The Chinese Representation of Venice. Ideal and Real Visions in Chinese Sources from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century

The aim of this contribution is to describe how Chinese sources have represented Venice since the seventeenth century, first through geographical treatises written or inspired by foreign scholars, especially Catholic and Protestant missionaries. After the Opium Wars Chinese diplomats and intellectuals began travelling abroad and wrote their own first-hand accounts of foreign lands. However, preexisting visions of Venice, inherited from a foreign tradition of travel writing, were still employed by the Chinese intellectuals who visited the lagoon city in the modern era. In turn, Venice was then seen as the urban incarnation of irredeemable decadence or of picturesque and poetic beauty. The comparison between Venice and Suzhou or some other Jiangnan water towns was often mentioned and this is proof of the persistence of a by-then semi-foreign, semi-Chinese palimpsest. At the end the twentieth century, though, a much more realistic conception of distant countries and peoples was developed by Chinese scholars, until a polemical and liberating vision of Venice as “the Suzhou of Europe” was finally put forward.