This book introduces the history of cultural exchanges between East Asia and the West through comparative biographical sketches of sixty personalities from China and Japan. These sketches illustrate how both countries, starting from a shared cultural heritage in script and Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist worldviews, took rather different approaches in their encounters with the European world since the 16th to 17th centuries. In particular in the 19th century under external and internal pre...

A comprehensive sourcebook for historians and sinologists, containing biographies of over 1000 Christian missionaries who served in China before 1955.In this monumental reference work, Leopold Leeb provides biographical accounts of over 1000 missionaries in China, beginning in the year 635 and continuing through the mid-twentieth century. Missionaries to China: A Historical Dictionary is distinctive for its wide historical range, its emphasis on Catholic, ...

This comparative study of the history of Christianity in China and in Korea opens up new perspectives for the understanding of the presence of the Christian faith in East Asia. Following the historical sequence throughout the last four centuries the author narrates the biographies of several outstanding Christians from China and Korea and attempts to understand them in their respective cultural settings by applying the principle of mutual illumination: the experience of China may help to i...

This comparative study of the history of the Catholic Church in China and Vietnam from the seventeenth to the twentieth century opens up new perspectives for the understanding of the presence of Christianity in Asia. The author narrates the biographies of a number of outstanding missionaries and Christians from China and Vietnam and tries to understand them in their respective historical backgrounds by applying the principle of mutual illumination: the experience of China may help to under...

A 16th century Italian Jesuit, Matteo Ricci was the founder of the Catholic Mission in China and one of the most famous missionaries of all time. A pioneer in bringing Christianity to China, Ricci spent twenty eight years in the country, in which time he crossed the cultural divides between China and the West by immersing himself in the language and culture of his hosts. Even 400 years later, he is still one of the best known westerners in China, celebrated for introducing western scientif...

For the Chinese, the drive toward growing political and economic power is part of an ongoing effort to restore China's past greatness and remove the lingering memories of history's humiliations. This widely praised book explores the 1500–1800 period before China's decline, when the country was viewed as a leading world culture and power. Europe, by contrast, was in the early stages of emerging from provincial to international status while the United States was still an uncharted wilderness...

The Chinese Catholic Church traces its living roots back to the late sixteenth century and its historical roots back even further, to the Yuan dynasty. This book explores paintings and sculptures of the Virgin Mary and the communities that produced them over several centuries. It argues for the emergence of distinctly Chinese Catholic identities as artistic representations of the Virgin Mary, at different times and in different places, absorbed and in turn influenced representations of Chi...

While previous works on the history of Christianity in China have largely centered on the scientific and philosophical areas of Catholic missions in the Middle Kingdom, China's Saints recounts the history of Christian martyrdom, precipitated as it was by cultural antagonisms and misunderstanding. Anthony Clark shows that Christianity in China began and grew under similar circumstances to those during the Roman Empire, with the notable exception that Catholic missionaries were not successfu...

China and Maritime Europe, 1500–1800 looks at early modern China in some of its most complicated and intriguing relations with a world of increasing global interconnection. New World silver, Chinese tea, Jesuit astronomers at the Chinese court, and merchants and marauders of all kinds play important roles here. Although pieces of these stories have been told before, these chapters provide the fullest and clearest available summaries, based on sources in Chinese and in European languages, m...

Occupying much of imperial China’s Yangzi River heartland and costing more than twenty million lives, the Taiping Rebellion (1851-64) was no ordinary peasant revolt. What most distinguished this dramatic upheaval from earlier rebellions were the spiritual beliefs of the rebels. The core of the Taiping faith focused on the belief that Shangdi, the high God of classical China, had chosen the Taiping leader, Hong Xiuquan, to establish his Heavenly Kingdom on Earth.How were the Taiping...

Since emerging as a settlement in the seventh century, Dubrovnik has faced Venetian aggressors, Ottoman plotters, a terrible earthquake in 1667 and, finally, the will of Napoleon. In 1991-92 the city survived the besieging Yugoslav army, which heavily damaged but did not destroy its cultural heritage. This book is a comprehensive history of Dubrovnik's progress over twelve centuries of European development, encompassing arts, architecture, social and economic changes, politics and the trau...

This collection offers fresh perspectives on Sino-Western cultural relations, with particular regard to the experience of Christianity in China. The contributors include authorities from China (including Hong Kong and Taiwan), Europe (including Russia and Eastern Europe), and North America.