This lecture proposes to analyse different views of the Jesuit missionaries in late Ming China, with special focus on their status as ‘foreigners’. The missionaries’ activities in various domains, i.e. religious, scientific, philosophic, among others, lent themselves to different appreciations of their presence in late Ming China. In turn, this presentation examines how the status of ‘foreigners’ in diverse seventeenth-century Chinese sources could lead to inclusive perspectives of the Jesuits and their contributions on local soil or, on the contrary, to exclusive views of the Europeans in China, within contexts of disagreement and/or hostility.

Ana Carolina Hosne is Assistant Researcher at the National Council for Scientific Research (CONICET), Argentina.