Making the New World Their Own

In Making the New World Their Own, Qiong Zhang offers a systematic study of how Chinese scholars in the late Ming and early Qing came to understand that the earth is shaped as a globe. This notion arose from their encounters with Matteo Ricci, Giulio Aleni and other Jesuits. These encounters formed a fascinating chapter in the early modern global integration of space. It unfolded as a series of mutually constitutive and competing scholarly discourses that reverberated in fields from cosmology, cartography and world geography to classical studies. Zhang demonstrates how scholars such as Xiong Mingyu, Fang Yizhi, Jie Xuan, Gu Yanwu, and Hu Wei appropriated Jesuit ideas to rediscover China's place in the world and reconstitute their classical tradition. Winner of the Chinese Historians in the United States (CHUS) 2015 Academic Excellence Award

Review:

The title of this fine study of the relationship between Jesuit missionaries and Chinese scholars shows that the author is determined to explore the Chinese side of that relationship far more than other recent studies of the Jesuits in China. Rather than a Eurocentric view of a New World, which focusses on the Americas, Zhang relates how encounters with Europeans and, more important, encounters with Jesuits enabled late Ming- and early Qing-dynasty China to adopt a new picture of the world. Sheila J. Rabin, in: Journal of Jesuit Studies, Volume 3, Issue 3 (2016), pages 518-519. Read the full review here.