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Travel Writings on Asia: Curiosity, Identities, and Knowledge Across the East, c. 1200 to the Present Christian Mueller full chapter instant download
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PALGRAVE SERIES IN ASIA AND PACIFIC STUDIES
Edited by
Christian Mueller · Matteo Salonia
Palgrave Series in Asia and Pacific Studies
Honorary Editor
May Tan-Mullins, University of Nottingham Ningbo China, Ningbo,
China
Series Editor
Filippo Gilardi, University of Nottingham Ningbo China, Ningbo,
China
Editorial Board
Melissa Shani Brown, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany
Adam Knee, LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore, Singapore
Gianluigi Negro, University of Siena, Siena, Italy
Andrea Střelcová, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science,
Berlin, Germany
The Asia and Pacific regions, with a population of nearly three billion
people, are of critical importance to global observers, academics, and
citizenry due to their rising influence in the global political economy
as well as traditional and nontraditional security issues. Any changes to
the domestic and regional political, social, economic, and environmental
systems will inevitably have great impacts on global security and gover-
nance structures. At the same time, Asia and the Pacific have also emerged
as a globally influential, trend-setting force in a range of cultural arenas.
The remit of this book series is broadly defined, in terms of topics and
academic disciplines. We invite research monographs on a wide range
of topics focused on Asia and the Pacific. In addition, the series is also
interested in manuscripts pertaining to pedagogies and research methods,
for both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Published by Palgrave
Macmillan, in collaboration with the Institute of Asia and Pacific Studies,
UNNC.
NOW INDEXED ON SCOPUS!
Travel Writings
on Asia
Curiosity, Identities, and Knowledge Across the
East, c. 1200 to the Present
Editors
Christian Mueller Matteo Salonia
University of Nottingham Ningbo University of Nottingham Ningbo
China China
Ningbo, China Ningbo, China
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2022. This book is an open access
publication.
Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution
4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits
use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long
as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to
the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.
The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book’s Creative
Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material
is not included in the book’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not
permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain
permission directly from the copyright holder.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for
general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-
tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with
respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been
made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps
and institutional affiliations.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Singapore Pte Ltd.
The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore
189721, Singapore
We dedicate this volume to our families.
Acknowledgements
The editors would like to record their gratitude to the individuals and
institutions whose support made it possible to put this volume together
and who contributed to the completion of the final manuscript. We
received financial assistance from the School of International Studies at
the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. We are very grateful for
the numerous intellectual stimulations, comments, and discussions from
and with colleagues at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China, the
University of Nottingham, Ningbo University, the Institute for Histor-
ical Research London, and the Rothermere American Institute at the
University of Oxford, among many others.
One great source of inspiration and reflection over the last years has
been our students at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. In
many modules on Western and Global History and on the historical
encounters between Europe and Asia, our students never cease to surprise
us through their inquisitive curiosity. This book is also for them and
for future generations of students who embrace the curiosity to explore,
encounter, and dare to know.
We would like to express our gratitude to the institutional support
and assistance received through the School of International Studies at the
University of Nottingham Ningbo China by the Centre for Advanced
International Studies, the Research Cluster for Global, Imperial and
Transnational History, and the Global Institute for Silk Road Studies. We
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ix
x CONTENTS
xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
from medieval Christendom to the early modern Iberian world, from the
economic and constitutional history of Italian city-states to monasticism
and Church history. He is particularly interested in the history of travel
writing, imperial peripheries, and the Catholic origins of self-criticism and
anti-imperial discourses. He is an elected Fellow of the Royal Historical
Society.
Georg Schindler is a Ph.D. student at the Ningbo campus of the Univer-
sity of Nottingham where he also completed his M.A. in International
Relations and World History. His main interests are the development and
change of stereotypical perceptions of East Asia between the thirteenth
and early eighteenth century in relation to European perceptions. His
Master’s thesis on the religious ‘other’ in East Asia as it is described in
European travel reports from the late medieval and early modern period
was awarded the Tomlinson Tri-campus award for the best thesis on Asia
in 2019.
Dr. K. Cohen Tan is Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning at Univer-
sity of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC) and Associate Dean in the
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. With a background in liter-
ature and philosophy, he completed his Ph.D. in Critical Theory at
the University of Nottingham (UK), theorising a comparative approach
to French Deconstruction and Indian Buddhist philosophy. His other
research interests include the impact of technology on digital nomadism,
media, and cultural studies. Dr. Tan is Senior Fellow of the Higher Educa-
tion Academy (SFHEA) and Fellow of the Royal Society for Arts (FRSA).
He has also been interviewed by global media outlets such as the BBC,
Le Soir, Agence France Presse, and Vice magazine on youth/online culture
in China as well as serving on external consultancies and contributing to
local policy via Blue Book publication.
