ABSTRACT
Xiguo Jifa (西國記法 The Western Art of Memory), written by Matteo Ricci in 1596, was the first text to introduce European mnemonics to China. Hoping to convert local literati to Christianity, Ricci applied Western mnemonics to Chinese characters through a reinterpretation of the classical six principles of character formation (六書), thus appropriating Chinese traditional views to Christian models. However, the influence of Jifa on contemporary Chinese literati turned out to be almost negligible. This chapter proposes one possible reason for Ricci’s failure: the major epistemological and philosophical differences between what he intended by 象 (xiang, the Chinese translation of the “image” in the context of mnemonics) in Jifa and what contemporary Confucian elites understood by the term. I argue that some basic concepts are nourished by their cultural tradition and become virtually untranslatable when cross-cultural translations also involve translations of philosophical systems.
