Overview

The European view on history was shaken to its foundations when missionaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries discovered that Chinese history was older than European and Biblical history. With an analysis of the Chinese, Manchu and European sources on ancient Chinese history, this essay proposes an early case of “intercultural historiography,” in which historical texts of different cultures are interwoven. It focusses on the ways Chinese and European authors interpreted stories about marvellous births by the concubines of Emperor Ku. These stories have been the object of a wide variety of interpretations in Chinese texts, each of them representing a different historical genre. They are excellent case-studies to illustrate how the Chinese hermeneutic strategies shaped the diversity of interpretations given by Europeans.

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a sinological tour de force (...) Standaert's book on the intercultural weaving of historical texts, East-West, is an example of scholarship at its best. He has again offered a contribution to the fields of classical sinology and sino-missionary studies that shall remain a necessary voice in the scholarly discourse on how China and the West have encountered and changed oneanother in ways that have transformed the fabric of history. Anthony E. Clark, Whitworth University, Spokane, WA, Journal of Jesuit Studies 4 (2017)

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Nicolas Standaert (Ph.D. Leiden University, 1984) is Professor of Sinology at the University of Leuven (Belgium). He has published widely on Sino-European cultural contacts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

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