yuèdòuhú 'ān · gāng sà léi sī · dé · mén duō sà Juan González de Mendozazài历史大观dezuòpǐn!!! |
Mendoza's Historia may have been the first book-length work on China published in Europe since the days of Marco Polo. It was mostly superseded in 1615 by the work of much more informed Jesuit missionaries who actually lived in China, Matteo Ricci and Nicolas Trigault, De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas.
BiographyMendoza was born at Toledo. He joined the army but after some years resigned to enter the Order of Saint Augustine. He based his most famous text on the journals of Miguel de Luarca, whose 1580 trip to Ming China provided a simple majority thereof. He never set foot in China, but spent two years in Mexico before returning to Spain. He was afterward Bishop of the Lipari Islands, of Chiapas, and of Popayán, where he died – honoured as a Spanish prelate.
Juan González de Mendoza's works on-lineHistoria de las cosas más notables, ritos y costumbres del gran reyno de la China (original Spanish; Rome, 1585)
The history of the great and mighty kingdom of China and the situation thereof (English translation by Robert Parke, 1588, in an 1853 reprint by Hakluyt Society); vol. 2.
Links to many other translations