Zhong Wen: At the dawn of the eighteenth century, Louis XIV—the “Sun King” who was obsessed with chinoiserie—held a Chinese-style ball at the Palace of Versailles. Dressed in Chinese garments and carried out in an ornate Chinese sedan chair, he caused a sensation among the peoples of Europe. In France at that time, from the royal court and nobility to Enlightenment thinkers and even common folk, all were immersed in a feverish pursuit of Chinese culture and Chinese craftsmanship.

Bo Ya: Therefore, the conclusion that “Europeans ought to become moral disciples of the Chinese” seemed almost a logical one.

Zhong Wen: In the late Ming dynasty, The Four Books translated into Latin by Michele Ruggieri—one of the founders of Western Sinology—had already reached Europe. Later, Matteo Ricci translated The Four Books again, this time following Zhu Xi’s Collected Commentaries on the Four Books. His China Journal (The Journals of Matteo Ricci), which reflected his experiences in China, was subsequently published in Italian, Latin, French, German, and Spanish, further shaping Europe’s image of China.

The profound depth of Chinese culture and China’s relative material prosperity sparked a craze for understanding and studying China; “Chinese learning” gradually entered the halls of European academia as an esteemed discipline. By the end of the seventeenth century, translations of the Four Books, the Five Classics, and works of Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucianism were already circulating widely in Europe. Scholarly works analyzing Chinese philosophy, thought, and culture appeared in increasing numbers—and their influence at times even surpassed that of the Chinese classics themselves.

Confucius—one of the great thinkers of the Axial Age—was evaluated in Europe on a level comparable to, or even surpassing, Plato and Aristotle. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a leading figure of the Cartesian school and a founder of modern European philosophy, stated bluntly: “This philosopher (Confucius) lived centuries before nearly all the Greek philosophers we know; his thought and his maxims always shine with a radiant brilliance.”

Bo Ya: The “China fever” was especially strong in France—the main battlefield of the Enlightenment. Enlightenment thinkers, inheriting the classical culture revived during the Renaissance, consciously absorbed elements of Chinese culture, especially Confucianism, in order to prepare the ideological foundation for their own political and social reform projects.

Zhong Wen: Voltaire alone mentioned China in nearly eighty of his works and in more than two hundred letters. He praised China as “the oldest, largest, most beautiful, most populous, and best-governed country in the world,” and he declared that “in matters of morality, Europeans should become the disciples of the Chinese.”

François Quesnay, the founder of the French Physiocratic school, was hailed as “the European Confucius.” He believed Confucius to be “the greatest reformer of the ancient laws, morals, and religion transmitted from his glorious antiquity,” and said that the Analects “were filled with maxims and moral principles surpassing the sayings of the Seven Sages of Greece.”

Quesnay studied in earnest the ideas attributed to the legendary figures Fu Xi, Yao, and Shun, and in 1767 published Despotism of China. In the book he criticized the earlier French mercantilist policies that sacrificed agriculture for the sake of commerce and industry, and he devoted an entire section to “Agriculture,” explaining Chinese agricultural administration and advocating governance in accordance with the “natural order.”

Indeed, the French word physiocracy literally means “the rule of nature.” Quesnay also expressed keen interest in the ritual norms of the Chinese emperors, and even encouraged Louis XV to imitate China; thus, in 1756, the king personally performed a plowing ceremony modeled after the Chinese imperial tradition.

Bo Ya: Quesnay did not understand that the Fu Xi, Yao, and Shun he studied so seriously were entirely fictitious figures, and their supposed “ideas” had no historical basis. Clearly, this was nothing short of a “China mania.”

Zhong Wen: Following Quesnay, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot—another leading figure of the Physiocrats and later the finance minister of Louis XVI—was regarded as “one of the direct precursors of the French Revolution.” His economic thought likewise bore clear Chinese imprints.

To better grasp China’s agrarian ideas, Turgot prepared a list of fifty-two questions concerning Chinese land, capital, labor, rent, and taxation. He then entrusted two Chinese students studying in France—Yang Dewang and Gao Leisi—to collect relevant materials after returning to China so that he might draw upon them for reforms in France.

Bo Ya: It seems that Europeans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries embraced Chinese thought much like the Chinese in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries embraced Western thought—projecting their own ideals and purposes onto the other side.