Sinology
Based on Wikipedia: Sinology
In 1583, an Italian Jesuit priest named Matteo Ricci stepped off a ship in Guangzhou and did something revolutionary: he treated the Chinese not as heathens to be converted, but as intellectuals to be engaged. He spent the rest of his life mastering their classical texts, learning to speak as their scholars spoke, and presenting European ideas in Chinese terms. Ricci didn't know it, but he was founding an academic discipline that would eventually be called sinology—the Western study of Chinese civilization.
The word itself wouldn't exist for another two and a half centuries. "Sinology" and "sinologist" were coined around 1838, built from the Late Latin "Sinae," which came from Greek, which came from Arabic "Sin," which ultimately traces back to "Qin"—as in the Qin dynasty, China's first imperial dynasty, whose name gave the Western world its word for China itself.
The Missionaries Who Learned Chinese
Before Ricci, there were others. Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian missionaries—Jesuits and Dominicans—had been studying Chinese since the sixteenth century, driven by a singular goal: spreading Catholic Christianity to the Chinese people. A Spanish Dominican mission in Manila even operated a printing press, producing four works on Catholic doctrine for the Chinese immigrant community between 1593 and 1607. Three were written in Literary Chinese; one mixed Literary Chinese with Hokkien, a Chinese dialect spoken in parts of what is now Fujian Province and Taiwan.
But these Dominican accomplishments among overseas Chinese communities pale against what the Jesuits achieved on the mainland.
Ricci's insight was simple but profound. Most missionaries of his era saw the Chinese primarily as pagans or idol-worshippers—lost souls requiring salvation. Ricci saw them as "like-minded literati approachable on the level of learning." He studied the Confucian classics the way Chinese scholars did, not to debunk them, but to find common ground. He presented Catholic doctrine and European scientific knowledge using concepts his Chinese audience already understood.
This approach—meeting a civilization on its own terms rather than demanding it meet yours—would define the best of sinology for centuries to come.
The Enlightenment Discovers China
During the Age of Enlightenment, European intellectuals became fascinated with what the Jesuit missionaries reported back from China. Sinologists began introducing Chinese philosophy, ethics, legal systems, and aesthetics to Western readers. Their works were often unscientific and incomplete, but they sparked something powerful: a genuine cultural exchange of ideas.
The timing mattered enormously. Europe had just emerged from what many considered the Dark Ages, and here was news of a civilization that seemed to have avoided such a collapse entirely. Enlightenment thinkers often described China as an enlightened kingdom—a model of rational governance that put European squabbling to shame.
Voltaire wrote a play called "L'orphelin de la Chine" (The Orphan of China), inspired by a Yuan dynasty drama called "The Orphan of Zhao." Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the philosopher and mathematician who independently invented calculus, penned his famous "Novissima Sinica" (News from China). The Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico also took note. China had captured the European imagination.
This fascination spawned chinoiserie—the European artistic style that imitated Chinese motifs in everything from porcelain to garden design. More substantively, it triggered a series of debates comparing Chinese and Western cultures. These debates, however romanticized, forced European intellectuals to confront the possibility that their civilization wasn't the only one worth studying.
From Curiosity to Curriculum
Despite this intellectual enthusiasm, Chinese texts weren't seriously studied at European universities until around 1860. The reason was practical: Chinese literature had no connection to the topics that dominated European higher education—primarily the Bible and classical Greek and Roman texts. If you couldn't use a text to illuminate scripture or antiquity, what was the point?
France was the exception. Thanks to Louis XIV, Chinese studies found institutional support earlier there than anywhere else in Europe.
In 1711, the king appointed a young Chinese man named Arcadio Huang to catalog the royal collection of Chinese texts. Huang worked with a French scholar named Étienne Fourmont, who would publish a grammar of Chinese in 1742. In 1814, France created a chair of Chinese and Manchu at the Collège de France—effectively the first professorship of Chinese in Europe. Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat, who had taught himself Chinese, filled the position.
