The Story of a Stele: China's Nestorian Monument and Its Reception in the West, 1625-1916

Product Description


The thesis of this book is that when Westerners discussed the Nestorian monument they were not really talking about China at all.


Review


Michael Keevak has written a story about the way in which places, objects, and even time travel through the imagination and cultures of people. The meticulous description of the problems and controversies that have surrounded the inscription on the Nestorian Stele for centuries results in the fascinating anatomy of one of the formative episodes of the West's engagement with Chinese culture and history. Keevak's reconstruction of the journey of the 'stone' in the intellectual and religious universe of the European early modernity also invites larger questions about the transmission, search for, and uses of knowledge. For all his apologies, Keevak writes splendidly and eruditely, and with a sense for the 'other' that is both delicate and deep. This book will delight anyone interested in the life and vicissitudes of cultural monuments. (Nicola Di Cosmo, Henry Luce Foundation Professor of East Asian Studies, School of Historical Study, Institute for Advanced Study)


About the Author


Michael Keevak is a professor in the Department of Foreign Languages at National Taiwan University in Taipei, Taiwan. He is the author of two books, Sexual Shakespeare: Forgery, Authorship, Portraiture (2001), and The Pretended Asian: George Psalmanazar's Eighteenth-Century Formosan Hoax (2004). He has also begun work on a new project: How East Asians Came to be Yellow: An Essay in the History of Racial Thinking.