Written in the Stars: How Old is China?
Chinese astronomers and the European Jesuits who worked alongside them found evidence of China’s antiquity in the heavens. Others were sceptical: how old was China really?
The Anglican vicar, astronomer, and orientalist George Costard wrote an impassioned letter to his fellow Oxford clergyman, Thomas Shaw, on 2 March 1747. In it, he furiously denounced the claim that Chinese history stretched back to the time of Noah and the Biblical Flood. Assertions of such great antiquity, Costard insisted, were surely ‘fictitious and without Foundation’. Yet Costard was something of an outlier: by the mid-18th century, scholars and antiquarians across continental Europe had come to regard China as the world’s most ancient civilisation, tracing its origins back thousands of years before the birth of Christ.
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