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The European Discovery of China

This course is an exercise in global history that focuses on when and how the West first approached China, and explores the influence that the discovery of China exerted on late medieval and early modern European minds. The backdrop of the course is the history of China from the Song to the Ming dynasties. We'll analyze this period of Chinese history through the eyes of travelers, discoverers and missionaries that wrote about China from the 13th to the 17th century: their writings will lead the path. We'll also take advantage of Chinese and European illustrated sources, like scrolls, paintings and maps, to give a more accurate picture of how China really was at each time. How did Europeans construct the highly positive image of China that would persist until the 18th century? What these Western travelers saw, what they didn't see, what they choose not to tell and what they invented - that's the story that we are going to unravel in this course.