EARLY MODERN EUROPE WAS enthralled by China and its main protago-nist from the late sixteenth century onwards, Confucius. This ancient sage was the subject of books and pamphlets, his likeness was depicted in print and on porcelain and his teachings were discussed in the pages of newspapers and journals throughout Europe. In 1740, the French writer Jean Baptise Boyer, marquis d’Argens, even dedicated his Lettres chinoises to the soul of this long departed Chinese savant: ‘Manes du plus grand homme qu’ait produit l’Univers, souffrez que je vous donne un témoignage du profond respect que j’ai pour votre mémoire’.

Separated in time by a millennium and in space by thousands of miles, D’Argens's dedication seems counter-intuitive. Dedications were usually aimed at remunerated (or prospectively remunerated or otherwise beneficial) patronage, and D’Argens could hardly have expected the soul of Confucius to grant him any earthly rewards in exchange for a flattering inscription. Yet there was more to be gained here than direct financial compensation. By ‘teaching the public what my feelings are for the greatest man the universe has produced’, D’Argens's dedication appealed in both sentiment and subject to the ever-growing number of early modern readers clamouring for knowledge about China. One result of this inquisitiveness has already been noted in Petiver's particular interest in and naming of specimens sent from China; D’Argens responded to the eagerness for knowledge of China with an epistolary novel: a genre that had only recently come into being.

As the Western humanities have increasingly focused on global per-spectives in the last couple of decades, scholars have emphasised the interconnectedness between cultures in Asia and Europe. A wide range of topics have been covered, often with a focus on the interactions facilitating the transmission of goods such as porcelain, lacquerware, silks and spices as well as shared knowledge about medicine, philosophy, writing systems and how this dissemination of goods and knowledge impacted upon the respective societies into which they were introduced.

The role of the Jesuits in the early European study of China and Con-fucius has been emphasised by, among others, David Mungello, who considers these premodern interactions as a form of ‘proto-sinology’.