China and the West

Tulisen ist chinesischer Gesandter in Russland.

Christian Wolff rezensiert Noël, François. Sinensis imperii libri classici sex [ID D1801] in der Zeitschrift Acta eruditorum.

Wolff, Christian von. Vernünfftige Gedancken von dem gesellschaftlichen Leben der Menschen [ID D16612].
Michael Albrecht : Wolff erklärt darin, die 'Sineser' überträfen in der Kunst zu regieren alle anderen Völker : "so ist mir lieb, dass ich ihre Maximen aus meinen Gründen erweisen kann. Vielleicht finde ich einmahl Gelegenheit die Sitten- und Staats-Lehre der Sineser in Form einer Wissenschaft zu bringen, da sich die Harmonie mit meinen Lehren deutlich zeigen wird".

The Spectator ; Vol. 3, No. 511 (Oct. 16, 1612).
Addison, Joseph : Eine der ersten englischen Geschichten mit Thema China :
"I have another Story to tell thee, which I likewise met with in a Book. It seems the General of the Tartars, after having laid siege to a strong Town in China, and taken it by Storm, would set to Sale all the Women that were found in it. Accordingly, he put each of them into a Sack, and after having thoroughly considered the Value of the Woman who was inclosed, marked the Price that was demanded for her upon the Sack. There were a great Confluence of Chapmen, that resorted from every Part, with a Design to purchase, which they were to do unsight unseen. The Book mentions a Merchant in particular, who observing one of the Sacks to be marked pretty high, bargained for it, and carried it off with him to his House. As he was resting with it upon a half-way Bridge, he was resolved to take a Survey of his Purchase: Upon opening the Sack, a little old Woman popped her Head out of it; at which the Adventurer was in so great a Rage, that he was going to shoot her out into the River. The old Lady, however, begged him first of all to hear her Story, by which he learned that she was sister to a great Mandarin, who would infallibly make the Fortune of his Brother-in-Law as soon as he should know to whose Lot she fell. Upon which the Merchant again tied her up in his Sack, and carried her to his House, where she proved an excellent Wife, and procured him all the Riches from her Brother that she had promised him."

Addison, Joseph. The pleasures of imagination. In : The Spectator ; vol. 2 ; no 414 (June 21, 1712).
Er schreibt : "If the Writers who have given us an account of China tell us the inhabitants of that country laugh at the plantations of our Europeans, which are laid out by the rule and line; because, they say, any one may place trees in equal rows and uniform figures. They choose rather to show a genius in works of this nature, and therefore always conceal the art by which they direct themselves. They have a word, it seems, in their language, by which they express the particular beauty of a plantation that thus strikes the imagination at first sight, without discovering what it is that has so agreeable an effect. Our British gardeners, on the contrary, instead of humouring nature, love to deviate from it as much as possible. Our trees rise in cones, lobes, and pyramids."

Sekundärliteratur
Tony C. Brown : Addison presents Chinese taste in landscape gardening as exemplary of aesthetic experience itself. In the way they appreciate a well-laid garden, the Chinese uphold a principle of variety without end, make apparent the immediacy of aesthetic pleasure, and exhibit a positive use of an imagination not beholden to the dictates of reason. Though what the Chinese therefore illustrate is a largely unconditioned state—of perpetual novelty, immediacy, and freedom from reason's rule—this is not because Addison thinks them undeveloped, akin to what we would call a primitive society or culture. Addison, like many late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Europeans, considers China to be a site of competing civilization. The China he presents in the "Pleasures" is not a figure of primitivism or a predicate of simplicity prior to complex bureaucratic and commercial development. Nor does it stand in for a condition of simple negation. On the contrary, Addison finds in the figure of Chinese taste something that enables him to delimit the aesthetic, something that he does not find available at home in Europe.
Addison's need for China follows from the noticeably new way he tries to conceive the aesthetic. For him, the pleasures of the imagination are not governed exclusively by the divine final cause but operate via the efficient cause, considered as a primitive, universal human faculty. For this reason, Addison finds aesthetic experience to be immediate and pre-cognitive, hence largely unconditioned—a formulation that posits the aesthetic as something that precludes direct description. It is to define what he cannot therefore otherwise present that Addison calls upon China. China's exotic status supplies him with a geopolitical principle of differentiation that he turns to remark a limit of another order, namely a subjective one. Binding in itself the known and unknown, China allows Addison to figure something lacking in initial distinction, the aesthetic and the self of an aesthetic experience.
As Addison wants to articulate the aesthetic itself through the figure of Chinese gardening, we can call the figure allegoric rather than, say, metaphoric. Whereas the latter, to maintain its coherence, brackets any incompatibility between tenor and vehicle, for Addison Chinese gardening designates something—the aesthetic—that in effect exhibits a qualitative non-equivalence with its vehicle or fable.
An allegory for Addison appeals not only to the understanding but to the imagination as well, a double appeal that gives it its pedagogic utility. Allegories can dress up difficult ideas in pleasing attire, though that attire must fit well. This is what Addison wants to achieve with the figure of Chinese taste. Addison finds the Chinese garden so attractive because it presents a seemingly free distribution of natural objects.

