Topic: Taming the foreign falcon: Ludovico Buglio's Jincheng yinglun and the translation of European falconry in Qing dynasty
Speaker: Dr Paolo de Troia
Associate Professor of East Asian Cultures and Civilizations at Sapienza Università di Roma
Date: 11 Nov 2025 (Tue)
Time: 4:00 - 5:30 pm
Venue: DE302, PolyU Campus
Language: English
Abstract:
This lecture takes falconry as a point of departure to explore the fascinating intersections between natural history and missionary scholarship in Qing China. It begins with a brief overview of the European history of falconry—from its medieval aristocratic traditions to its symbolic role in courtly life—before turning to its corresponding practices and cultural significance in the imperial Chinese context.
At the center of the discussion is the seventeenth-century Jesuit missionary Ludovico Buglio and his treatise A Presentation on Falcons (Jìnchéng yīng lùn), an ambitious attempt to translate European knowledge of falconry into Chinese. By analyzing this work, the lecture highlights the linguistic and conceptual challenges Buglio faced in rendering highly specialized terminology, techniques, and metaphors across distinct cultural and epistemological frameworks.
Finally, the lecture broadens the lens to consider issues of cross-cultural exchange and knowledge translation in the Qing dynasty more generally: How were European practices reinterpreted and adapted for Chinese audiences? And what does this process reveal about the complex dynamics of Jesuit cultural mediation between different worlds?
Speaker's Biography:
Dr. Paolo De Troia is Associate Professor of East Asian Cultures and Civilizations at Sapienza Università di Roma. His research centers on the history of Sino-European cultural and scientific exchanges, with a particular interest in the circulation, adaptation, and translation of knowledge between China and Europe in the early modern period. He has also worked extensively on the history of the Chinese lexicon.
His studies have explored encounters between Europe and China through geographical works, most notably his annotated translation of Giulio Aleni’s 17th-century Atlas (Zhifang waiji 職方外紀 published in 2009), which examined Western sources and their reception within the Chinese geographical tradition. Building on this line of research, he has recently completed the translation of Ludovico Buglio’s Treatise on Falcons (Jincheng yinglun 進呈鷹論), an ambitious attempt by the Jesuit missionary to introduce European falconry knowledge into Chinese. The work, now forthcoming with a scholarly press, sheds light on the complexities of cross-cultural mediation in the Qing dynasty and on the role of Jesuit scholarship in the global history of science.
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