Speaker: Nicolas Standaert, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium)

The Chinese gazette as a publicly available government publication was distributed in a variety of formats since the twelfth century. Little is known, however, about its form and content before 1800. By looking at European sources, this presentation shows how they offer a unique way of expanding the knowledge about the gazette of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its interconnected history illustrates how the Chinese gazette, as translated by European missionaries, became a major source for reflections on state and society by Enlightenment thinkers. It thus joined a global public much earlier than so far assumed.

Nicolas Standaert is Professor of Sinology at KU Leuven (Belgium) (1993-) and Member of the Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts of Belgium (2003-). His major research interest is the cultural contacts between China and Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this field he has led multiple research projects on rituality, visual culture, historiography, and print culture. He is the author of The Chinese Gazette in European Sources: Joining the Global Public in the Early and Mid-Qing Dynasty (Brill, 2022); The Intercultural Weaving of Historical Texts: Chinese and European Stories about Emperor Ku and His Concubines (Brill, 2016); Chinese Voices in the Rites Controversy: Travelling Books, Community Networks, Intercultural Arguments (Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 2012), among many others.