Early Sino-European Relations: Problems, Opportunities, and Archives

-50Early Sino-European Relations: Problems, Opportunities, and Archives John E. Wills, Jr. Department of History University of Southern California In 1972-1973, during and after a sabbatical leave in Taiwan, I visited twelve archives in nine countries which contain material on early Sino-Western relations. Looking back on all this and on an earlier year o^f research in the Netherlands and Portugal, it seems clear to me that although this subject does hot deserve the emphasis it received in the days of Cordier and Pelliot, further study of a number of topics would be valuable for Chinese historians because of their intrinsic interest and because of the Western- language information about China that could be made accessible to students of Chinese history. All these topics present, in varying degrees, common opportunities and difficulties, which can be traced in large measure to the use of non-Chinese sources and the focus on the surface of Sino-foreign interactions. The difficulties are perhaps more obvious. Learning two or three additional languages and developing a background knowledge of European expansion in Asia are only the first of them. More important, the scholar who has spent much of his concentrated pre- and post-Ph.D. research time reading Dutch, Portuguese, and so on inevitably will have done so at the, expense of the development of his Chinese language and ancillary Sinologica! research skills. He will have spent a good deal of time unraveling the internal communication, decision, and record-keeping processes of the European organizations, which he has to know in order to use their archives intelligently, but which only occasionally contribute to his understanding of Sino-Western relations. Secondary literature on early European expansion in Asia is spotty in coverage and quality, and it is not always easy to find out where the good work is.being done and published. -51Most important, the scholar soon will realize that the convert communities, foreign embassies, or what have you he deals with are pretty small fish in the vast Ming-Ch'ing ocean. Even if one is interested in the background of the nineteenth-century crisis in Sino-Western relations, Siamese and Korean embassies are parts of this background as well as Portuguese and Dutch, T'ien-li-çhiao communities as well as T'ien-chu-chiao. Only the eighteenth-century Canton trade, both as a Sino-foreign institutional adjustment and as an aspect of Ch'ing economic history, is clearly of major importance in the total sweep of Min-Ch'ing history. But others are case studies of important problems, such as tribute embassies and heterodox sects, and sometimes exceptionally important ones because of the detailed European documentation. The use of European documents, not Chinese -- say, a run of Jesuit accounts of a local mission community rather than Grand Council Archive documents on a suppressed heterodox sect -- may present special opportunities. The foreign observer may tell us things a Chinese observer would have found too obvious or trivial to record. His description may involve a more or less conscious comparison between a European institution -the lay sodality, for example — and its transformation in the context of Chinese culture and society. More difficulties will develop, however, when one tries to ask Western sources questions about Chinese institutions. The Ch'ing historian reading Chinese sources owes a great many of his ideas about his topic to the dense and sophisticated comments of Ch'ing statesmen and statecraft scholars; the student reading Western sources finds that he is working against the grain of his sources. Catholic missionaries (to judge by my rather small sampling of this vast literature) were not much interested in the place of their converts in the local social order; European merchants knew little and cared less about the policy problems of Chinese -52officials taxing and controlling foreign trade. Working against the grain can lead to important and surprising insights, but it can lead to maddening problems and long dry spells when one is "not learning anything about China". However, if one is genuinely interested in the European side as well as the Chinese side of a particular set of relations, some of these frustrations can be avoided and some new possibilities will...