Nicolas Standaert (KU Leuven and visiting scholar at Harvard EALC), “The ancient and new doctrine of the Chinese on filial piety”: On the most extensive treatise on xiao 孝 in any European language … dating from 1779

With its 298 pages of text, “Doctrine ancienne et nouvelle des Chinois sur la piété filiale” (Ancient and new doctrine of the Chinese on filial piety) by Pierre-Martial Cibot (1727-1780) is probably still the most extensive treatise on filial piety by one author in any European language. It was published in 1779 in volume 4 of the major French collection Mémoires concernant l'histoire, les sciences, les arts, les mœurs, les usages, &c. des Chinois, par les missionnaires de Pékin, 17 vols., Paris, 1776-1814.

Cibot did not simply write an interpretative treatise on xiao 孝, he let the “Chinese speak through their own texts” by translating a wide variety of texts which he considered discussing xiao. This presentation in the first place traces these Chinese sources, and next puts the treatise in the wider context of intercultural textual history. It particularly discusses the shifts that took place in the study of China at the end of the eighteenth century as reflected in Mémoires.

Biography of Speaker:

Nicolas Standaert is Professor of Sinology at KU Leuven (Belgium) (1993–) and Member of the Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts of Belgium (2003–). His major research interest is the cultural contacts between China and Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this field he has led multiple research projects on rituality, visual culture, historiography, and print culture. He is the author of The Chinese Gazette in European Sources: Joining the Global Public in the Early and Mid-Qing Dynasty (Brill, 2022); The Intercultural Weaving of Historical Texts: Chinese and European Stories about Emperor Ku and His Concubines (Brill, 2016); Chinese Voices in the Rites Controversy: Travelling Books, Community Networks, Intercultural Arguments (Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 2012), among many others.