Abstract

Until now the history of the first contacts between China and Europe in modern times has been studied principally from a Politica! Point of view or from an economic and commercial one, as well as from its religious aspects. The cultural aspects and more particularly the philosophical consequences of these contacts have hardly been touched upon except by Chinese scholars with little knowledge of European sources, or inversely by European historians who have not made sufficient use of Chinese sources. For about fifteen years I have devoted two or three of my courses at the Collège de France to studying the Chinese thinkers of the Ch'ing period, and this has led me to touch upon certain questions which the introduction of European ideas in China by Jesuit missionaries at this time poses. Occupied with other research in recent years, I have not followed at close hand the many studies which have been devoted to these questions by Chinese and Japanese scholars, notably by Professors Fang Ho of Taipei, Saeki Yoshiro of Hiroshima, and Goto Sueo of Tokyo, and I am not familiar with the recent Marxist interpretations, those of Hiu Wai-lu, of Kwan Fong, or the recent ideas of Fong Yiu-lan or the other collaborators of the Pekinese magazine “Philosophic Studies” (Tcho-hiu yen-kiou). I must apologize for using documentation which is not up-to-date or not according to the fashions of the day and which at any rate is very incomplete, for I am not a specialist in this subject. I would especially like to address myself to the Chinese reactions to the first Sino-European contacts rather than the European reactions, which—in Europe at least— are better known and which still more so are outside my field of competence.

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