Nicolas Standaert (Ph.D. Leiden University, 1984) is Professor of Sinology at the University of Leuven (Belgium). He has published widely on Sino-European cultural contacts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

"a sinological tour de force" (...) Standaert’s book on the intercultural “weaving of historical texts,” East–West, is an example of scholarship at its best. He has again offered a contribution to the fields of classical sinology and sino-missionary studies that shall remain a necessary voice in the scholarly discourse on how China and the West have encountered and changed oneanother in ways that have transformed the fabric of history."Anthony E. Clark, Whitworth University, Spokane, WA, Journal of Jesuit Studies 4 (2017)

• Acknowledgments viiList of Tables and Figures viiiIntroduction 1Part 1: Between Chinese and European Sources: Europeans WritingChinese History in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries1 Comprehensive Histories in Late Ming and Early Qing and the Genealogy of the Gangjian 綱鑑 Texts 152 Jesuit Accounts of Chinese History and Chronology and Their Chinese Sources 94Part 2: Between Text and Commentaries: Europeans Reading Chinese History in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries3 Chinese Interpretations of Marvellous Births 1694 Jesuit Interpretations of Marvellous Births 226Conclusion 303Postface 315Bibliography 322Index 354