Chinese-German Symposium on ”Transfer of Scientific and Technical Knowledge between Europe and China during the Early Modern Period”

01/03/2019 to 10/06/2019

The history of scientific, technical and medical exchange between Europe and China during the early modern period (16th to 19th centuries) is an important topic of research undertaken on a global level, but so far much more attention has been paid to astronomy, mathematics and cartography than to other fields of practice and knowledge. This symposium prominently concentrates on “hands-on” sciences, practical crafts and techniques which have been much less studied. Moreover, another distinct feature of approach is to take the texts produced in these fields more comprehensively into account as this has been done so far. Surprisingly, and perhaps due to the difficult technical language, only very few of the scientific, technical and medical treatises initiated or produced by the Jesuit China mission have been translated into English, nor have they been really studied to substantial depth so that much work has still to be done in this respect. Therefore, translations of these Chinese texts into English, including all relevant text-critical, translational and contextual questions according to the newest global standards current in the field, are an important task for the future.
The symposium endeavours to bring together specialists in the history of exchange of scientific and technical knowledge between Europe and China. The targets of this convention will be to share between colleagues mainly from China and Germany experiences obtained from relevant research and delineate fields of future investigations. Moreover, this opportunity is used to explore possibilities of further co-operations in the framework of other conferences and workshops to be held in the future, invitations of individual scholars for research stays, or joint project applications.