Meanwhile, in Naples, something remarkable happened. In 1732, a missionary named Matteo Ripa founded the "Chinese Institute"—the first school of sinology on the European continent. Pope Clement XII gave his blessing. Ripa had spent twelve years in China, working as a painter and copper-engraver at the court of the Kangxi Emperor. When he returned to Naples, he brought four young Chinese Christians with him. They taught their native language at the institute, training missionaries bound for China. That institute eventually evolved into what is now the University of Naples L'Orientale.
The field spread slowly across Europe. By the time Abel-Rémusat took up his chair in Paris, the first Russian sinologist, Nikita Bichurin, had already been living in Beijing for ten years. England's first important secular sinologist was James Legge; Germany's was Hans Georg Conon von der Gabelentz, who in 1878 became professor of Far Eastern languages at the University of Leipzig—the first such position in the German-speaking world.
The Problem with Early Sinology
For all its achievements, early Western sinology had a significant blind spot. The image of China conveyed by Jesuit scholars—essentially a Confucian society governed by ethical principles—dominated Western thinking for generations. While some Europeans learned to speak Chinese, most studied only written classical Chinese. They worked in what scholars call the "commentarial tradition," producing critical annotated translations of classical texts.
This sounds impressive, and in many ways it was. But the emphasis on translating classical texts created problems. Scholars rarely used social science methodology. They almost never compared Chinese texts to texts from other traditions. One critic described this type of sinology as "philological hairsplitting"—preoccupied with marginal or curious details while missing the larger picture.
Think of it this way: imagine studying Western civilization entirely through close readings of Aristotle and Aquinas, never asking how ordinary people actually lived, what they believed, or how their society functioned. You'd learn important things, certainly, but you'd also miss most of what makes a civilization tick.
Secular scholars gradually came to outnumber missionaries, and through the twentieth century, sinology slowly gained a substantial presence in Western universities. But the field remained dominated by what might be called the Paris school—even outside France—until the Second World War.
The Paris School
Three scholars exemplified this approach: Paul Pelliot, Henri Maspero, and Marcel Granet. Each published foundational studies and trained students who would shape the field for decades.
Pelliot was formidable and sometimes fearsome. His command of relevant languages—especially those of Central Asia—and his bibliographic control over sources in those languages gave him extraordinary power. He could write authoritatively on an enormous range of topics. He could also criticize other scholars' mistakes in damning detail. Being reviewed by Pelliot was not for the faint of heart.
Maspero expanded what sinology could encompass. Before him, the field focused heavily on Confucianism. Maspero brought in Daoism, Buddhism, and popular religion. He studied Chinese art, mythology, and the history of science. He showed that Chinese civilization was far more varied than the classical texts alone suggested.
Granet's contribution was methodological. He applied the concepts of Émile Durkheim—the French sociologist who essentially founded the discipline of sociology—to ancient Chinese society. Granet analyzed the Chinese family and Chinese ritual using the same analytical tools European scholars used to study their own societies. This was genuinely new: treating China not as an exotic curiosity but as a society that could be understood through universal analytical frameworks.
Russia developed its own school of sinology, focused mainly on classical Chinese texts. The Russian sinologist Julian Shchutsky produced what many consider the best full translation of the I Ching, the ancient Chinese divination text also known as the Book of Changes, in 1937. His translation was later rendered into English and other European languages, spreading its influence far beyond Russian-speaking scholars.
The Great Divide
Everything changed in 1949, when Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic of China. The Chinese revolution didn't just transform China—it transformed the study of China.
In the United States especially, a new approach called "area studies" challenged the dominance of classical sinology. Scholars like John King Fairbank at Harvard promoted what he called "the study of China within a discipline." Instead of sinology as its own self-contained field, Fairbank wanted historians to study Chinese history using the same methods they'd use for European history, economists to study the Chinese economy using standard economic tools, and so on.
This approach deliberately downplayed philological sinology—the close study of classical texts—and focused instead on questions drawn from history and the social sciences. What caused the Chinese revolution? How did the Communist Party maintain power? What were the economic consequences of collectivization? These were questions that couldn't be answered by reading Confucius more carefully.
