LASA/EANLAS: Rethinking Trans-Pacific Ties: Asia and Latin America

“This Monster Was Noticed Among Them.” Uses of the Shanhaijing in the Boxer Codex

• In Event: Under the Imperialist Eye: Transcultural Convergence and Dissonance in the Early Modern Spanish Pacific

Abstract

Compiled in the Philippines shortly before the end of the sixteenth century, the Boxer codex (circa 1595) describes and pictorially illustrates the customs, history, mythology, and appearance of different cultural groups of Southeast Asia. As a cultural device, the codex is a radically hybrid object, juxtaposing European textual sources rendered legible within the genre of the relaciones geográficas with Chinese illustrations that must have appeared foreign to the European eye.
This paper analyzes how one set of these images, namely those copied from illustrated editions of the Shanhaijing, was repurposed to emphasize the cultural distance between Spain and the Southeast Asian world it depicts. The codex performs a kind of semiotic twist, as it borrows illustrations of the Shanhaijing, itself a fictional geographical account that historically symbolized the distant boundaries of the Chinese imperial landscape, to represent the contested limits of the Habsburg Empire. My first argument is that, in doing so, the Boxer codex signals the rising tensions between the Spanish imperial bureaucrats and the Chinese merchants in the Philippines. Secondly, I claim that the substitution of a specific culture by a foreignized symbol is central to the process of cultural hierarchization operated by the Habsburg Empire.

Author

• Miguel Llanos de la Guardia, The University of Chicago