Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe

by David Porter

From the first successful Jesuit mission in 1583 until the disastrous failure of the British trade embassy in 1816, China’s cultural practices transfixed the attention of Western philosophers, theologians, architects, artists, entrepreneurs, and social critics. The direct influences on European culture were many and profound, ranging from Chinese teahouses in European palace gardens to adaptations of Chinese plays for the popular stage, from calls for the restructuring of the civil service on the model of Chinese meritocracy to the espousal of Confucian precepts in the moral education of children. More significant than even such readily visible gestures of imitation and appropriation, however, were the interpretive strategies that accompanied the processes by which Europeans translated the unfamiliar and often enigmatic artifacts of Chinese culture into familiar forms of meaning, thus engaging them in the emergent discourses of European modernity. This book traces recurrent patterns in the European imaginative constructions of China through four illuminating spheres of linguistic, theological, aesthetic, and economic. How might we compare the perplexity of Europeans before the Chinese writing system with their experience of Chinese religious practice, trade policy, or porcelain design? The author shows how the remarkably consistent interpretive paradigms revealed through such comparisons suggest not only how historical circumstances condition and constrain responses to the foreign but also how an active engagement with the cipher of foreignness shapes the way a society comes to understand itself.

311 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

David Porter was born and raised in Tuscola, Illinois, and has been writing professionally since 1984. He is owner/publisher of three newspapers: The Tuscola Review, Arcola Record-Herald and Lebanon Advertiser.

He previously worked as Director of Communications for the Illinois Press Association and served as president of the Southern Illinois Editorial Association.

His book, The Make-out Room & Other Stories, is a compilation of 123 newspaper columns with a wide variety of subjects. Light reading.

His wife, Jennie, is a Kindergarten teacher in Tuscola. The two were classmates having first met in Kindergarten.

Note: Goodreads links all books written be people of the same name. The only book from me as of Nov. 29, 2020, is The Make-Out Room & Other Stories.