The first substantial cultural encounter of East Asia with the European West was initiated by the Jesuit Missionaries who endeavored to Christianize China and other East Asian nations, but the key discourse thus ignited was to a large degree grounded on natural knowledge. While the Jesuits deployed natural philosophy and sciences from Europe as the footing for preaching Christianity, increasing number of Chinese elites saw the “Western learning” as a new resource to complement their own knowledge about nature. In the new round of uprising tidemark of economic and knowledge globalization, scholarship in this classic field of the history of knowledge transmission and interaction has gained fresh energy. To shed new lights on our understanding of this grand cultural encounter within the framework of this congress, namely, “knowledge at work”, the papers in this symposium concentrate on the following topics:

The types of natural knowledge that the Jesuits deployed and their roles in supporting the Catholic missions.

The knowledge strategies adopted by Jesuit missionaries and their East Asian audience in dealing with the relationship between religion and natural knowledge, and their impacts on the transmission and reception of the “Western learning” in East Asia.

The approaches of the Jesuits and East Asian literati in dealing with the foreign and the native, the old and the new in this grand trans-cultural knowledge discourse.

The dynamics, channels and consequential responses of the secondary transmission of the “Western learning” from China to its neighboring country Korea.