The Story of a Stele

Bibliographic Data

ID20009225
AuthorsMichael Keevak (corresponding author)
Year2008
Publication date2008-02-01
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueThe story of a stele (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherHong Kong University Press (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.5790/hongkong/9789622098954.001.0001
OpenAlexW2269820030
ISBN9789622098954
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited1

Western readers have yet to come to terms with the fact that during much of history very little was ever “known” about China. There was never any lack of information from missionaries and travelers and traders. But what kind of information was it? What kind of knowledge was obtainable via the lenses of religious intolerance, colonial ambition, or Eurocentrism? Travel accounts, Jesuit letter-books, or embassy narratives can sometimes seem comparatively dispassionate, even ethnographic, but one is repeatedly struck by a remarkable vagueness when it comes to discussions of the foreign, and such discussions become buried in a huge mélange of fact and fiction that is then collected, retold, or reintegrated in innumerable ways. The thesis of this book is that when Westerners discussed the Nestorian monument they were not really talking about China at all. The stone served as a kind of screen onto which they could project their own self-image, and this is what they were looking at, not China. The stone came to represent the empire and its history for many Western readers, but only because it was seen as a tiny bit of the West that was already there. This is the first study in English of the Western reception of the monument since its discovery in Xi'an in 1625

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · China · Colonialism · Empire · Ethnography · Eurocentrism · Linguistics · Literature · Narrative · Sociology · Vagueness · Anthropology · Chinese history and philosophy · Historical Studies of British Isles · History · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity

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