China It was originally used in China as a name denoting parts of
Inner Asia and
India. The meaning of the term was changed to encompass Europe during the Chinese
Ming dynasty. This
semantic change is credited to the Italian Jesuit priest
Matteo Ricci, who used the Far West as the Asian counterpart to the
Eurocentric concept of the
Far East. The Jesuits called India the Little West () and identified their homeland as the Far West or the Great West (). This name is still preserved in the current Chinese name of the
Atlantic Ocean, which is called the Ocean of the Great West (), also translated by Ricci during that time. In his essay
An Essay on Friendship in Answer to Prince Jian’an, Matteo Ricci introduces himself by saying, "I, Matteo, from the Far West, have sailed across the seas and entered China with respect for learned virtue of the
Son of Heaven of the Great Ming dynasty." He may have used the term to ingratiate himself with his Chinese hosts by identifying Europe as a region on the western fringes of the known
Sinocentric world. In 1601, an editor revised the essay by replacing the term Far West with Extreme West (), possibly because he considered
taixi an awkward-sounding name. European knowledge was designated in China as
tàixī xué (). Zhou Bingmo gave Western learning a more elaborate name by calling it
taixi zhixue, which first appeared in a
postface for the 1628 edition of Matteo Ricci's
Jiren shipian (The Ten Paradoxes). The term taixi was still used in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The "Western Sea" () and
yuanxi () were alternative Chinese names for Europe. The Chinese referred to European people as
xiren () and European missionaries as
xiru (). The term Far West was later expanded to include the
United States. The official Zhi Gang wrote a diary titled
Chushi Taixi Ji (Record of the First Diplomatic Mission to the Far West) during the 1868
Burlingame Mission, a Chinese
diplomatic mission to Europe and America.
Japan Europe was also called
taisei ("the Far West") in Japan.
Rangaku, which literally means "Dutch Learning", was an intellectual tradition that came to prominence in the
Sakoku period. The term
taisei appears in many sources about Western learning published during that era. Examples include the
Taisei gankazensho (Complete book on Western ophthalmology) in 1799,
Taisei honzomeiso (Botany of the West) in 1829, and
Taisei naika shusei (Compilation on Western internal medicine) in 1832. Western influence also introduced the Japanese to the geographical nomenclature of Europe, which included the idea of Asia as a continent. There were some Japanese intellectuals that opposed adopting the Western notion of Asia, and instead advocated retaining East Asian geographical terminology. One example is
Aizawa Seishisai (1781–1863), who claimed that calling Japan an Asian country was an insulting name for the . He favored the continued use of traditional terms such as "Far West" or . == References ==