Introduction: Globalization, localization, and cultural resilience -- Mapping a contact zone -- Divergent discourses on the physical earth in premodern China -- The introduction and refashioning of the terraqueous globe -- Translating the four seas across space and time -- Taking in a new world -- Conclusion: Jesuit science and the shape of Chinese early modernity
Summary
"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"--Provided by publisher
