I gesuiti e la Cina. La produzione cartografica come problema tecnico e culturale (XVI-XVIII secolo)

Starting from 1583, after Michele Ruggieri and Matteo Ricci had based in Zhaoqing (Guangdong), the modern encounter between East and West was officially inset: besides the missionary activity, several Jesuits, most of them from Italy, introduced Western notions in the Celestial Kingdom and, during their trips back in Europe, a factual (and not mythical, as happened before) knowledge of China. In the framework of this bilateral dynamics, map-making, basis for a rational view over the Middle Kingdom, had a prominent role. In fact, once back in Italy, Michele Ruggieri was the first to carry on the idea of an atlas of China under the Ming Dynasty (late 16th-early 17th centuries), which remained unfinished as a manuscript; Matteo Ricci published in China a world map in several versions (the most famous edition is the third, dating back to 1602; the first two versions are lost) with toponyms and text in Chinese, which gained a great success; Ricci’s world map was later used as a model for Giulio Alenis’s and Francesco Sambiase’s world maps; in 1655 Martino Martini published in the Netherlands his very influential Novus Atlas Sinensis, in Latin, dedicated to the Chinese Empire, at that time just passed under the control of the Qing. The cartographical production of the Jesuits based in China, or the one drafted in Europe and focused on China, were characterized by technical problems from one side, and several cultural implications from the other. In the first case, to make in China, by a Westerner, maps in Chinese or European languages, in the years of the origin of the modern sinology, implied a close cooperation with local intellectuals, frequent linguistic misunderstandings and to cope with a printing process very different from the Western tradition. Regarding cultural implications, to publish in Europe an atlas of China intersected with the transliterations of the Chinese toponyms or the use of the Chinese maps, found by the Jesuits during their Chinese stay and usually obsolete, as a source. The paper will strike a critical balance with regard to the nexus among the Jesuits, China and map-making, encompassed between the late 16th century and the Imperial ban of Christian preaching in the first quarter of the 18th century. Further epistemological themes of this cartographical production will be discussed, such as its role in cultural mediation (we have significant and ‘intercrossed’ quotations by Ricci and Chinese intellectuals published in Ricci’s world map), or the instrumental use of maps, in China, to accredit the Jesuits as learned scholars and, on the basis of the principle of authority, facilitate their evangelizing mission in the Middle Kingdom.