ABSTRACT
If we are to believe the Enlightenment philosophers, Confucian China compared favorably to the European nations, which were divided by religious discord and political conflict. Therefore it could serve as the location of an alluring utopia, which because of its inaccessibility remained very much a product of the imagination. If I call this utopian interest in China a mode of Orientalism, I use the term in a neutral sense, differently from Edward Said (1978) whose references to Orientalism nearly always imply a pejorative judgment. (The use of the term Orientalism is more elaborately discussed in chapter 12.) The image of China in the years of the early Enlightenment was predominantly shaped by the enthusiastic reports from Jesuit missionaries active in the Middle Kingdom, and not by the earlier account of Marco Polo, which played almost no role in the debate of the seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century sinophiles. Yet the idea of a splendid Chinese civilization had already been fostered by the Venetian merchant and remained influential up to the present day.
