[
    {
        "id": 210979,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1987",
        "page_number": 41,
        "title": "RAS-1987",
        "content_text": "affectation is a well-known chapter of our eighteenth-century cultural history, and it is also a political paradox. For those aristocrats and nobility who had been indulging in Chinese art and Chinese festivities were to meet their fate in 1789 and 1793. They were to be crushed by a major revolution to which China had contributed through the intellectual battles waged by the Philosophes against the monarchy. And this was no longer a dinner party à la chinoise.\n\nA major intellectual and cultural encounter had definitely taken place between China and France. But was it France alone? The addiction to chinoiseries was equally popular with the English nobility and gentry. German Philosophes were as keen as their fellow Frenchmen to achieve genuine universality through China. Such was the message of Leibniz's 'Chinese latest news' (Novissima Sinica), an essay advocating the dispatch to Europe of Chinese Confucian missionaries so as to balance the impact of Christian missionaries to China. Yes, China was then valued as a model for the whole of Europe, to quote the title of a suggestive essay by Louis Maverick.\n\nNevertheless, there is something definitely French in the magnitude, in the style, in the rhetoric of France's encounter with China. France was more deeply committed to China than any other European country in the eighteenth century, and this reflects the specifically acute crisis of French society and the French political regime at that time: a crisis in which French intellectuals were most actively involved. The attraction of China, eccentric and artificial as it was, was part of the French ideological upheaval which contributed so decisively to the French Revolution.\n\nThe concern for China was also very French in its claim to achieve theoretical universalism, to think and to reason for the whole of humankind in the grand Cartesian tradition. From fashionable chinoiseries to high-level intellectual achievements, such as those of Voltaire, Diderot and Gournay, the whole thing was conducted with a typical French sense of sensationalism; it was a well-staged intellectual play lasting for almost a century, with the whole cultural elite in the cast. Other peoples simply act; the French always like to perform, and to find a public for it.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522",
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    {
        "id": 210991,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1987",
        "page_number": 53,
        "title": "RAS-1987",
        "content_text": "28\n\nNOTES\n\nVirgile Pinot, La Chine et la formation de l'esprit philosophique en France, 1640-1740 (Paris, 1932).\n\n1 From Diderot's Encyclopédie. English translation from A. Reichwein, China and Europe, Intellectual and Artistic Contacts in the Eighteenth Century (Kegan Paul, Trench, Turbner & Co., London, 1925), p.92. Reichwein offers the best comprehensive treatment of China at the Age of Enlightenment, together with L. Maverick (see note 10).\n\n3 Pierre Poivre, Voyages d'un Philosophe (English translation by Reichwein, loc. cit.).\n\nFrançois Quesnay, Le Despotisme de la Chine (Paris, 1767). His friends had dubbed him 'the Confucius of Europe'.\n\n$ Lo Hui-min, The Tradition and Prototype of the China-watcher, 1976 G.E. Morrison lecture (Australian National University, Canberra, 1978), p. 9.\n\n7 Louis Lecomte, Nouveaux mémoires sur l'état présent de la Chine (Paris, 1969). Du Halde, Description géographique, historique, chronologique, politique et physique de l'Empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie Chinoise (Paris, 1735).\n\n$ Hugh Honour, Chinoiseries, the Vision of Cathay (John Murray, London, 1961).\n\nIn 1951, at the Lycée de Chartres where I was teaching history, the bicentenary of Diderot's Encyclopedia was celebrated at the initiative of left-wing teachers who were keen to stress the connection between the Encyclopedia and French Revolutionary traditions. I gave a public lecture: 'China and the Encyclopedists', of which the present Morrison Lecture might be considered the direct descendant.\n\n10 Lewis A. Maverick, China, a Model for Europe (Paul Anderson Company, San Antonio, Texas, 1946).\n\n|| From Les Fleurs du Mal (my translation).\n\n12 Evariste Regis Huc, L'Empire chinois (Paris, 1854). For a more severe evaluation of Huc, see Simon Leys, The Burning Forest (New York, 1986), pp. 47-94 (\"Peregrinations and perplexities of Pere Huc').\n\n13 Eugene Simon, La Cité chinoise (Paris, 1885).\n\n14 Paul Claudel, Connaissance de l'Est (Mercure de France, Paris, 1908).\n\n15 The novel by Jules Verne, Les Tribulations d'un Chinois en Chine (1879), is quite unique in its concern for the politics of nineteenth-century China. The hero, Kin Fo, is torn between his fascination with modern technology and his loyalty to his teacher Wong, who is an ex-Taiping leader. It is to my knowledge the only appearance of the Taiping rebellion in French literature.\n\n16 V. Hugo, Lettre au Capitaine Butler, Hauteville House, 25 November 1861 (my translation).\n\n17 Charles Bettelheim, Cultural Revolution and Industrial Organisation in China: Changes in Management and the Division of Labor, trans. by Alfred Ehrenfeld (Monthly Review Press, New York, 1974). See also China Since Mao, by Neil G. Burton and Charles Bettelheim (Monthly Review Press, New York, 1978).\n\n18 Claude Roy, Clés pour la Chine (Paris, 1954); Etiemble, Le Nouveau singe-pèlerin (Paris, 1957); Philippe Sollers, Tel quel (a literary magazine edited by...",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522",
        "rank": 0
    }
]