Images de la France sous la dynastie des Qing (review)

In a seminar I taught on eighteenth-century French Orientalism several years ago, a student asked, "But what did the Chinese think about the French?" In this instance, we were discussing the Jesuit missionaries' letters from China, the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses. The class had already read some Oriental tales by Enlightenment philosophers and a few excerpts from their "philosophical histories"; the students had seen portraits of French aristocrats in Turkish dress and photos of various kinds of chinoiserie. From these examples, we could only know about one perspective, directed from France towards the East. As much as I would have liked to provide examples of views that went in the opposite direction, I could think of none. At least, our ignorance of Chinese made it impossible for us to access any academic sources written in that language. While Western scholars such as Jonathan Spence, Susan Naquin, or David Porter have given us wonderfully erudite works about Chinese history or about the influence of Chinese products in Europe, to my knowledge, they have not addressed my student's not unreasonable question about the Chinese perspective on France.

The present volume edited by Jin Lu addresses the very question of the Chinese point of view from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries through the eyes of present-day Chinese scholars. For this reason, it is an invaluable resource for students of French literature and comparative literature—or for those who happen to be interested in both French and Chinese cultures. Most articles in this collection are translated by Jin Lu from Chinese to French, with the exception of her own pieces, which are written directly in French, and Gang Song's article, which remains in the original English. We are extremely fortunate that Jin Lu is fluent in all of these languages and is familiar with the different academic systems, because she was able to produce a collection of articles that few others are equipped to do.

What we know of Sino-French relations in the early modern era begins with the Jesuit mission to convert the Chinese to Roman Catholicism. The mostly Italian, Portuguese, and French members of the Jesuit order arrived in China in the late 1500s, three centuries after Marco Polo's famed voyage. Matteo Ricci (aka "Li Madou") was the pioneering Jesuit who carried out the policy of assimilating into the Chinese court in order to secure the emperor's favour. Accordingly, the first section of Images de la France sous la dynastie des Qing consists of two articles devoted to the period of the Jesuit missions. The other two sections of the volume deal with the reception of specific works of French literature in China and the descriptions of France by Chinese travellers of the nineteenth century. Some oddly curious facts and several important themes emerge from this collection of articles. To start with the curious facts, it must be said that the interaction between two very different cultures, Chinese and European, sometimes produced hilarious results. For instance, Gang Song tells us in his article "The Other under a Chinese Heaven" of Matteo Ricci's great efforts to explain his homeland to the Chinese elite in terms that would impress them. He created a world map to assist in visualizing the geographical position of his home continent of Oulouba, or Europa. The map included commentary such as, "The wine is made of grape juice. All craftsmen are skilful. People understand everything regarding astronomy and physics. The customs are simple and the wu lun (five human relations) are stressed" (28). Even the main tenets of Christianity had to be adapted to Chinese tastes, to the extent that Ricci convinced scholars that this religion was just like Confucianism because it mostly consisted of "practical advice for daily life" (27). The work of Ricci and his fellows, however, did not prevent many Chinese people from believing that Jesus was a sort of witch...