What does the transformation of China's image look like to Westerners?

In 2011, a yellowed letter went on display at the National Palace Museum in Taipei.

In 1688, Louis XIV from France wrote the letter in his own handwriting, in which he wrote:

Supreme and great prince, dearest friend, may God honor you with good fruits. Knowing that there are many learned men around Your Majesty and in your kingdom who are devoted to European science, we decided many years ago to send our people ? six mathematicians, to bring to your Majesty the most recent scientific and astronomical observations of the famous Royal Academy of Sciences in the city of Paris; but the distance of the sea not only divides us from each other, but is full of accidents and dangers; and therefore, in order to satisfy your Majesty, we planned to send our mathematicians, also Jesuits, as well as the Count of Syrique, by the shortest and less dangerous overland route, in order to be the first to arrive at you, and to make you the first to be able to honor us with our respect and friendship. as a token of our esteem and friendship, and that on the return of Syrius, the most faithful witness, he may publish the remarkable deeds of your life. For this reason, may God honor you with good fruits.

Written on August 7, 1688, in Marly, by your dearest friend Louis

Louis's delegation intended to set out for the Ching dynasty via Russia with this letter, but was repatriated by Peter the Great, who was only fourteen years old. The unsent letter remains to this day as a memory of those glorious times.

Louis XIV was 48 years old and Emperor Kangxi was 32.

The two emperors corresponded across millions of miles, forging a friendship that will be remembered for generations to come.

China fever, or chinoiserie in French

It was the golden age of East and West.

The West was basking in the glow of the Enlightenment.

The population of the East skyrocketed, and the reigns of the Kangxi, Qianlong and Yong became the swansong of the Chinese empire.

But the two civilizations went their separate ways. In less than a century, the image of the Chinese empire turned straight downward in the eyes of the West, from admiration to contempt.

This happened at a time when the vast majority of Chinese, at that time, were not even aware of it.

They loved us, we didn't know.

They cursed us, we didn't know.

It's like a countryside love story where a poor, weak boy once pined for the wide-eyed girl with a ponytail at the head of the village, and I'm sure we should all be able to guess quite a bit of what happened later.

The transformation of China's image in the eyes of Westerners is also nothing more than a history of love induced by unrequited love.

In 1299, the war-torn Venice and Genoa reached a contract. Two elder brothers were released from Genoa's prisons.

One big brother was called Rusty, a knight of the city of Pisa and a non-famous third-rate writer.

The other big brother, called Marco Polo.

These two cellmates in order to pass the time in prison, Marco Polo, an illiterate dictated to Rusty what he had seen in the East, and after his release from prison, "The Chronicle of the Acts of Marco Polo" was a big seller, and in a few months' time it became popular throughout Europe.

People nowadays are increasingly skeptical that this is not Marco Polo squatting number of idle made up paragraphs, but in fact, people have long replied to such queries. At that time, some people said he this stuff is simply nonsense, and asked him to confess, Marco Polo laughed, he spoke: ? What I have said is less than half of what I have seen.

In a sense, it was Marco Polo who created the image of the Khitan in the collective memory of the West. That's what people said later, and it's true to a point.

Europeans believe that in the far East, the Khan ruled by the country's cultural prosperity, material abundance, where there can spit silk magical bugs, with the dance of the songstresses and gentle like water, there are gold and silver casting of the city and spices, and countless of people who do not believe in God urgently need to save them?

Decades later, people continue to add to this collective memory? adding fuel to the fire?

It took the ascetic-like missionary Erdolik nearly seven years to reach the far East, and he wrote "Erdolik's Travels to the East," which confirms many of Marco Polo's sightings, penciled in by others before his death bed. He traveled to Peking, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, these extremely rich cities, like a paradise opened his eyes, and for the women of the East, this big brother said immodestly ? They are the most beautiful in the world!

These are the most beautiful women in the world, and they are the most beautiful in the world!

The Englishman Sir John Mandeville also visited the city in 1322. Sir John Mandeville also embarked on a journey to the East in 1322, leaving his homeland for 34 years, he wrote this book of extreme exaggeration of color "Mandeville Travels", a time of fame, fire over Marco Polo. He was later hailed as the world's greatest Asian traveler, and Columbus used his travels as a powerful testament to his circumnavigation of the globe, and later his readers even included Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, and Mark. Vinci, Shakespeare, and Marx.

