VMs: "European Knowledge of China, 1500-1630"

[Nick Pelling <nickpelling@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

Those of you with Chinese VMs theories might be interested in this 
1500-page (!) dissertation. Abstract and link originally posted by Chet Van 
Duzer to the MapHist mailing list. But before you ask, only the abstract 
seems to be in English. :-o

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....

				* * * * * * *

Roque de Oliveira, Francisco Manuel de Paula Nogueira, "A construcao do
conhecimento europeu sobre a China, c. 1500  c. 1630: Impressos e
manuscritos que revelaram o mundo chines a Europa culta," Thesis,
Departament de Geografia, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, 2003

Abstract:
After the first voyage of Vasco da Gama to India (1498), the conquest of
Malacca by Afonso de Albuquerque (1511) and the first Portuguese landing
at the Chinese province of Guangdong (1513), Europe regained the
capability to inquire on a regular basis about Chinas geographical
reality, a kind of learning process that had been suspended at the end of
Pax Mongolica (mid fourteenth-century). In this research we will list and
analyse those textual and cartographical objects whose contents were
crucial to inform the learned Europeans about the Chinese world between c.
1500 and c. 1630. The dissertation is divided in two parts.
The First Part defines the geographic background and the several
political, economical and social sceneries that, both in Europe and in
Asia, led to the production and the contents of the documents we selected.
The following subjects are among those that will be reviewed:
(1) Asian merchants and trade communities in the Indian Ocean and the
China Sea at the eve of the 16th century;
(2) Chinese internal situation at that same period and the consequences
related to the long lasting maritime tradition in China;
(3) The building up process of the Indian Portuguese State between c. 1500
and c. 1630;
(4) The several phases of the Portuguese approach to the Chinese world
during that same period;
(5) The consequences brought by the arrival and settlement of Spaniards,
English and Dutch in the Indian Ocean and in the Far East between the end
of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th century.
In the Second Part we will approach each document or specific collection
of documents by considering nine preliminary questions:
(1) Where was the new information it presents gathered?
(2) Who collected that information?
(3) Who ordered that data, who was supposed to receive it or by which
reason was it collected in the first place?
(4) How can we define the main informative topics exhibited in each
document and how do they change as time goes by?
(5) Which European places where the first to receive and to publish the
new first-hand reports, and which were those kept aside from that same
process?
(6) Closely related to the previous question, which rhythms of report and
of news transmission can we perceive during the period under
consideration?
(7) In which way can those rhythms be connected to the quality of the
written information spread around, to the documents internal organization,
or to the maturing process of some of the narrative genders involved?
(8) In case there exists some kind of textual transference from document
to document, how does it occur and what kind of sense can be perceived in
that transit?
(9) In case there exists some kind of combination inside a certain
document between (i) the new empirical knowledge about China that resulted
from the European Discoveries and the Expansion movement, and (ii) the
concepts related to East Asia inherited from classic and medieval
scientific tradition, how does it occur and what kind of sense can be
perceived in that combination?

http://www.tdx.cesca.es/TESIS_UAB/AVAILABLE/TDX-1222103-160816/


______________________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe, send mail to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxx with a body saying:
unsubscribe vms-list