In 1964, a debate erupted in the pages of the Journal of Asian Studies that crystallized the divide. The anthropologist G. William Skinner declared that "the cry has gone up: Sinology is dead; long live Chinese studies!" He concluded that "Sinology, a discipline unto itself, is being replaced by Chinese studies, a multidisciplinary endeavour with specific research objectives."
The historian Joseph Levenson went further, doubting that classical sinology offered anything useful to social scientists anymore. But Benjamin Schwartz, another historian, pushed back: the academic disciplines, he argued, were too often treated as ends in themselves rather than tools for understanding.
Frederick Mote, a specialist in traditional China, defended sinology as a field in its own right. Denis Twitchett, another traditionalist, issued what he called "A Lone Cheer for Sinology." He rejected the assumption that sinology and the social sciences were inherently hostile to each other. The word "sinology," he pointed out, was used in too wide a range of meanings to be so easily dismissed.
The China Watchers
The Cold War created an entirely new category of China experts: the China watchers.
These were primarily American government officials and journalists based in Hong Kong. The United States and China didn't trust each other, and travel between the countries was prohibited. China watchers couldn't conduct interviews, attend press briefings, or do the normal work of journalists and analysts. So they adapted techniques from Kremlinology—the art of divining what was happening inside the Soviet Union from fragmentary public information.
They parsed official announcements for hidden meanings. They tracked which officials appeared in newspaper photographs—and which ones disappeared. They analyzed seating arrangements at public events. They scrutinized the precise wording of communiqués. It was intelligence work disguised as scholarship, and scholarship forced to operate like intelligence work.
When China opened to the outside world in the late 1970s, China watchers could finally live in China and take advantage of normal sources of information. The field transformed almost overnight. What had required detective work now required only a plane ticket and a press credential.
Toward a New Sinology
By the end of the twentieth century, many scholars called for an end to the split between classical sinology and disciplinary approaches. The Australian scholar Geremie Barmé proposed what he called a "New Sinology"—one that demanded strong foundations in both classical and modern Chinese language and studies, while embracing a rich variety of approaches and disciplines.
This sounds like common sense, and perhaps it is. But it represented a genuine synthesis after decades of institutional warfare between traditionalists and modernizers. The new sinology wouldn't abandon the classical texts, but it wouldn't treat them as the only thing worth studying either. It would use whatever tools worked—philological, historical, sociological, anthropological—to understand China as a living civilization, not just a repository of ancient wisdom.
The Politics of Studying China
In Germany, where the tradition of "Sinologie" runs deep, fierce debates have erupted in recent years over a question that might seem simple but isn't: What moral obligations do sinologists have when studying a country accused of human rights abuses?
Specifically, the debates have centered on China's treatment of the Uyghurs—a Turkic-speaking Muslim minority in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, where the Chinese government has been accused of mass detention, forced labor, and cultural suppression. Should sinologists who study Chinese culture also speak out about Chinese government policies? Or does academic objectivity require a certain neutrality?
In 2023, two sinologists—Thomas Heberer and Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer—published an op-ed in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, a Swiss newspaper, that appeared to favor China's policies in Xinjiang. The response was explosive. Fellow sinologist Kai Vogelsang declared that German sinology was now "bankrupt."
The German China Studies association issued a warning to its members: "Representatives of sinology have a very special responsibility to live up to their public role by guarding against suspicions of appropriation." In other words, sinologists needed to be careful not to become, or appear to become, apologists for the Chinese state.
When Schmidt-Glintzer later accepted an award from the Chinese government, he was roundly criticized by another colleague, Björn Alpermann, who had written a book specifically about the Uyghurs and Xinjiang.
These debates reveal something important about sinology that Matteo Ricci, back in 1583, couldn't have anticipated. Studying a civilization on its own terms doesn't mean accepting everything that civilization does. Engaging with Chinese philosophy doesn't mean endorsing Chinese government policy. The relationship between scholarly understanding and moral judgment remains genuinely difficult to navigate.
China's View of China Studies
It's worth pausing to consider what China itself calls this field. In modern China, the study of China-related subjects is known as "guóxué"—usually translated as "national studies." Foreign sinology, by contrast, is translated as "Hànxué," or "Han studies." The Han are China's majority ethnic group, and the term suggests that foreigners study Chinese civilization from the outside, as observers of the Han.