In the mid-14th century, the Italian Pegorotti wrote in his Guide to Commerce: ? According to merchants who have traveled to Khitan, the journey from Tana to Khitan? the whole way is safe and without danger?

When the Ottoman Turks emerged at the end of the Silk Road, Europeans' longing for the far east was blocked.

People went mad looking for the East, for a whole new way to get there.

What happened afterward is a story we all know, the opening of new routes? The bourgeois revolution? The Industrial Revolution. The wheels of history were set in motion by a distant yearning, a story as common as that of a poor young man who rose to the occasion because he wanted to marry the girl at the head of the village with the ponytail and the big eyes he loved.

In the end, did the boy marry the girl he had a crush on?

Heh.

When the former teenager talks about the girl he once loved, he mostly says: ? I was just young and ignorant.?

In the 17th century, Europeans cried out for rationality and the Enlightenment arrived.

The paradox is that in the Enlightenment, China was imagined as a very ideal country. In the writings of Voltaire and Montesquieu, China was considered a model, and there was no shortage of exaggeration and unrealistic imagery. For example, the inoculation of cowpox, he wrote in the Philosophical Correspondence: ? I have heard that for a hundred years the Chinese have been in the habit of doing just that (referring to the inoculation of human pox). It is a great precedent and example for a people considered one of the most intelligent and polite in the world.?

What is the truth?In 1678, the son of Emperor Kangxi? had a pox? , he asked a candidate called Fu Weige magistrate specializing in inoculation of human pox to the royal family, the effect is good, and later to find a doctor in Jiangxi Zhu Chun longevity, he compiled a book in 1713 "planting pox full book", and in his life for eight or nine thousand people planted human pox, only 20 or 30 people ineffective, the clinical effect is twice as good. Emperor Kangxi put the list of people in the civilization of the "force to persuade the general planting of pox flower method", and the creation of the planting of the pox bureau.

Later in the history, we found that the Russians had also come to China to learn the method of receiving the pox, and later passed through Turkey to Britain. England produced some professional pox growers, including a country doctor named Cinna, and later this older sister, inspired by a milkman, invented cowpox, replacing the Chinese method of human pox.

But in reality, it's hard to say ? the Chinese have always had it? The Kangxi period can only be said to have discovered the method of planting cowpox, which is far from being popularized on a large scale, or else why did many philanthropists still put the planting of pox at the top of their list when doing charity in modern times? This shows that the elevation to ? Habit? to this is clearly ill-advised.

In their writings, such misunderstandings arising from remoteness abound. It's as if the girl at the head of the village only did the family's laundry once a month, and her mother did the rest, but the teenager only saw her when she was doing her chores, and so he jumped to the conclusion that she? What a virtuous girl!!!?

Louis XIV Banquet Portrait

And in the perception of the West at that time, the emperor in the East was considered to be the presence of a philosophical king in Plato's ideal state, trained by reason and not bound by divinity.

Professor Jin Canrong once humorously said in a speech: ? We live in China know, is that he that ideal emperor is not there, China more than 500 emperors, most of them are fools and bad guys, but in their writings, the Chinese emperor is the King of Philosophy, we read it all blush.?

People are crazy to imitate the East.

At a French court party on Jan. 7, 1700, Louis XIV appeared in a sedan chair wearing Chinese clothes, and the nobles wore the same clothes at the same time. This is just a microcosm of the Oriental fever in Europe, in many painters' paintings, we can find the presence of Chinese porcelain.

Voltaire in the Philosophical Dictionary? Glorious? The words of the entry wrote: ? The history of the world began with China! , and in the Treatise on Customs he wrote: ? The East is the cradle of all art, and the East has given everything to the West!

Whether it is the image of the Oriental world, which is materially prosperous, or the image of the Oriental world, which is taken as the representative of an advanced civilization, all this, in fact, has nothing to do with us.

It is nothing more than their portrayal of an ? Other? s image to criticize the social reality of Europe. They had to find a sufficiently advanced and prosperous ? Other? , by portraying the ? The Other. s image to set an example and criticize the self.

This ? Other? s image must be rational, beyond religious thought, because they want to manage society through reason.

This ? Other? s image must be one of abundance, both spiritually and materially, because it reflects the great benefits of rationally managing society.

And China, as it happens, has shades of these images, and we can't argue with that.

