EACS-2016. Book of Abstracts

East-West Contacts & Perceptions 21st Biennial Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies 156 and the dispersal of the imperial art collection, is considered one of the worst acts of cultural vandalism of the nineteenth century. Over a million objects are estimated to have been taken from the Yuanmingyuan, and many of these are now scattered around the world, in private collections and public museums. This paper traces the trajectories of objects looted from the ‘Summer Palace’ in the nineteenth century, exploring the succession of Western meanings and values attributed to China’s imperial treasures — their existence as commodities in London auction houses in the 1860s, their lives in international exhibitions and public displays in the late nineteenth century; and their status as ‘trophies of war’ in military museums in the UK. Vetrov Viatcheslav (University of Heidelberg) Coming to Terms with Evil Key words: history of ideas, evil, the Faustian spirit, anti-traditionalism, cultural relativism The paper is conceived as a study of the concept of evil in the process of mutual perceptions of the West and China since the early 20th century until present. It shall begin with a discussion of the theory according to which the “otherness” of Chinese civilization was largely due to the fact that China did not possess the idea of radical personified evil as it was known to the Christian world. The observation of this conceptual deficit is central to Max Weber and François Jullien. Both of them belong to the most heatedly debated thinkers within Sinology: among the most controversial features of their works is the tendency to “exploit” China as the “other”, i.e. to perceive the “other” as a means of better understanding their own Western culture. Criticisms of Weber’s and Jullien’s eurocentrism pertaining to the debate on cultural relativism have had a significant effect on the development of Western Sinology. The investigation of this debate among Western sinologists shall be accompanied by the study of a parallel reception process of the Western idea of evil among Chinese intellectuals. The chronological frame of both reception processes shall be the same: from the early 20th till early 21th c. For the second — Chinese — case, the focus will be on translations of three Western literary works in which the deal with the devil is the central motive: Goethe’s Faust (1808–1832), Hoffmann’s Die Elixiere des Teufels (1815–1816) and Bulgakow’s Master and Margarita (1929–1939). The reception of different versions of the “deal” with the personified evil testifies to a growing interest of Chinese intellectuals for dialectics and (black) romanticism, which has serious political implications. For example, Chinese readings of Bulgakov’s “deal” — a satire of the early Sowjet state —were made possible only in the context of the post-Mao political atmosphere of the eighties. Vinci Renata (Sapienza University of Rome) An Autographic Telegraph for the Transmission of Chinese Characters: the Attempted Application of Caselli’s Pantelegraph in China Key words: media history, telegraphy, China, Sino-Italian relations, Giovanni Caselli (1815–1891), pantelegraph In 1872 the Shanghai newspaper Shenbao described in detail a smart system invented by the Italian Giovanni Caselli that permitted the production of telegraphic messages containing Chinese characters: it was the so called “pantelegraph” (also known as “universal telegraph” or “autographic telegraph”). This invention, described by the specialists of communication technology as the ancestor of the fax, permitted the exact reproduction any kind of documents, including images and symbols, so seemed to be totally suitable for the Chinese telegraphy. As a matter of fact, during its French period, in 1863 Caselli showed his invention to the members of a Chinese embassy, producing some impressive transmissions (so called “caselligrammi”) of short Chinese messages, still well preserved in his personal archive in Siena, his hometown. Such envoys reported this news back to China, but due to some reasons the effective commercial contact was set more than twenty years later. Although in many ways this seemed to be the perfectly suitable solution for the telegraphic communication in Chinese, this machine was never applied in China and the reasons have been revealed by an account to the Italian Foreign Minister written by the Minister Plenipotentiary in China De Luca, that Caselli himself had copied and saved.