Before Orientalism by Phillips Kim M.;

Author:Phillips, Kim M.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Conclusion

Medieval travelers’ tales distinguished between levels of civility in different parts of Asia, as in Poggio’s summary of Niccolò’s narrative:

All India is divided into three parts: the first, extending from Persia to the Indus; the second, comprising the district from the Indus to the Ganges; and the third, all that is beyond. This third part excels the others in wealth, humanity and refinement and is equal to our own country in the style of life and in civilization. For the inhabitants there have most sumptuous buildings, elegant habitations and handsome furniture; they lead a more refined life, removed from all barbarity and coarseness. The men are extremely humane [perhumani] and the merchants very rich, so much so that some will carry on their business in forty of their own ships, each of which is valued at fifty thousand gold pieces. These alone use tables at their meals, with tablecloths and silver vessels as we do. The inhabitants of the rest of India eat on carpets spread upon the ground.100

Barbarism, simplicity, and the highest levels of civility could all be found in the Orient, but China exhibited qualities that were equal to the best of Europe. Other authors went further and asserted that realm of the Great Khân was unsurpassed by any other in the world. Travelers found the same elements to praise in Chinese cities, palaces, and ritual culture that European authors extolled at home, thus supporting the view that far from home European travelers often responded positively to the similar and indeed the superior in distant cultures. Moreover, the detail paid to more sophisticated aspects of financial or administrative organization than found in Europe suggests that Yuan practices could be seen to serve as models. While the authors never directly say, “We should do just as the Great Khân does,” the implication is there.

The notion of “European” (as opposed to Christian) superiority was not yet widespread when western travelers first encountered the complex and sophisticated cultures of Yuan China. Observers and their readers were prepared to be impressed. Let us remember that in 1613 Samuel Purchas would ask, compared with Europe, what other lands are so “fortified with Castles, edified with Townes, crowned with Cities,’” which more advanced in “Arts and Inventions,” “Liberall Arts,” “Mechanical Sciences,” “Musicall Inventions,” and all technological inventions?101 China in his eyes had lost any semblance of prestige, even in the fields of printing and firearms, compared with European supremacy. It was that preeminence in all things that, according to Purchas, justified the establishment of European colonies in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. How differently the readers of medieval travel literature viewed the world. Hungry for knowledge of urban and courtly development and free from justifications for conquest, they possessed a curiosity that could be sated by travelers’ accounts of advanced Chinese civility.

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