BU Spearheads Massive Database of Centuries of Culture-Sharing between the West and China
This article was originally published by BU Today on November 4, 2020. Congrats to STH faculty Dana Robert and Daryl Ireland, and students Alex Mayfield (’21) and Yang Dai (’21) on their recognition for their contributions to this important project!
BU Spearheads Massive Database of Centuries of Culture-Sharing between the West and China
Researchers hope hundreds of years of past ties promote understanding amidst today’s tension
Some people choose beach reading for the warm months. Ao (Ava) Shen spent her summer poring over a French directory of Jesuit missionaries in China between 1542 and 1800. Language was no barrier (she’s trilingual in French, English, and Chinese) as she translated the biographical information, then recorded it in an Excel sheet.
“They were the pioneers of globalization,” Shen (Pardee’20) says of the medieval missionaries who carried Christianity, along with other ideas and Western technology, to her native China. “We need people who recognize the need for mutual understanding, and the need to cultivate common interest.”
As China’s government stands accused of intellectual property theft, herds Muslim Uighurs into the “largest mass incarceration of an ethnic group since the Holocaust,” and proclaims sovereignty over the South China Sea in defiance of a Hague Tribunal ruling, foreign policy experts fear the West and its Asian allies are drifting into a Cold War with the People’s Republic. While governments and diplomats ultimately must calm these waters, Eugenio Menegon thinks BU can help.
The College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of Chinese and of world history recruited Shen for her research as codirector of an ongoing global scholarly effort to construct an online warehouse of four centuries of records documenting the ties binding the United States and China.
The China Historical Christian Database, based at the School of Theology’s Center for Global Christianity & Mission and being built by researchers there and at CAS, gets granular: it will feature maps and other resources showing where Christian churches, schools, hospitals, orphanages, and publishing houses were located in China, how long they operated, and who worked in them.