Dr. Claire Taylor is an Associate Professor in History at the University of
Nottingham’s Nottingham campus. She is best known for her work since
1999 on the social and religious history of medieval southern France in
the high middle ages, on which she has published two monographs—
Heresy in medieval France: dualism in Aquitaine and the Agenais, 1000
-1249 (2005) and Heresy, crusade and inquisition in medieval Quercy
(2011), to numerous articles, and a co-edited sourcebook, The Cathars
and the Albigensian Crusade (2013). Her interest in where ‘difference’
originated in the medieval world more widely led to the creation of
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
The greatest of all mistakes that can be found in the geography of Ptolemy
[in the opinion on the extension of Asia to the East], has led humankind
to the greatest discoveries in relation to new parts of the earth. […] Every-
thing that triggers movement, whatever the moving force may be: mistakes,
1 Humboldt (1852, 34). The addition in the quote appeared in Humboldt’s footnote.
2 Navarrete (1853, 80–82). See already Humboldt (1852, 35–38).
3 Columbus (1969, 13). See also Parry (1981, 222–223).
4 Columbus (1870, 2).
1 INTRODUCTION: CURIOSITY, IDENTITIES, AND KNOWLEDGE … 3
towns and in fact everything that China and Japan stood for in the Euro-
pean imaginary finally made Columbus partly readjust his mental image
of the encountered space.
Travelling appears in the vast literature as the paradigmatic form of
human experience. Semantically and conceptually, travel and experience
are linked in Germanic languages while most other European languages
connect travel to a laborious ordeal and connect acquired liberal educa-
tion semantically to a widely travelled person.5 Travels require a huge
effort to mentally and cognitively appropriate a different world while the
travellers remain rooted in the cultural, mental and social framework of
their original background.6 It is this specific combination of experience,
generation of meanings, and the continuous articulation of space that
make travel reports a unique source for the specific ways of thinking and
interpretations of individual travellers. The results of this articulation, the
travel reports, open windows to understand the human social and mental
structures that conceptualise knowledge about space in different times.7
This volume focuses on different actors from across the globe who trav-
elled to, within, and through a geographical space that we may broadly
consider as Asia. In reflecting upon their experiences and encounters in
travelling this space in its diversity, the travel writers try to locate these
within their diverse worldviews and preconceived knowledge. Even when
discussing accounts penned by European travellers, the contributions to
the volume trace some of these individual and collective attempts through
the analytical lens of curiosity as a human capacity and a mode of observa-
tion that led to the creation of a plurality of Asias before and against the
scholarly assumption of a coherent dominating othering of “the Orient.”
8 Friedrich Ratzel (1904, 28). See Schlögel (2016, 3–7), Osterhammel (2013,
86–87).
9 Osterhammel (1998), Schlögel (2005), Döring and Thielmann (2008). See the new
publications in Bavaj et al. (2022), esp. Bavaj (2022, 1–5, 9–17).
10 On curiosity see: Blumberg (1983, 229–444), Parry (1981, 42–47) Gebhardt (1986,
97–113), Stagl (1995, 1–12), Ball (2013, 2, 16, 98), Osterhammel (2013, 27–29; 2018,
x), Pennock (2019, 1–31), Gustafsson Chorell (2021, 242–248).
11 Maczak and Teuteberg (1982), Bauerkämper et al. (2004).
12 See e.g. Bauerkämper et al. (2004, 9–31).
13 Tuan (1974), Hostetler (2001), and Hargett (2018) address the relative lack of
research on travel, knowledge, ethnocentrism, and power in Asia (China in particular)
but also do not attempt to connect this insight with a more inclusive reflection on
travel writings as a source of space and identity construction in encountering non-Asian
actors. Wang (2014) has provided an insightful perspective on China’s anthropological
and cosmological views of East and West, stressing how the concept of Orientalism in the
tradition of Said diminishes China’s rich intellectual history and denies its own agency
and “world-scapes” (Wang 2014, 7–17).
1 INTRODUCTION: CURIOSITY, IDENTITIES, AND KNOWLEDGE … 5
14 Blumberg (1983, 235–236), Gebhardt (1986, 97–102), Wang (2014, 12), Oster-
hammel (2018, x).
15 Osterhammel (2013, 400–405; 2018, x), Hostetler (2001, xvii), Reinhard (2015,
4–8).
16 See Tuan (1974, 37), Strassberg (1994, passim), Hostetler (2001, xvii, 21), Wang
(2014, 12–16 and passim), Hargett (2018, 13).
17 Tuan (1974, 36–38), Wang (2014, 13–17).
18 Tuan (1974, 30–37), Rubiés (2002, 243, 250–251), Wang (2014, 1–17, 179–211,
and passim).
