When did Asia learned about "the discovery of America" and how much did they knew about it?

by TheGhostHero
y_sengaku

Please delete this comment if it does not meet the academic standard of this subreddit
(since I'm specialized neither in this period nor in this area).

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Famous/ notorious War Lord Nobunaga ODA (d. 1582) almost certainly knew about the latest knowledge of the World, including the New World, in ca. 1580:

  • Jesuit annual letter in 1580 from Bungo, Japan, addressed to the Superior General of the society, states that Nobunaga had asked Organtino Gnecchi‐Soldi, the Italian Jesuit missionary, to bring the terrestial globe to him (again) and he asked many things about the globe to Organtino.
  • Alessandro Valignano, another Italian Jesuit missionary also met Nobunaga in 1581. At one of his meetings (at least Valignano met Nobunaga five times in the lartter's lifetime), Nobunaga was said to ask Valignano who brought the world map with him which sea route Valignano had took from Europe to Japan. Nobunaga actually raised the same question to Organtino. Valignano also brought a famous African slave, later given to Nobunaga called as Sasuke, to Nobunaga. Nobunaga asked about the difference between the Europeans and this slave, and Valignano was said to answer that it was because the Africans lived in the tropics, closer to the sun.

These episodes, recorded in non-Japanese (Jesuit) sources, do not directly testify Nobunaga's knowledge of two American Continents, but it would be enough to show that Nobunaga was familiar with some of the latest European geographical learning in the 16th century (otherwise Valignano did not mention the tropics to explain the Africans).

 

I knew even much less about China, but also the Jesuit seemed to play an important role there as a translator/ mediator in cultural transfer between Europe and China at that period. Ly Leam (李之藻: 1571-1630), Christian scholar official in the end of Ming Dynasty, compiled Tian-xue Chu-han (天学初函), a collection of European knowledges in 1628. The world geography of the World constitutes one section within this kinda encyclopedic work. Even after the establishment of Qing dynasty in 1644, a group of the Jesuits in China still kept on this kind of activity under the Kangxi Emperor (Arai 2017: 41f.).

 

References (Sorry for non-English ones):