The Disentangled Pictorial History of Mémoire sur la Chine (1776)

Abstract

This paper would add a contribution to the "entangled histories" of the circulation of Sino-European representations of landscape during the long 18th century. I will discuss a prime example of interaction, interpretation and hybridization that occurred in French essays, atlases, encyclopedias, reports, and private letters on the Qing land-scape. I am especially interested in the grey literature and colorful maps that have sur-rounded two publications by d'Anville and Father Du Halde, SJ: Mémoire sur la Chine (1776); and Description géographique, historique, etc. de l'Empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise (1735).

I will disentangle only two in the many layers of the French interpretation of the Qing landscape: Layer 1: Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville (1697-1782)'s quarrel with Father Joseph-Anne-Marie de Moyriac de Mailla (1669-1748) SJ, about de Mailla's disentanglement of d'Anville's disentanglement made when he reviewed… Layer 2: … several disentanglements made by the Manchu, Russian, Dutch, and French cartographers who mapped and depicted independently several parts of the Qing Em-pire

I will examine why and how d'Anville defined concepts, methods, and best practices in the disentanglement of landscape representation. I plan to revisit the Sino-European history of transfers of theories and techniques on visual information, from technical surveys of the physical landscape in Beijing to the emergence of a new intellectual landscape in Paris. Case study: The carto-controversy of the Mémoire de M. d'Anville, etc. sur la Chine (1776), and of the Description géographique, historique, etc. de l'Empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise (1735)

Since Julius von Klaproth (1826), Henri Cordier (1904-1908), and Marcel Destombes (1976), we believe that we know everything that deserves to be known on the infor-mation on China that became available to 18th-century Paris. We have been maybe too self-confident. Since 2010, Lucile Haguet has unearthed at the Bibliothèque nationale de France new materials that are telling us an un-redacted story on the Sino-European exchanges of landscape depiction.