Zhong Wen: History does not allow for hypotheses. So all we can do is look back from the tragic transition between the late Ming and early Qing dynasties to examine the Chinese culture that missionaries introduced to Europe and how it spread there.

Bo Ya: The Age of Discovery not only facilitated global trade—it also catalyzed cultural collision. Just like the internet in the 21st century, even a firewall cannot stop the flow of information.

Zhong Wen: Indeed. From tea to dyes, from traditional Chinese medicine to the Book of Changes, China’s ancient knowledge traveled together with its artifacts into the daily lives of Europeans. For example: the earliest Western book describing “Chinese tea,” the earliest Western research on Chinese medicine—The Great Compendium of Chinese Medicine, the first full Latin translation of the I Ching, and the first edition of The General History of the Chinese Empire, hailed as a classic of European “Chinoiserie.”

Bo Ya: Was the earliest Western reference to “tea” found in sixteenth-century Venice?

Zhong Wen: Yes. In 1550, the Venetian diplomat and geographer Ramusio published his three-volume Navigation and Travel Notes. In it, he recorded information from a Persian merchant about Chiai Catai—Chinese tea: “…He told me that throughout all of China they use the leaves of a certain plant… It is grown in Sichuan… People boil this fresh or dried herb in hot water. After drinking one or two cups on an empty stomach, it can remove fevers, headaches, stomach pains, flank pain, or joint pains; the hotter it is consumed, the better the effect… If one overeats, drinking some tea will quickly aid digestion.”

The book was reprinted many times in Europe, and thus Europe’s awareness of tea began.

Bo Ya: So what was the route through which Chinese medicine spread to the West?

Zhong Wen: The earliest Western study of Chinese medicine was The Great Compendium of Chinese Medicine, written by the Polish Jesuit Michał Piotr Boym. It systematically introduced Chinese medicine—from yin-yang and the five elements to pulse diagnosis, acupuncture, and herbal remedies. After Boym died following a turbulent life, most of his manuscripts remained unpublished and fell into the hands of Dutch merchants. The section on Chinese medical studies was plagiarized by a German physician working with the Dutch East India Company, who then published it with the help of the German sinologist Mentzel as his own work. Only later, after Boym’s colleague Philippe Couplet wrote to Mentzel to clarify the truth, did Boym’s name appear properly in the 1686 edition.

Bo Ya: It seems crows are black everywhere. But at least the Germans corrected the mistake—certainly better than the Manchus ever did.

Zhong Wen: Boym’s Flora Sinensis, published in 1656, recorded over twenty species of Chinese plants and animals. It is the earliest Western natural-history work on China based on firsthand field research. Boym is even celebrated as “the Polish Marco Polo.”

Bo Ya: That was the seventeenth century. What about the eighteenth century?

Zhong Wen: Although eighteenth-century China lay miserably beneath the iron hooves of Manchu and Mongol rule, Europe saw a powerful surge of “Chinese fashion”—a true Chinoiserie craze—and a vast body of books on China emerged. Jesuit Jean-Baptiste Du Halde’s General History of the Chinese Empire, first published in 1735 in four volumes, was quickly translated into English, German, Russian, and other languages.

The work encompassed China’s natural environment, geography, history, society, humanities, drama, and architecture—virtually an encyclopedia of China. In literature, for instance, it included the Jesuit Joseph Henri Prémare’s 1731 translation of the Yuan-dynasty zaju The Orphan of Zhao—the first complete edition of the play ever published in Europe.

Bo Ya: This is exactly what Xie Xuanjun describes in The Global Government Theory—How Chinese Civilization Integrated the World: “a dead civilization integrating the world.” This translation appeared more than five centuries after the original play was written.

Zhong Wen: Although Prémare’s translation was never a faithful representation of the Yuan original, it nevertheless caused a sensation in Europe. Voltaire, after reading the Orphan of Zhao in Du Halde’s book, declared that one could learn more about China from this play than from any other report. He then secluded himself for several months and created the five-act tragedy L’orphelin de la Chine (The Chinese Orphan). Its premiere in Paris on August 20, 1755 was met with extraordinary enthusiasm.

Bo Ya: Perhaps precisely because the translation was not the true original, it was able to create such immense influence in Europe.

Zhong Wen: Beyond the Orphan of Zhao in the 1735 edition, the Book of Changes (I Ching) attracted broad interest—so much so that it inspired Leibniz. As the principal discoverer of binary code—the foundation of computing—Leibniz wrote to the missionary Joachim Bouvet in Beijing in February 1701 to explain his idea of binary notation. Leibniz even suggested that Bouvet present it to the Kangxi Emperor.

Bouvet replied with a long letter showing that the binary structure existed in ancient Chinese trigrams. He suggested using the six lines of hexagrams to illustrate binary numbers and included a “Table of the Sixty-Four Hexagrams in Fuxi’s Sequence” and a “Diagram of the Hexagrams in Cardinal Directions.” In the trigrams, a solid line corresponds to 1 and a broken line to 0. The sixty-four hexagrams correspond exactly to the binary numbers from 0 to 63. In mathematics, the eight trigrams form an eighth-order matrix. Bouvet’s letter greatly encouraged Leibniz, and their exchange was published in scientific journals, accelerating the spread of the I Ching in Europe.

Bo Ya: If stones from another mountain can polish jade, then jade from another mountain can enter the human soul!

Zhong Wen: The I Ching is binary, computers are binary—does the I Ching hint that the future world would be ruled by binary logic?

Bo Ya: The Chinese understood thousands of years ago that “exchange creates wealth.” But after Qin Shi Huang—raised by a singer—interrupted the flow of exchange, wealth became monopolized by the state. It was instead England, the Netherlands, and other European nations that rediscovered the secret of creating wealth through commerce. As a result, Europe became the birthplace of modern civilization. On the surface, nearly all modern inventions and ideas were contributions of Europeans or their colonial descendants. But in reality, these too were the result of exchange.