ABSTRACT
The global trade networks and the transnational cultural activities accompanying maritime explorations render it pertinent to study East-West contact in the early modern period from a global perspective. Neither Eurocentrism nor sinocentrism can adequately address the cultural traffic between East and West in the Renaissance, since each framework claims a superiority and centrality at the expense of the other. World history is a narrative that comprises the stories of all civilizations, and each story contributes to human progress in its unique way. By the fifteenth century, the Ptolemaic cosmogony and Christian theology had confined the western horizon to Jerusalem and the Mediterranean ring, and racial or ethnical others referred chiefly to the Jews and Muslims. The world beyond the four terminuses delimited by Ptolemy was largely excluded from Western imagination, though the expeditions of the Mongol Tartars did impinge upon the old boundaries. But at that time, the Tartars were commonly regarded as a “brethren of the tribes of Israel.” After Columbus and Vasco da Gama's epoch-making discoveries, however, the western horizon started to expand to include the whole world. Consequently, new lands and peoples began to assume a place in the world picture of the West. Thus only a global lens can do justice to the early modern interactions with the new world others, including China.