The Spectator ; vol.2 ; no 415 (1712).
Joseph Addison schreibt : "The wall of China is one of those eastern pieces of magnificence, which makes a figure even in the map of the world, although an account of it would have been thought fabulous, were not the wall itself still extant."

Swift, Jonathan. A proposal for correcting, improving and ascertaining the English [ID D17121].
Er schreibt : "The Chinese have books in their language above two thousand years old, neither have the frequent conquests of the Tartars been able to alter it."

In China wird 620 das erste Porzellan hergestellt. Kaolin, der Rohstoff zur Herstellung wird im 12. Jh. in Gaoling (Jiangxi) gefunden.
Francois Xavier Dentrecolles beschreibt in zwei Briefen aus den Jahren 1712 und 1722 Details aus der von ihm in Jingdezhen beobachteten Porzellanherstellung, darunter die Verwendung zweier Arten von Ton : Kao-lin und Pe-tun-se, einem feldspat- und glimmerhaltigen Gestein.

Matteo Ripa macht 36 Kupferstiche für Kaiser Kangxi, Vues de Jehol.

Arcade Hoang weigert sich, Priester zu werden, will aber in Paris bleiben, was ihm mit Hilfe von Jean-Paul Bignon gelingt. Er wird Übersetzer der königlichen Bibliothek und chinesischer Dolmetscher von Ludwig XIV.

Thomas da Cruz ist als Missionar in Songjiang (Jilin) tätig.

Pieter Thomas van Hamme ist als Missionar in Zhengjiang (Jiangnan, Hunan) tätig.

Arcade Hoang wird von Ludwig XIV. beauftragt ein chinesisches Wörterbuch und eine chinesische
Grammatik zu schreiben. Es entsteht eine unvollendete Übersetzung eines chinesischen Wörterbuchs,
ein kleines französisch-chinesisches Vokabular, ein Vokabular mit ca. 2000 Wörtern und Sätzen der
Umgangssprache und grammatische Aufsätze, die Übersetzung des Vaterunser, des Ave und des Credo,
sowie ein Anfgang der Übersetzung eines kleinen chinesischen Romans.

Etienne Fourmont wird Mitglied der Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettrres.

Charles de Secondat de Montesquieu macht bei einem Treffen mit Nicolas Fréret und Pierre Nicolas Desmolets die Bekanntschaft von Arcade Hoang in Paris. Im selben Jahr liest er die Tabula chronologica [ID D1757] und Confucius Sinarum philosophus [ID D1758] von Philippe Couplet.
Montesquieu schreibt : "J'ai ouï au sieur Oèanges [Arcade Hoang] qu'étant arrivé nouvellement de la Chine il avait laissé son chapeau dans l'église parce qu'on lui avait dit à la Chine que les moeurs étaient si pures en Europe et qu'il y avait une si grande charité qu'on n'y entendait jamais parler de vols ni d'exécutions de justice et qu'il fut fort étonné d'entrendre qu'on allait pendre un assassin."

Aufführung von Arlequin invisible chez le roi de la Chine von Alain René Lesage mit Musik von Jean-Claude Gilliers im Théâtre de la Foire in Paris. Das Geschehen ist meist in eine exotische Ferne verlegt. Gesellschaftskritik mit Hilfe der Verfremdung ins Exotische war ein Standardtopos im 18. Jahrhundert und die Verschlüsselung Peking = Paris wurde von jedermann verstanden.

Friedrich von Görne gründet eine Faience-Manufaktur in Brandenburg

Claude Audran III, Jacques Dagly und Pierre de Neufmaison gründen eine Manufacture de verny à la chinoise.

Etienne Fourmont erhält die linguistischen Abhandlungen von Arcade Hoang und wird am Collège royale
(Collège de France) zugelassen.

Nicholas de Rémond bittet Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz um eine Stellungnahme zu Niccolò Longobardis Traité sur quelques points de la religion des Chinois [ID D1792] und Sainte-Marie, Antoine de. Traité sur quelques points importans de la mission de la Chine [ID D2729]. Beide lehnen den Akkommodationsstandpunkt ab. Leibniz antwortet mit "un discours entier sur leur Théologie, touchant Dieu, les Esprits et l'Ame", daraus entsteht sein Discours sur la théologie naturelle des Chinois, der erstmals 1735 [ID D16302] aus seinem Nachlass veröffentlicht wird.