Describing China in the missionary experience during the second half of the sixteenth century: the Iberian laboratory

Abstract

The main goal of this article is to develop a reflection about the specificity of missionary writing as a means for the production of knowledge. Rather than endorsing the ‘proto-ethnological character of missionary writing’ (in the footsteps of Claude Lévi-Strauss), it aims at confronting the geopolitical context with the potential elements of a particular episteme allowing, during the second half of the sixteenth century, for China to be turned into a new topic for the European learned milieu, encompassing thus knowledge production into a new global framework. The article’s main suggestion is that the historiographical operation that encapsulates this process can be located in the cross-reading of three books: Gaspar da Cruz’s Tratado das Cousas da China, González de Mendoza’s Historia de las cosas las mas notables, ritos y costumbres del gran reyno de la China, and Nicolas Trigault’s De Christiana Expeditione apud China.