The last century of China’s Ming dynasty (1368–1644) saw many troubles and challenges from abroad. Pirates raided the coast, Europeans challenged the traditional world order of the tribute system, and the everlasting threat from the northern steppe people continued to raise concerns for the state’s survival. This climate of uncertainty resulted in many Ming literati discussing foreign countries. During the last decades of the Ming era, seven authors wrote monographs that can be considered a form of Chinese “world history.” The authors describe the geography, history, and political systems of foreign countries and regions, ranging from China’s close neighbors Japan and Mongolia to more distant lands such as Mogadishu and Europe. This book studies each of the seven authors’ knowledge and perceptions of the world and focuses especially on countries linked to China by a maritime border, namely Siam (Thailand), Malacca, and Portugal. The book combines a close textual and paratextual analysis with a biographical study to understand why the authors wrote the texts the way they did. This is the first comprehensive introduction to these texts to contribute to the understanding of late Ming historiography and late Ming scholars’ perceptions of foreign countries.
“As part of my research for this book, I visited several libraries in North America and Asia to study the original Ming prints and manuscripts. One manuscript in particular was fun to examine, the Siyi guangji 四夷廣記 by Shen Maoshang 慎懋賞 now in the National Central Library, Taipei. At some point in its history, this book had been taken apart and its pages been rebound. During this process, parts of the text were lost,” Papelitzky says. “As I visited the library, I tried to figure out the original order of the chapters in the Siyi guangji, looking at water stains and tiny holes in the paper that gave clues about which pages had originally been together. This might seem like a monotonous task but I really enjoyed working not only with the written text but also the material object.”