Maps, Clocks, and Gardens: The Renaissance Goes to China
Speaker: Prof. Andrew Hui, National University of Singapore
Moderator: Prof. Hao Tianhu, Zhejiang University
Time: 19:00-21:00 pm, March 24, 2026
Venue: 浙江大学紫金港校区东五201
This talk traces a Jesuit itinerary of objects—maps, clocks, and gardens—to ask how Renaissance techniques were transformed when brought to China, and how China in turn transformed the Jesuits. Beginning with Matteo Ricci’s remaking of Abraham Ortelius’s atlas for Chinese readers, I follow the translation of global space into a cartographic imagination. I then turn to the self-sounding clocks 自鸣钟, assembled in the imperial workshops of the Forbidden City, where Chinese and European artisans co-produced a discipline of quantitative, measured time. Finally, the Western maze at 圆明园 reveals the aesthetics of wonder and wandering. These secular knowledge, I argue, ironically secularized the missionaries.
Andrew Hui is Associate Professor at National University of Singapore and is the author of three books: The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries (2025), A Theory of the Aphorism from Confucius to Twitter (2019, translated into 5 languages), and The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature (2017). His books have been reviewed in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and London Review of Books. His newest projects are: for Princeton, The Marvelous Universe of Xiyou ji; for Penguin, The Emperor’s Maze: The Jesuits in China and the Making of a Global Age.
浙江大学教育基金会钟子逸基金资助