In Japan, the study of China was historically called "kangaku." The Japanese distinguished it from "kokugaku" (the study of Japan) and "rangaku" or "yōgaku" (the study of the West—"rangaku" originally meant "Dutch studies," since the Dutch were the only Westerners allowed to trade with Japan during its period of isolation). These distinctions mattered: what you studied said something about who you were and where your loyalties lay.
The Arab Connection
Western sinology isn't the only tradition of China studies. Chinese historical sources indicate that Arabs had knowledge of China several centuries before Islam, with relations between the two civilizations dating back to the pre-Islamic era.
The Han Dynasty, beginning around 206 BCE, actively pursued trade routes with what are now Central Asia, India, Western Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, and Africa. Historical studies suggest that Muslim Arabs entered China during the early days of Islam to spread their religion—some accounts claim that companions of the Prophet Muhammad himself preached in China as early as 616 or 617 CE.
During the reign of the Ming dynasty Emperor Yongle, the famous Chinese admiral Zheng He led his fleet to the shores of the Arabian Peninsula on his fourth voyage in 1412. Zheng He was himself a Muslim, and his voyages connected the Chinese and Arab worlds in ways that purely overland trade routes never had.
There were certainly cultural and commercial exchanges between Arab and Chinese civilizations, which would have required visiting Arabs to learn Chinese and vice versa. However, no texts survive indicating that Arabs during this period studied Chinese language or culture systematically—beyond what their missionary work or trade required.
As Arab power grew from the seventh through eighth centuries, fueled by the expansion of Islam, Arab scholars developed sophisticated geographical knowledge, including new information about China. Up to the twelfth century, Arabs possessed knowledge about the East that Europeans lacked entirely, and they played a crucial role in transmitting this knowledge westward.
The Arab geographer and historian Abu al-Hasan Ali al-Mas'udi, who lived in the tenth century, made significant contributions to what might be called Arab sinology. A tireless traveler from childhood, he visited India, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Champa (in what is now Vietnam), and the coastal regions of China itself. His encyclopedic works transmitted knowledge about the Far East to readers across the Islamic world.
The Opposite of Sinology
If sinology is the study of China by outsiders, what's the opposite? In a sense, it's the study of the outside world by China—what Chinese scholars have called "Western studies" at various points in history. When nineteenth-century Chinese reformers tried to understand why Western powers had humiliated China in the Opium Wars, they began systematic study of Western technology, military organization, and political institutions. The slogan "zhongti xiyong"—"Chinese learning for essence, Western learning for practical application"—captured their attempt to learn from the West without abandoning Chinese civilization.
Today, China maintains extensive programs studying Western societies, just as Western universities maintain programs studying China. The relationship is no longer one-way, if it ever truly was.
Why Sinology Matters
More than a billion people live in China. Hundreds of millions more are part of the Chinese diaspora, scattered across Southeast Asia, the Americas, Europe, and beyond. Chinese civilization has existed continuously for thousands of years, producing philosophy, literature, art, science, and technology that have shaped human history in ways most Westerners barely understand.
Sinology—whether you call it that, or Chinese studies, or area studies, or something else entirely—represents humanity's attempt to understand one of its major branches. The Jesuit missionaries who first learned Chinese did so to spread their faith, but they ended up doing something more lasting: they began a conversation between civilizations that continues to this day.
That conversation has been marked by misunderstanding, romanticization, condescension, and genuine insight in roughly equal measure. The image of China as an enlightened Confucian utopia was wrong, but so was the image of China as a backward empire awaiting Western modernization. Getting China right—understanding it on its own terms while maintaining the ability to make moral judgments—remains one of the great intellectual challenges of our time.
Renata Mirkova, the Czech language educator whose journey into Mandarin began almost by accident, is part of this tradition whether she thinks of herself that way or not. When she teaches Czech students Chinese, or Chinese students Czech, she's participating in a conversation that Matteo Ricci started in 1583. The conversation has changed—it's no longer about converting souls to Catholicism or importing chinoiserie to European parlors. But the fundamental project remains: two civilizations trying to understand each other, one word at a time.