In the 1550s Europeans had begun to make regular trading voyages to the ports of three great empires of which they knew very little. In 1688 all three remained in European eyes worlds apart. To Europeans, Japan and China were more thoroughly “other” than Russia, their civilizations built on foundations that owed nothing to the Mediterranean and Europe. In 1688 there was no permanent foreign presence in Edo, capital of Japan’s military rulers, and in Beijing the only Europeans were a few hundred Russian war captives and a handful of Jesuits. Japan’s extremely tight control of its foreign relations had grown out of responses to threats of subversion by Catholic missionaries and converts. Apart from that, the politics and cultures of these two peoples had been little altered by their contacts with the Europeans.
Europeans had been more changed by distant reports of China than the Chinese had been by European ships in their harbors. The picture of China built up by the Jesuits was widely published in the 1680s and soon provided leverage for new trends of thought idealizing the rationality of the rulers of China. For some European intellectuals, China was about to become the Great Other, showing possibilities of ways of thinking and organizing society radically different from their own. China, Japan, Russia—and India—all have been Great Others for European and American social thought at various times down to our own. The availability of knowledge of them and the use of them as examples and objects for comparison are an intellectual transformation that was just beginning in 1688. It continues today to open up to us one frontier after another of the possibilities of the human condition.