This symposium looks at the application of Chinese natural knowledge in a range of fields during the long eighteenth century.

Much scholarly attention has been devoted to the early-modern European interest in Chinese philosophy, institutions, history, language, and gardens; similarly, the activities of the Society of Jesus in China, including its work in astronomy, geography, and mathematics, have received considerable attention. However, there has been less sustained research on the ways in which China contributed to natural knowledge even when contact with outsiders was limited. For example, it has been assumed that botanists of the ‘centre’ such as Linnaeus named Chinese and other plants of the ‘periphery’ with no regard to local Chinese understandings, but this was not in fact the case; a local understanding of a plant’s use, as in the case of ginseng, could still become a global understanding. A complex process of translation and transformation of natural knowledge was therefore underway even in the relatively limited encounters that were possible in the mid-eighteenth century.

The papers offered in this symposium examine how Chinese natural knowledge came to be known and used in a range of eighteenth-century European sciences: alchemy, pharmacology, medicine, natural history, geography and botany.