6 C. MUELLER AND M. SALONIA
Secondly, Asia in its more ideological form of the “Orient” has been at
the forefront of theoretical and conceptual discussions on travel writing
since the 1970s. Empirical studies take still for granted the stimulating yet
overly schematic and simplistic assumptions of Edward Said. In following
Foucault’s concept of knowledge as power, Said assumes rather than
evidences the unity of an imperial ideology that all encounters between
West and East entail, with the sole intention to dominate and rule the
East.19 “From travelers’ tales […] colonies were created and ethnographic
perspectives secured.”20 Said suggests that travel writings in particular
create colonial power and discourse which are possessed entirely by the
coloniser. Ambiguities, nuances, and in fact other forms of inquiry or
knowledge that are not primarily understood in the form of discur-
sive power are completely absent from the ideological conceptualisation
of “Orientalism.” Other postcolonial theorists have held Said respon-
sible for a historical and theoretical oversimplification in his quest for
an assumed single “intentionality and unidirectionality” of all colonial
power.21 Interestingly, although equally adhering to a relatively unhistor-
ical and ideological assumption of unified colonial power, Homi Bhabha
has argued strongly for a much more diverse and open approach in
studying especially prejudice as an ambivalent form of “appropriating”
the East in colonial discourse.22 However, many historical and literary
studies on travel writings seem to focus on the “imperial gaze” under
Said’s paradigm of unified ideological accusation rather than on Bhabha’s
ambiguity as a heuristic tool when analysing Western and Asian travel
writers. The volume seeks to fill the gap left by the fact that singularised
narratives of imperialistic conquest have dominated the scholarly land-
scape where the recognition of a multiplicity of voices and nuances within
those voices who entered the region of Asia cannot be subsumed under an
ideological effort of postcolonial homogenization. On the contrary, the
19 Said (1978, passim), Said (1994, xviii-xix, 58), Bhabha (1983, 24–27).
20 Said (1978, 58–9, 117 (Quote)), Said (1994, 58–59). Few sources in the nineteenth
century are so explicit and audacious as Sven Hedin in his Autobiography published in
1925: “When I reached home, in the spring of 1891, I felt like the conqueror of an
immense territory; for I had traversed Caucasia, Mesopotamia, Persia, Russian Turkestan,
and Bokhara, and had penetrated into Chinese Turkestan. I therefore felt confident that
I could strike a fresh blow, and conquer all Asia, from west to east.” Hedin (2003, 80).
21 Bhabha (1983, 25).
22 Bhabha (1983, 24–26).
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Kant 103.
Kaswini 43.
Kaup, J. 116.
Kepler 58.
Kielmeyer 81, 109.
Kircher, Ath. 55.
Klein, J. Ph. 73, 74.
Koelliker, A. von 121, 122, 134, 139.
Konrad von Megenberg 46, 47.
Kowalewski, A. von 141, 147.
Ktesias 17.
Raffles 149.
Rathke, M. 110, 117.
Ray, John 67–70, 73, 75, 76, 82.
Réaumur 70, 71.
Redi 61, 65.
Reil 108.
Reinwardt 149.
Remak, R. 120, 121.
Rengger 149.
Robinet 73.
Rondelet 50.
Roux, W. 138.
Rudolphi, K. A. 109, 110, 111, 113, 116, 147.
Ruino 54.
Rüppell 149.
Rütimeyer, L. 116, 117.
Ruysch 64.
Saliceto 46.
Salviani 50, 51.
Sarasin, M. 70.
Sardanapal 11.
Sars, M. 149, 150.
Savigny 97, 99.
Scaliger 48.
Schelling, W. 105.
Schleiden 120, 121.
Schmidt, O. 118, 152.
Schneider, J. G. 152.
Schomburgk 149.
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Shaw 70.
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Sloane 70.
Smith, A. 149.
Soleiman, Abu 43.
Souleyet 148.
Spallanzani 72.
Spencer, H. 131.
Spighelius 57.
Spix 149, 151.
Stahl 103.
Stannius, H. 113, 123.
Steenstrup 146.
Steller 77.
Stelluti 60.
Steno, N. 60, 61, 63.
Stilling 121.
Straßer 121.
Swammerdam, J. 63, 64, 72.
Telesius 57.
Temminck 149.
Tertullian 41.
Theophrast 20, 32.
Thomas von Aquino 42.
Thomas von Cantimpré 45.
Thompson, Wyv. 114, 150.
Tiedemann 108.
Tournefort 70.
Trembley 71.
Treviranus (Gebrüder) 108.
Tyson 62.
Uterverius 53.
Zacharias 151.
Zimmermann, E. A. W. 103.
Zittel, K. A. von 119.
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