Missionaries, and in particular the Portuguese Assistancy of the Society of Jesus, played a fundamental role in the dissemination of Western scientific knowledge in East Asia. They also brought to Europe a deeper knowledge of Asian countries. This volume brings together a series of essays analyzing important new data on this significant scientific and cultural exchange, including several in-depth discussions of new sources relevant to Jesuit scientific activities at the Chinese Emperor's Court. It includes major contributions examining various case studies that range from the work of some individual missionaries (Karel Slavicek, Guillaume Bonjour) in Beijing during the reigns of Kangxi and Yongzheng to the cultural exchange between a Korean envoy and the Beijing Jesuits during the early 18th century. Focusing in particular on the relationship between science and the arts, this volume also features articles pertaining to the historical contributions made by Tomas Pereira and Jean-Joseph-Marie Amiot, to the exchange of musical knowledge between China and Europe.

In recent years, research on the history of early modern cartography has undergone remarkable developments. At the same time, European travel accounts and works on China and Japan are also being investigated more systematically. Finally, studies of translations between European and East Asian languages have highlighted the more general issue of how and to what extent representations of the world that prevailed at one end of Eurasia informed and influenced the representations prevailing at the other end of the continent, sometimes to the point that novel forms of representations were being generated.This volume brings together a series of essays on this theme. It is divided into five sections which address as many topics: the textual representation of the 'Other'; 16th- and 17th-century maps of China, Japan and Vietnam; the phenomenon of hybridisation in visual representations; knowledge and representations of the world in Europe and East Asia; and the circulation of representations of the heavens in astronomy between these two regions.