The College de France Opens a Chair for a Language Almost No European Read

Sinology is the academic study of China's language, literature, history, philosophy and religion, reading Confucian, Daoist, Buddhist and historical texts in classical and literary Chinese rather than relying on missionary reports or diplomatic paraphrase. The discipline gained its first European academic chair in 1814, when the College de France in Paris created a professorship in Chinese and Manchu language and literature and appointed Jean Pierre Abel Remusat, who had taught himself to read Chinese medical texts and became, at not yet thirty, the first person in France to hold an academic post dedicated to the language.

Confucian ritual, Daoist religious practice and Chinese Buddhism are each documented extensively in their own classical textual tradition, and sinology gives the atlas direct philological access to that record rather than the secondhand and often distorted account earlier European writers produced from missionary translation alone. The atlas relies on the discipline wherever a claim about Chinese religious practice, cosmology or textual history depends on reading the primary Chinese sources rather than a later summary, since a term that a missionary translator rendered loosely can carry a considerably narrower or wider meaning in the original classical Chinese.