open their minds to the religion of Western Christendom. How successful were they? We will address this question by examining some representative maps and texts by Chinese authors from the late sixteenth through the eighteenth century who did embrace the notion of the globe.
Qiong Zhang is Associate Professor of History at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She received her BA and MA in Philosophy from Wuhan University, China, and her Ph.D. in the History of Science from Harvard University. At Wake Forest, she teaches various courses on Chinese history, pre-modern world history, and global encounters in the Age of Discovery. Her research fields are early modern Chinese intellectual and cultural history and the history of China’s encounters with Western Europe since the sixteenth century. Her book on the reception of the notion of the globe in seventeenth century China (Making the New World Their Own: Chinese Encounters with Jesuit Science in the Age of Discovery) was published by Brill in June 2015. She is currently working on several projects that explore the continuities and ruptures between the early and late modern developments in China, and what may be called global early modernity, as manifested within the discourses of natural history, ethnography, world geography and meteorology. 
