What can we learn from The Question of Hu about the interactions between Europeans and Chinese in the early eighteenth century? Do you consider the case John Hu to be emblematic of those interactions or an aberration, an exception to them?
The Rites Controversy was one of the most important episodes in the long history of the Jesuit mission in China, and one that generated its own complex history. Using the accounts of it in Waley-Cohen, Gregory and Mungello, write an essay about the controversy that addresses one of the following two questions: a) were the Jesuit attempts at accommodation doomed from the outset because of the issues raised by their opponents in the Rites Controversy?; or b) how different were the understandings of the controversy on the part of four groups: the Jesuit proponents of accommodation, their clerical opponents, Chinese converts, and the Chinese emperors?