Member-only story
The Controversial Priests Who Bridged East and West
How 18th century France fell in love with China — and vice versa
In the early 1700s, Voltaire, the French Enlightenment philosopher, fell in love with China. He extolled the virtues of the faraway land, calling it the “wisest and best-behaved nation” in the world.
In this, as in many things, he was a trendsetter — for a while, fashionable French people became enamored of Chinese goods, Chinese culture, and Chinese philosophy. Chinoiserie — European imitations of Chinese styles — became all the rage. You can see the French fascination with China in paintings like Francois Boucher’s 1742 The Chinese Garden:
Right around the same time, the Qianlong Emperor in China was building a new summer palace. He included in the grounds an elaborate area called the Xiyang Lou, or “Western Mansions” — an area full of buildings and gardens designed to mimic European palaces. He, like many wealthy and powerful Chinese people, had become fascinated by European culture. The complex looked something like this:
Why were Europeans and Chinese people so interested in each other in the 1700s? How did they learn about each other in the first place? And when did the mutual admiration society come to an end?
The story of the interaction between Europe and China coincided with the rise and fall of a controversial set of Catholic missionaries — the Jesuits.
The Jesuits (who Voltaire hated, by the way) are an order of Catholic priests founded in the 1500s as an arm of the Counter-Reformation. They served as the Catholic Church’s intellectual shock troops in the battle for hearts and minds after the Protestant Reformation. Jesuits built a network of schools and universities — many of which still exist today — and became known as the church’s elite intellectuals and missionaries.
Jesuits traveled all over the world in an attempt to spread Catholicism and bolster papal authority. Some of the most famous Jesuit missionaries — like Francis Xavier — were among the first Europeans to arrive in places like Japan…
