This panel centers on agents who traveled between East Asian and European cultures, translated, and transferred books and information to various audiences, thus carrying their knowledge to another cultural environment and onto the global stage. We look at a wide variety of individuals who were involved in the practical process of circulating and producing knowledge, including Catholic and Protestant missionaries, Chinese travelers to Europe, and the Chinese in the Philippines (Sangleys). These intercultural actors were not only the carriers of knowledge that enabled the flow of information, but more importantly, also actively participated in creating new knowledge in an unfamiliar place and foreign culture for their own benefits. Looking at these agents together gives us the opportunity to examine how knowledge production was practiced on the ground by different groups of people on a global scale.

Niping Yan combines the history of books and maritime history to explore how the Sangleys employed practical knowledge learned from character books, a type of primer popular in late imperial China, to interact with the Spaniards in the Philippines during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Måns Ahlstedt Åberg considers the importance of native Chinese visitors for the structuring and cataloguing of collections of Chinese-language books and manuscripts in England, 1687–1775. Xiangyi Liu focuses on Antoine Gaubil, a French Jesuit missionary in China in the eighteenth century, reconstructing his life as a scientist of the Académie des Sciences and his contribution to the scientific developments in France from his work abroad. Sixing Chen examines how the concept of “physiology” was interpreted in the Chinese Christian context and how Protestant missionaries simplified physiological knowledge in vernacular Chinese by comparing two Chinese editions of Henry Porter’s Elementary Physiology.

This panel highlights from different perspectives the mutual influence of cross-cultural communication between East and West, covering several regions such as Spain, England, France, China, and Southeast Asia. Spanning a long period from the 16th century to the 20th century, this panel also seeks to understand, beyond the limitations of time and space, the continuous movement of cross-cultural knowledge production.