China and the West

Giulio Aleni gründet die Mission von Fujian.

Francisco Furtado ist als Missionar in Jiading (Shanghai), Jiangnan (Hunan) und Hangzhou (Zhejiang) tätig.

Bacon, Francis. Of Vicissitude of Things [ID D26977].
Er schreibt :
"The changes and vicissitude in wars are many; but chiefly in three things; in the seats or stages of the war; in the weapons ; and in the manner of the conduct. Wars, in ancient time, seemed more to move from east to west ; for the Persians, Assyrians, Arabians, Tartars (which were the invaders) were all eastern people."

"As for the weapons, it hardly falleth under rule and observation: yet we see even they have returns and vicissitudes. For certain it is, that ordnance was known in the city of the Oxidrakes in India; and was that which the Macedonians called thunder and lightning, and magic. And it is well known that the use of ordnance hath been in China above two thousand years. The conditions of weapons, and their improvement, are ; First, the fetching afar off ; for that outruns the danger; as it is seen in ordnance and muskets."

Athanasius Kircher studiert Theologie in Mainz.

João Rodrigues ist Dolmetscher der portugiesischen Soldaten, die der Ming-Dynastie gegen den Angriff der Mandschus helfen sollen.

Emmanuel Diaz, o Novo ist Vize-Provincial für China.

Bacon, Francis. New Atlantis [ID D26978]. [Enthält Eintragungen über China].
Mögliche Quellen :
[Polo, Marco]. The most noble and famous trauels of Marcus Paulus [ID D26973].
Gonzáles de Mendoza, Juan. Historia de las cosas más notables, ritos y costumbres del gran reyno de la China [ID D1627].

Er schreibt :
"We sailed from Peru, where we had continued by the space of one whole year, for China and Japan, by the South Sea, taking with us victuals for twelve months; and had good winds from the east, though soft and weak, for five months' space and more. "
"Toward the east the shipping of Egypt and of Palestine was likewise great. China also, and the great Atlantis, (that you call America,) which have now but junks and canoes, abounded then in tall ships. This island, (as appeareth by faithful registers of those times,) had then fifteen hundred strong ships, of great content. Of all this, there is with you sparing memory, or none; but we have large knowledge thereof. At that time, this land was known and frequented by the ships and vessels of all the nations before named. And (as it cometh to pass) they had many times men of other countries, that were no sailors, that came with them; as Persians, Chaldeans, Arabians; so as almost all nations of might and fame resorted hither; of whom we have some stirps, and little tribes with us at this day. And for our own ships, they went sundry voyages, as well to your straits, which you call the Pillars of Hercules, as to other parts in the Atlantic and Mediterrane Seas; as to Paguin, (which is the same with Cambaline,) and Quinzy, upon the Oriental Seas, as far as to the borders of the East Tartary."
"It is true, the like law against the admission of strangers without license is an ancient law in the Kingdom of China, and yet continued in use. But there it is a poor thing; and hath made them a curious, ignorant, fearful, foolish nation. But our lawgiver made his law of another temper."

"Now for our travelling from hence into parts abroad, our lawgiver thought fit altogether to restrain it. So is it not in China. For the Chinese sail where they will, or can ; which showeth, that their law of keeping out strangers is a law of pusillanimity and fear. But this restraint of ours hath one only exception, which is admirable ; preserving the good which cometh by communicating with strangers, and avoiding the hurt: and I will now open it to you."

"We have burials in several earths, where we put divers cements, as the Chinese do their porcelain. But we have them in greater variety, and some of them more fine. We also have great variety of composts and soils, for the making of the earth fruitful."

Gwee, Li Sui. Westward to the Orient : the specter of scientific China in Francis Bacon's New Atlantis [ID D26972].
Chinese longevity was the basis for Bacon's fantasy of an enduring cultural alternative aligned with the West and reframed his adventure 'beyond both the old world and the new' as more than a metaphor in its desire to encroach upon the known sphere of Chinese socioeconomic influence. By depicting China as still polarized three thousand years ago between Quinzy and cambaline, or Manzian Hangchow and Tartar Peking, Bacon's grossest error was hardly his depiction of Peking as a sea-port, a notion possibly derived from John Mandeville's Voyages de Johan de Mandeville chevalier [ID D10209]. Rather, he revealed that the only Middle Kingdom he cared about was either recent or unchanging since Bensalem's age-old familiarity with China did not translate into a knowledge of its contours prior to the Yuan or Mongol dynasty of the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. His siting of Cathay and China as one and the same terrain further did away with a geographical indeterminacy that could not have been resolved before the clarifications of Jesuits Matteo Ricci and Bento de Gois, around the turn of the seventeenth century. These points fix the span of what Bacon knew about China firmly within the circulated narratives from Marco Polo's visit to the Orient.
Although the Spanish threat was real, immediate, and textually noticeable, Bacon's greater instinct lay in his recognition of China's more enduring rivalry, this clarifying his actual contribution as an international socioeconomic outlook. His depictions of Spain and China bore tellingly distinct shapes of cultural Otherness : unlike Spanish dominance, Chinese superiority was not so much vilified, opposed, and negated as admired on all terms except those with regard to morality and an unframed scientific diversity. Bacon's use of fiction to secure a vantage point that could obscure the West's real limitations, weaken its cultural inertia, and shift the epicenter of its engagements stressed not just his individual originality but also the factor of neurosis arising from his anxiety over a truly inassimilable Other that seemed to undermine or overwhelm it. This ironic creative reliance on an agon challenges the common assumption that Bacon chose the mode of travel-writing for its inherent empirical rigor and highlights his likelier understanding that the leading travelogues then tended to, in the words of Robert Parke's printer, 'extoll their owne actions, even to the setting forth of many vntruthes and incredible things'.

