EACS-2016. Book of Abstracts

East-West Contacts & Perceptions 21st Biennial Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies 148 socialist values attached to Cyrillic. In contrast to their unreserved support for Russian language learning, the Chinese leadership showed more deliberation in the choice of the new alphabet. Behind the selection of the new alphabet was the desire of the CCP to integrate China into an international culture larger than the one under Soviet dominance. The paper thus sheds new light on the dynamic and tension between Soviet intervention and Chinese assimilation in the formative years of the Chinese Communist regime. Li Xuetao (Beijing Foreign Studies University) On the Academic Interaction between German Sinologists and Chinese Scholars in the 1920s–1940s in Peiping Key words: Deutschland-Institut, history of sinology, Chinese academia, Peiping, academic interaction German sinologists played an important role in developing the modern Chinese academic system when the Chinese Classics studies fell into obscurity in the early 1900s. In the 1920s and ’1940s, German sinolo- gists maintained close contact with Chinese classics scholars, the best of whom had studied in the West. It was a time when China had many German sinologists teaching at the country’s universities. In addition, many academic institutes were set up in Peiping at that time, for Example Das Deutschland-Institut. A favorable condition was created for the establishment of the modern Chinese academic standards, thanks to the libraries, institutes, journals of Sinological studies and publishing houses founded by Germans in Peiping and other places in China, and information on latest academic developments supplied by both German and Chinese scholars. This cultural inflow led to the shaping of the modern Chinese academic system. The joint effort of German and Chinese scholars earned Chinese academic studies an international status. By then the traditional method of annotating ancient Chinese classics had given way to new scientific academic approaches. And all this was made possible byWestern sinologists, especially those in Germany. Luca Dinu (National Taiwan Normal University) 17th Century Europeans on the Chinese Language: a Few Lesser-known Cases Key words: Chinese language; Chinese writing; ideography; early Sinology; proto-Sinology By the early 17th century, the mythology of the Chinese language in European sources was already well established: late 16th century syntheses like Mendoza’s Great and Mightie Kingdome or early 17th century master-texts like the Ricci-Trigault Christiana expeditione had already created the general frame- work against which later major efforts like Kircher’s, Webb’s or Le Comte’s developed. On the other hand, the century produced a number of lesser-known contexts, with names like Pierre Poussines (the editor of Francis Xavier’s letters), Antoine de Vienne Plancy (speculating in the 1680s on Blaise de Vigenère’s century-old investigations) and several others well deserving to be fully recuperated by scholarship. In my paper, I offer an overview of a number of texts authored by several such writers, focusing both on their sometimes particularly significant contribution to the existing tropology of the Chinese language (as in the case of Poussines’ overwriting, through translation, Xavier’s points on Chinese characters) as well as their sometime idiosyncratic takes on the same topic (like with Vienne Plancy’s vision of Chinese characters as mini-labyrinths).As I argue, without properly exploring at some length such lesser-known rhetorical contexts, our understanding of a key aspect of the Western image of China is likely to remain partial and incomplete. McDowall Stephen (University of Edinburgh) Collating Empire: British Photograph Albums of Nineteenth-Century China Key words: photographs; albums; materiality; imperialism; souvenirs The late-nineteenth-century rise of photography occurred at the highpoint of imperialism, and the emergence of this new technology has long been associated with the imperial project. For Quartermaine