Geographical Curiosities and Transformative Exchange in the Nanban Century (c. 1549-c. 1647)

Abstract

This essay focuses on various forms of information and transformative exchange promoted within the space of Jesuit missions in Asia. Beyond past and current implicit assertions of alleged European predestination and superiority in disclosing the orbis terrarum, still in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century the meaning of concepts such as ‘Europe’, ‘India’, ‘China’, ‘Japan’ and their whereabouts was by no means obvious for European, Chinese and Japanese cultural elites and scholars: they were all trying to relate these terms to intelligible geographic and cultural concepts, using knowledge that had been accumulated locally over many centuries and mutually disseminated and integrated mainly, but not exclusively, in the contexts of the missions, in particular those of the Jesuits. This essay discusses the way in which this mutual act of emplacement developed at the time of the first encounter between European and Japanese agents, trying to understand the different strategies, forms of curiosity, and communication that were developed in local contexts of interaction in China and Japan. The simultaneous analysis of Jesuit forms of mapping and of Japanese cartography on folding screens shows that linear Eurocentric models of circulation of knowledge, people, and ideas – such as West-East relationships – are ill-adapted to articulate the complexities of the agencies, and also the places of exchange and transformation of material culture, forms, and ideas in the long and multifaceted system of maritime and terrestrial routes that linked Europe to several kingdoms and cities in Asia. Instead of a linear, pendular model based on West-East circulation, this analysis highlights a more complex radial system of vectors within an intra-Asian space of communication and action which involved the port city of Macao. Macao received and combined the agency of Portuguese, Malayan, Chinese, and Japanese merchants, together with that of Jesuit missionaries, radiating its influence over a vast space, from Goa to Nagasaki and Manila. Europe was still part of this picture, but was placed in the margins.