On 16^th of December, 2016, directeurs d'étude/professor Antonella Romano of École des hautes études en sciences sociales gave a talk entitled “Putting China on the Map, Processes of Knowledge Production and the Shaping of the Globe – The perspective of European Missionaries in the Early Modern Period” at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia. Professor Romano has recently published a book titled Impressions de Chine:L’Europe et l’englobement du monde (XVIe-XVIIe siècle), Fayard, Sep.2016 on the subject. In the book as well as during her talk, professor Romano has emphasized that the aim is to revise the current narrative of the “discovery” of America as the most important event in world history by focusing on the changing representations of China in European world maps which helped to shape a new sense of the globe that engulfed the “west” and the “east” in the 16^th and 17^th century. Missionaries played central role in the period as knowledge producers, without being “scientists” which had to do with the fact that they were also among very few people who were physically in China at the time. Missionaries such as Gonzalez de Mendoza and Jose de Acosta were also part of multi-layered global networks circulating among many other groups and created books and books of cartography that resulted in offering accurate description of China and tried to shape a new category of <<natural and moral history>> where all the people of the world are encompassed within one humanity, with its hierarchies. This talk is part of her one month stay at the Institute for Advanced Asian Studies on Asia.　

L. Mandkhai