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日期: 2019/10/24
時間: 15:00~17:00
地點: 檔案館第二會議室
主講人:Prof. Timothy Brook(卜正民教授)(Republic of China Chair, Department of History, University of British Columbia)
主辦單位: 近史所
本場次演講開放自由參加,毋需報名。 The world is too impossibly vast for us to see or imagine without already having an image in mind. At almost every time or place in world history, that image has relied on repetition more than innovation. The great exception was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the global expansion of maritime travel obliged both Europeans and Chinese to revise their images of the world. These heavily illustrated lectures pivot on one particular map printed in Nanjing in 1644 to explore this history from both ends, looking first at the impact of Matteo Ricci’s mappa mundi of 1602 on Nanjing publishers, and then at the history of Chinese maps that reached Europe and shaped how Europeans understood the far end of Eurasia. Together, the lectures tell a story not of the West teaching the East, but of East and West adapting images from the other in a genuinely reciprocal process of assembling the knowledge needed to complete the map of the world. Lecture 2. London, 1644: Drawing China from the World In this lecture, I start with the same map, this time the copy in the British Library, to expand the story of the mutual shaping of the image of the world. We will examine how ideas and models moved in the other direction: not how Chinese adapted European models, but how Europeans made use of Chinese models. To tell this story, I reconstruct the history of the arrival of “complete maps” in Europe. Their arrival was influential, because as they arrived, Europeans used them to fill in Eurasia. The approach in this lecture focuses less on cartographic ideas than on the physical history of maps as material objects that had to be acquired, transported, preserved, and viewed in places where they were not fully understood. By treating the acquisition of maps as central to this history, we can recognize that Europeans depended on Chinese knowledge as much as Chinese depended on European. It was this intercultural process of contact, engagement, and mutual influence that enabled both Europe and China to complete their maps of the world.