This talk explores the transnational journey of the Dao from early modern China to Enlightenment and Victorian Europe, revealing how encounters between Chinese commentators, Jesuit missionaries, and emerging Sinologists produced a global genealogy of the Dao. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, the Daodejing became a site of intercultural translation where theology, philosophy, and philology intertwined. Drawing on Sophie Ling-chia Wei’s micro-historical framework, this presentation traces three intersecting arcs: the Jesuit Figurists’ reinterpretation of the Dao as divine language, its adaptation by nineteenth-century French and British Sinologists, and its philosophical transformation in German Romantic thought.
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