Fearful Encounters: Demons, Magic Weapons, and Fierce Warriors in Xiyang ji

Abstract

Since its establishment, the Ming dynasty was troubled by border issues and foreign threats. This situation worsened in the sixteenth century with the Japanese piracy crisis, the Manchu threat from the northeast, the European mariners armed with advanced weaponry in Canton, and especially Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s (1537–98) Korean expedition, which severely challenged the suzerainty of China. Written in the last years of the sixteenth century, when Ming imperial authority was perceived to be on decline both at home and abroad, Xiyang ji takes Sino-foreign relations as its primary thematic concern. This paper examines how the foreign “others” are imagined in Xiyang ji. Although Xiyang ji attempts to affirm the age-old myth of the Sinocentric world order by demonizing foreign others and subsuming the outside world within the Chinese order, it also demonstrates a genuine interest in foreign culture and an awareness of cultural relativity. Most importantly, through presenting fearful encounters experienced by the Chinese fleets in foreign lands, Xiyang ji highlights the glaring gap between the old myth of the Sinocentric world order, whereby the foreign others were seen as tribute subjects, and the new reality, in which foreign countries fight fiercely for their status as independent entities. I argue that, in using warfare to reimagine Sino-foreign relations, Xiyang ji draws attention to foreign threats, the limits of the old knowledge system, and the urgency of learning more about the outside world, thus signaling the beginning of a process whereby Chinese scholars gradually ceased to identify China as the center of the world.

Keywords

Xiyang ji / Sino-foreign relations / cultural others / knowledge / foreign threat / Zheng He

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

2014 Higher Education Press and Brill