Filipe Lobo und Jerónimo da Silveira sind Gouverneur von Macao.

Alexandre de Rhodes konvertiert 6000 Chinesen.

Francesco Sambiasi ist als Missionar in Shanxi tätig.

Es gibt ca. 13'000 Christen in China.

Alexandre de Rhodes ist als Missionar in Tonkin (Vietnam) tätig.

Bacon, Francis. Sylua syluarum [ID D26979].
Er schreibt :
“And to help the matter, the alchemists call in likewise many vanities out of astrology, natural magic, superstitious interpretation of Scriptures, auricular traditions, feigned testimonies of ancient authors, and the like. It is true, on the other side, they have brought to light not a few profitable experiments, and thereby made the world some amends. But we, when we shall come to handle the version and transmutation of bodies, and the experiments concerning metals and minerals, will lay open the true ways and passages of nature, which may lead to this great effect. And we comment the wit of the Chinese, who despair of making of gold, but are mad upon the making of silver : for certain it is, that it is more difficult to make gold, which is the most ponderous and materiate amongst metals, of other metals less ponderous and less materiate, than via versa, to make silver of lead or quicksilver…”

“It differeth much in greatness ; the samllest being fit for thatching of houses, and stopping the chinks of ships, better than glue or pitch. The second bigness is used for anglerods and staves ; and in China for beating of offenders upon the thigs.”

“And we understand farther, that it is the use of China, and the kingdoms of the high Levant, to write in 'Characters Real', which express neither letters nor words in gross, but things or notions ; insomuch as countries and provinces, which understand not one another's language, can nevertheless read one another's writings, because the characters are accepted more generally than the languages do extend ; and therefore they have a vast multitude of characters, as many, I suppose, as radical words.”

Sekundärliteratur
Saussy, Haun. Great walls of discourse and other adventures in cultural China [ID D22144].
In classifying Chinese writing as 'ideographic', nineteenth-century grammatologists repeated Francis Bacon's view of Chinese 'Characters Real', which is to say, they repeated Aristotle. In 1605 Bacon observed of the Chinese character : For the organ of tradition, it is either Speech or Writing : and Aristotle saith well, 'Words are the images of cogitations, and letters are the images of words'.
For Bacon, Chinese writing brought the possibility of eliminating one of the levels of mediation through which the 'De Interpretatione' had constructed its picture of mind, language, and world. If indeed words symbolized affections in the soul and phonetic writing symbolized words, then a writing that symbolized affections in the soul would symbolize things themselved, since both things and affections were 'the same for all'.
Bacon divided such 'notes of cogitations' into 'two sorts : the one when the note hath some similitude or congruity with the notion ; the other 'ad placitum', having force only by contract or acceptation', and he put Chinese characters into the latter category – as indeed did most European writers on China before Fenollosa. For Bacon, at least, ideogrammatism does not imply resemblance.
The fortunes of the 'Chinese model' of writing promoted by Bacon – the direct notation of reality, through conventional characters, without the interference of spoken words.
Bacon, with debts to Aristotle, initiates a nonphonetic and potentially wholly conventional model of writing, for which Chinese script serves as the chief ethnographic example, seconded by gesture and numbers. Bacon supposed that a universal character might, but need not necessarily, express some 'similitude or congruity' with the things signified. For a rival understanding of universal conceptual writing in Bacon’s period and afterwards, convention was inadequate, because no set of conventional marks could ever equal the power of a language grounded in a prior kinship between signified and signifiers.

George Candidius halt sich als Missionar der Dtuch Reformed Church in Formosa auf.

Athanasius Kircher wird zum Priester geweiht.

Konferenz in Jiading (Shanghai) über die christliche Terminologie.

Francesco Sambiasi gründet die erste Missionsstation in Kaifeng (Henan).

Xu Guangqi, Johannes Schreck, Giacomo Rho, Johann Adam Schall von Bell und Li Tianjing konstruieren und reparieren im Auftrag des Kalenderamtes astronomische Instrumente für Berechnungen. Schreck entwirft neue astronomische Messgeräte und berechnet korrekt eine Sonnenfinsternis.

Simão da Cunha ist als Missionar in Fujian tätig.

Xu Guangqi hat nach verschiedenen Eingaben an den Kaiser erreicht, dass der fehlerhaft gewordene Kalender reformiert wird, was mit einem kaiserlichen Dektret angeordnet wird. Er wird zum Leiter des Kalenderamts Liju (früher Shoushan shuyuan). Als seine Assistenten bestimmt er Niccolò Longobardo, Johannes Schreck und Li Zhizao.