Graeme, a French writer of the time, once said: ? In our time, the Chinese Empire receives special attention and study from people? China is too remote for anyone to have visited or to be able to dispute their reports. Then it is the philosophers who use these reports and extract from them all sorts of useful information to criticize the ills of their own society.?

You see, there are still people who see clearly.

Edward?W?Said, who later wrote Orientalism, once gave this conclusion: ? The mainstream popular conception of the Orient is only a concomitant product of the wholesale westernization of Europe's imperialist activities and values in the world, not the real Orient that exists on the other side.?

So it was that once such an image failed to serve the development of Europe, his image was reversed.

The poor and feeble boy from the countryside who got into a prestigious university and was y attracted by the pomp of the city and the sensible girl, who remembered the girl who had once been that soulful girl, was suddenly covered with a layer of gray fog, and the boy, who had once ignored her imperfections, her various shortcomings, was then suddenly? exposed? In front of her eyes.

The teenager thought about it, this girl is really still my favorite girl?

The wide-eyed girl with a ponytail in her village head did not become annoying, it became just this teenager.

The 18th century was the height of China fever, and in less than 50 years the admiration for Eastern civilization switched to disdain in a way that has staggered all those who have studied this period of history.

In fact, this kind of criticism has been around for a long time. Rousseau once criticized the Chinese empire in his "Nouvelle éloise" in this way: ? They are bookish, loose in life, inconsistent in appearance, and very hypocritical; they talk a lot, but have no real content; they have a lot of heart, but have little genius; they are vain and extremely poor in thought; they are polite and attentive to people; they are very smooth and treacherous in the world; they hang on to the duty of being a human being, and put on an appearance of being very moral; their so-called humaneness is nothing more than a greeting and a curtsy to people.?

Seeming to be an independent thinker, Rousseau may have seen the typical dilemma of the dual personality under the moral politics of the late Chinese Empire. But his conclusions are not objective either; they simply go from one extreme to the other.

And when later Westerners tried to deride this image, they came up with a clever way: just say he was stagnant.

You see, we are progressing and renewing ourselves every day, yet that Eastern world has been stagnant and reincarnated for thousands of years.

So then, with the addition of one little word, all those initiatives that once seemed wise have become symbols of stagnation and decay. And the East, the ? Other? s image, too, became a tool to justify their civilizational achievements.

The image of a stagnant, backward and corrupt Eastern civilization served to prove that the Europeans themselves were sufficiently advanced, developed and accomplished enough.

The French philosopher Durge said in 1750: ? Reason and justice, once set in stone, make everything rigid and unchanging, as in China, and, on the contrary, imperfections do not come to a standstill.? This was said only to justify what he called ? progress? s view of history.

The German philosopher Hull, in his Thoughts on the Philosophy of Human History, published in 1787, said: ? This empire is a mummy, which is covered with embalming spices, depicted with hieroglyphics, and wrapped in silk; the circulation of blood has ceased in it, as in a hibernating animal.?

So it was that all the shortcomings of the Chinese empire were exposed at once; torture, ignorance, decadence?

The Europeans gleefully hailed their achievements and rebounded into a Eurocentric view, which in fact existed from the very beginning of their study of the East.

Although, they drew on the superior components of Eastern civilization, such as the United Kingdom and the United States learned the imperial examinations to create the modern civil service examination system. And the so-called ? Stagnant China? Achievements are not to be underestimated, his population has tripled to the size of 300-400 million, and the level of national personal income and Europe is not far behind. Our civilization has only taken a step in the direction of our development, albeit slowly, but we still cannot ignore the possibility that he has the potential to break through on his own.

When you once loved me, I never knew.

When you cursed me later, I knew even less.

The teenager eventually married a middle-class woman who was well read and had a steady job. And the ponytailed, wide-eyed girl at the head of the village that year married the mangy Wang Er from the next village.

The teenager still goes back to his hometown to visit and even talk to that girl,.

The teenager sees the girl reduced to a worldly village woman, with a big belly under the tree at the head of the village and the old lady guest pulling the family.

The more she spat and the more expletives popped out of her speech, the happier the teenager's heart was.

Is it really just that she's not nice?

I was right to stop liking her.?

I'm glad I tried so hard or I would have had to marry her and that would have been a disaster.?

The image of her is just a way to self-confirm that I've grown up, have matured, and am different from what I used to be.

Finally, I leave you with a poem written by the German writer Goethe, which I leave you to savor

He who understands the self and the other also knows that the East cannot be separated from the West.? Goethe.