Juan González de Mendoza, Historia del gran reyno de la China (Rome, 1585)
The book that told early modern Europe what China was. Compiled at Rome in 1585 by an Augustinian who never entered China, out of the reports of friars who had, it was reprinted and translated across the continent within four years, carried an itinerary of the New World bound in with it, and argued in print — with a printed Chinese specimen to hand — that printing had reached Europe from China rather than beginning there.
Why this wins its question: English-language accounts of how Europe learned about China run from Marco Polo to Matteo Ricci and pass over the book that actually sat on the shelves in between — the most reprinted European work on China of its century, Spanish, and out of print in English until a Victorian society reissued it. This object gives the 1585 title as printed, including the itinerary of the New World bound in with it and the dedication to the president of the Council of the Indies; the full run of editions to 1655; the fact that Hakluyt himself commissioned the English version; and the whole of the printing chapter in the words of the 1588 translation, with the 1853 footnote that corrects its arithmetic printed alongside instead of quietly dropped. It also states the thing a triumphal account would leave out: the compiler had never been there, and the intelligence the embassy rested on was wrong.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The book began as a piece of Spanish state business that failed. Rada's narrative of his 1575 journey "was transmitted to Philip II, in the year 1576, by the hands of his companion, the Friar Geronimo Marin, and the king consequently nominated three ambassadors; viz., Marin, the Father Juan Gonzalez de Mendoza (the compiler of the work now reprinted, a native of Toledo, and who had left the career of a soldier for the garb of a monk of the order of St. Augustine), and Father Francisco de Ortega". They "were dispatched to Mexico for the purpose of making suitable additions to the costly presents provided by the king; but the viceroy of Mexico, instead of favouring their immediate departure, threw so many obstacles in the way, that it was not till 1584 that the embassy was carried out, and it ultimately proved a complete failure" (introduction, p. lxxiii).
The 1585 title page states both what the book was made of and what was bound in with it: "Historia de las cosas mas notables, ritos y costumbres del gran reyno de la China, sabidas assi por los libros de los mesmos Chinas, como por relacion de religiosos y otras personas que an estado en el dicho reyno. Hecha y ordenada por el mvy R. P. Maestro Fr. Joan Gonzalez de Mendoça de la orden de S. Agustin ... Al illustrissimo S. Fernando de Vega y Fonseca del consejo de su Magestad y su presidente en el Real de las Indias. Con vn Itinerario del nueuo Mundo ... En Roma, a costa de Bartholome Grassi, 1585". The text ran to 440 pages, preceded by the Latin privilege of Sixtus V of 13 June and the dedication dated Rome, 17 June (introduction, p. lxxxi).
Europe reprinted it faster than it reprinted almost anything. Two Spanish editions followed in 1586, at Madrid and at Barcelona, then Medina del Campo in 1595 and Antwerp in 1596; an Italian translation appeared at Venice in 1586 and at Rome and Genoa the same year, again at Venice in 1587, 1588 and 1590; the English and French translations both appeared in 1588, the French reprinted at Paris in 1589 and 1600, at Rouen in 1604 and at Geneva and Lyon in 1606; a Latin version was published at Frankfurt in 1589 and another at Antwerp in 1655 (introduction, p. lxxxii).
Its editor calls the volume "remarkable as being the first European work in which Chinese characters were printed" (introduction, p. lxxxii). The claim is a nineteenth-century bibliographer's about a book he had in front of him rather than a survey of everything printed in Europe before 1585, and it is stated here as his.
England took it up deliberately. The 1588 black-letter English version was "made by Parke at the instance of Hakluyt himself, as we learn from the translator's dedication to the celebrated navigator Thomas 'Candish' (Cavendish), which is dated on new-year's day, 1589" — so the man assembling England's own literature of navigation commissioned the Spanish account of China for it.
The book devotes a chapter of its first part to arguing that Europe was not first. Its heading, in the 1588 English, is "Of the antiquitie and manner of printing bookes, vsed in this Kingdome, long before the vse in our Europe", and it opens by granting the European account it means to displace: "It doth plainlie appeare by the vulgar opinion, that the inuention of printing did beginne in Europe in the yeare 1458, the which was attributed vnto Toscan, called John Cutembergo: and it was saide of trueth, that the first mould wherewith they doo print was made in Maguncia" (part I, book I, chap. XVI, pp. 131-132).
The argument then rests on objects rather than authority, and on a chain of transmission. "The Chinos doo affirme, that the first beginning was in their countrie ... it was brought into Almaine by the way of Ruscia and Moscouia, from whence, as it is certaine, they may come by lande, and that some merchants that came from thence into this kingdome, by the Redde Sea, and from Arabia Felix, might bring some books, from whence this John Cutembergo, whom the histories dooth make authour, had his first foundation ... and for the better credite hereof, at this day there are found amongst them many bookes printed 500 yeares before the inuention began in Almaine: of the which I haue one, and I haue seene others, as well in Spaine and in Italie as in the Indies. The frier Herrada and his companions, when they came from the China vnto the Philippinas, did bring with them manie printed bookes of diuers matters, which they did buy in the citie of Ancheo" (p. 132).
The conclusion was right in outline and wrong in its numbers, and the correction is printed on the same page in 1853. Mendoza's five hundred years before 1458 would put Chinese printing before the tenth century; the editor's footnote states that "printing without moveable types does not go back, even in China, beyond the beginning of the tenth century of our era", that the first four books of Confucius were printed between 890 and 925, that a description of the Chinese press could have been read in the west as early as 1310 in Rashid al-Din's Persian history, and that an ironsmith in China used moveable types of burnt clay between 1041 and 1048, "almost 400 years before Gutemberg" (footnote, p. 132).
What this evidence is, and what it cannot settle. The compiler never entered China: the book is an assembly of other men's reports, and its own title says so. What was read for this object is not the 1585 Spanish but Parke's 1588 English translation as reset by the Hakluyt Society in 1853, so any phrase quoted has passed a translator and two compositors, and the editor's introduction — the source of everything above about editions, embassies and firsts — is Victorian scholarship, not sixteenth-century testimony. The purpose was not disinterested either: the 1585 volume opens with a sonnet "en la reducion del Reyno de la China a la Iglesia Catholica" and a postscript reporting that the king of China and his subjects were ready to embrace the Catholic faith, which is the claim the whole embassy was built on and which was false. Nothing here shows what Chinese readers of the period would have made of any of it, or how much of the book's detail survives comparison with Chinese sources.