ABSTRACT
The year 1492 marked a dramatic moment in the history of global encounters. Five years later, another less dramatic but just as fateful event occurred: a Portuguese sea-captain, Vasco da Gama, seeking another route to the East rounded the Cape of Good Hope, marking the entrance of early modern Europeans into the maritime world of Asia. Unlike Japan, the Chinese Empire was a centrally governed state. Instead of warlords as in Japan, the emperor and a large number of civilian scholar-bureaucrats governed China. As a powerful intellectual and governing class, scholar-bureaucrats became important for the encounter with westerners because of their interaction with western missionaries and traders. In addition to its dominance in economic matters, China thought of itself in cultural and political terms as the “middle kingdom,” superior to all others. The official Chinese history of the Jesuit missionaries stated that the missionaries were admirable because they were intelligent and talented and they came without need for profit.
