Saint Confucius, the Chinese Adam, and a Broken Mirror: Writing World History in the Seventeenth-Century Netherlands

Abstract

Early European attempts at writing a comprehensive history of the world struggled in particular with China, whose greater antiquity was difficult to accommodate with the biblical chronology of Creation and the Flood; the Chinese might also have traveled to the Americas before the Europeans. The fulcrum of this debate was the Dutch Republic, where innovative schools of historiography and biblical criticism went hand in hand with interest in East Asian material culture, antiquities, and books. Around 1650, Jacob Golius, Georg Hornius, and Isaac Vossius quarreled about China in relation to Egypt, Israel, and the Americas. The debate flared up again fifty years later when Nicolaes Witsen and Gijsbert Cuper confronted the Republic of Letters with a rare bronze mirror from Han Dynasty China. Dutch attempts to engage with Chinese written and material sources, and even with a handful of early Chinese visitors to Europe, arguably made this exchange an early example of global history.