Sometime in late 2008, the editors of a prestigious publication made what must have seemed a sensible decision: in an attempt to “symbolically illustrate the magazine’s focus on China” in one of that year’s issues, they accessed a well-known image database, performed a search for “Chinese characters,” and selected a picture containing a fine-looking set of such signs.¹ With its orderly strings of white characters set against a scarlet background, the cover featuring this picture was probably deemed certain to produce a strong visual impact. Unfortunately, the impact went well beyond the strictly visual, as the white graphs—which also included two rather inconspicuous Latin letters—did not align to make up some diaphanous classical Chinese poem. Instead, as it quickly “transpired,” they articulated a somewhat less ethereal piece, belonging to a more mundane genre, and comprising “inappropriate content of a suggestive nature.” With Internet controversy spreading swiftly and the print media picking up the story and reporting on the debacle, the embarrassed editors were soon forced to replace the incriminated cover. They also circulated an email—the source of this paragraph’s quotations—in which they talked about the text’s “deeper levels of meaning” that were not “immediately accessible” to an unspecified sinologist they had consulted prior to publication.

As many Internet comments on this incident have noticed, the editors treated Chinese writing very much like an ornament—something not unlike, as one astute observer put it, (would-be) Chinese characters in a tattoo. The origin of such aestheticism is not hard to identify: behind the editors’ justifications, the wording of their apology, as well as their decision to opt for yet another set of Chinese signs for the new cover, one recognizes a very old and very common Western fascination with the “mystery,” “power,” and “otherness” of Chinese writing. Indeed, the initial columns of white characters must have been chosen specifically not only for their perceived beauty but also for the tacitly assumed ability of Chinese characters—any Chinese characters—to conjure China for European eyes and minds. Furthermore, when the selected image was eventually acknowledged as a text, this was still declared to resist deciphering and remain somewhat opaque, even to the specialist. Finally, it was still characters, this time making up the title page of a book, that were chosen for the new cover: this would probably be unremarkable were it not for the presence of many sketches and drawings in the same book, any of which arguably could have captured just as well the “excellent scientific interaction between China and the Western world”—as the legend explaining the new cover puts it in the printed issue. The script of the “Great and Mightie Kingdome”—to use the partial English title of Juan González de Mendoza’s (ca. 1540–1617) famous compilation on China, to be examined in Chap. 3—can still be, it seems, as other as ever. Exploring the early stages of this “ever” in relation to the Chinese language is, in fact, the main object of this book.

This can be done in several ways. One could, for instance, engage in data gathering, cataloging, and analyzing along the lines pioneered by Emma Martinell Gifre and her collaborators in their works devoted to recording or inspecting linguistic contacts between Europeans and non-Europeans and the “linguistic consciousness” resulting in the wake of such interactions.² Alternatively, one could aim to supplement existing dedicated narratives, the most extended of which is still The European Discovery of Chinese, a 1992 study by linguistic historiographer Rüdiger Schreyer.³ Another approach would be to set one’s investigation against the background sketched by a series of quite heated Sinological exchanges in the 1990s–2000s with regard to the regime of Chinese characters and the Chinese language in general.⁴ Finally, and from yet another perspective, the discussion could proceed in relation to some of the developments—linguistic, philosophical, anthropological, or otherwise—of early modern thought.⁵ To a smaller or larger extent, directly or indirectly, all these paths will be trodden on here as well.

Thus, in an attempt to sketch the picture in the most accurate way possible, this study expands the data bearing on the Chinese language that is usually visited by interested scholars. To this end, I explore a significant number of texts, particularly from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, which generally attract little concerted notice. While, for a variety of reasons, the manuscript resources referred to are not numerous, the dissemination of those taken into account is paid due attention. Of course, similar consideration is given, when appropriate, to printed sources as well; consequently, differences between editions or translations, for instance, are noted and commented upon whenever relevant. On the other hand, when engaging on an investigation like this, one quickly learns that exhaustiveness is bound to remain a desirable rather than a truly attainable objective: in spite of one’s best efforts, some texts will still be unreachable, time and again one’s linguistic equipment will prove to be hopelessly unsatisfactory, and the domains in need of staking out will seem to be always expanding. Still, I believe that the amount of material gathered here can offer a fully adequate image of the problematics this book centers on.

While the documents I work on could certainly be put to use in further detailing the development, in Europe, of a linguistic consciousness with regard to the languages of the Other, they are not organized and read in keeping with the categories established by Martinell Gifre and her colleagues. Instead, I prefer to explore them in a chronologically oriented account not unlike Schreyer’s, from which this study nevertheless differentiates itself in terms of both focus and strategy. Thus, even while the present inquiry partially coincides with Schreyer’s as regards its time frame, its interest in the production and circulation of tropes makes it give different weight to the popular China master-texts and the other widely disseminated works at the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the next. Also, the use I make of sources such as manuscripts, on the one hand, as well as histories, chronicles, and compilations of all kinds, on the other, makes the present story proceed along a somewhat more sinuous path. This is a risk well worth taking, as I think that only by fully acknowledging the contribution of lesser-visited pieces—specifically those perceived as not immediately connected with China or seemingly too derivative to warrant critical attention—can we aspire to capture the complicated ballet of relevant tropes and thus draw a more exact picture of the early European visions on the Chinese language.

This brings us to the occasionally intense debates about the same language, its script, and, from here, also about “theory,” Jacques Derrida and deconstruction, and the very meaning of Sinology.⁶ Behind many of these disputes, which took place primarily in the 1990s and the early 2000s, one finds John DeFrancis’s 1984 seminal book on reality and projection with regard to Chinese (The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy). DeFrancis’s “myths”—such visions that there are as many characters as there are things in the world, that characters represent things or “ideas,” that Chinese writing somehow constitutes a universal language, independent of speech and communicating directly to the eyes, and so on—are, in fact, invoked quite often in these pages. However, they certainly do not occupy center stage in this study, not only because there often seems to be room for nuance when approaching one context or another through their lenses, but also, most importantly, because my interest lies more in the actual processes whereby such and other visions coagulated and spread. Accordingly, by working on a large variety of texts dating from both the period from which DeFrancis gets his earliest examples and from much earlier times, I strive to capture, as much as possible, the many rhetorical continuities, breaks, innovations, and detours that are responsible for the appearance of these “myths,” as well as other early European claims related one way or another to the Chinese language.

From this perspective, essential questions this book poses include: What shapes did the early relevant tropes take? Under what guises did some of them manage to move between texts, contexts, and ages, and relate to new environments of knowledge, readily or painfully hybridizing into adulterated forms, and acquiring new strength or diluting into irrelevance in the process? How were new tropes fashioned and then accepted, modified or rejected, disappearing forever or resurfacing again, in one form or another, sometimes in completely unexpected circumstances? And to sum up: what are the main contours of the dynamics that articulated the coming together and constant repositioning of the new and the old in relation to the Chinese language in European texts up to 1615?

Arguing for 1615 or, more specifically, the 1615 Christian Expedition to China… (De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas…) as the end point for my investigation is not difficult: this translation and reworking, by the Jesuit father Nicolas Trigault (1577–1628), of the journal penned by his famous colleague, Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), has been declared to contain a “definitive account of [the] Chinese [language]” for Western readers,⁷ and one can trace its influence in many later texts.⁸ On the other hand, deciding on a starting point for the present survey is a more complicated matter: while it seems customary to begin with the mid-thirteenth-century reports produced by John of Plano Carpini (Giovanni di Pian di Carpine, ca. 1182–1252) or William of Rubruck (Guillaume de Rubrouck, or Rubruquis, ca. 1220–ca. 1293),⁹ I believe that these friars’ Cathay cannot be easily dissociated from the rhetorical heritage of the Serica of Antiquity. It is indeed often stated that medieval accounts of Asian travel narrate journeys through lands just as much as they reflect (and result from) travels through other texts, words, and visions, contemporary as well as classical.¹⁰ As such, the contribution of the inherited, highly conventional images of the Asian Other to the medieval rhetoric of Cathay cannot be perfunctorily dismissed, and the role played by the tropology of the Seres of classical times in the age of renewed European contact with Asia should also be duly acknowledged.

Taking the discussion back to Antiquity also permits me, partially in relation to scholarship dedicated to early modern Europe, as mentioned above, to formulate the main argument of this study. My starting point is a somewhat commonplace observation: while, in their reviews of Western perceptions of the Chinese language, scholars regularly notice the predominant interest of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century writers in scriptural rather than speaking China, hardly any has ventured an explanation for this state of things.¹¹ This is perhaps because the reason may seem obvious: the existence of a Chinese-script mystique that overpowers almost all curiosity about the spoken Chinese language can be traced to the well-known Renaissance fascination with the countless mysteries of writing—alphabets, ciphers, hieroglyphs, figures, emblems, symbols, visual experiments in print, stenography, and scripts of the Other. Such a correlation whereby Chinese “letters” naturally join the variety of mesmerizing signs bedazzling the eyes and minds of European viewers certainly makes sense, and probably can be seen at work behind, for instance, the hieroglyphic speculations of the 1570s.

However, certain aspects remain puzzling. On a larger plane, one wonders, for instance, a...