China and Japan: 1450-1750 Essay Example

or driven out. Any converts had to give up the Christian faith or be killed. The Europeans’ were interested in China’s products and only offered silver in exchange for the products, which were usually silk and porcelain. The Chinese accepted this trade of these products for just silver.

They continued to trade this way, but the fact that the Europeans only offered silver for China’s products resulted in China’s economic inflation. The Japanese had European traders and missionaries come to the islands. The Europeans continued to trade with them, and they brought firearms, printing presses, and many other Western objects like clocks, and also silver. In return, they got copper, pottery, and lacquerware. The Japanese started to use the silver that they obtained from the Europeans to make strong silver weapons, especially for the samurai.

This helped them win many victories. What changed was that over time, the methods that the Christian missionaries used to try to convert the Chinese changed. At first, the missionaries visited the coasts of China and tried to convert the people there. When that didn’t work, they tried to be in favor with the emperors. After attempting that, the Franciscans and Dominicans tried to get converts among the common people, which gained some thousands. Then the Jesuits developed a different method.

They tried to impress them with scientific and technological skills to attract the Chinese elite to convert. They eventually won some converts but also got strange looks from the court officials because they though the “barbarians” were strange. In Japan, the treatment of the missionaries just got more and more negative. Nobunga saw Christianity as sort of an enemy to the Buddhist

religion. Some of the daimyos were converted. Nobunga started to wear Western clothes, and wanted artists to paint like the Westerners, especially scenes of Mary and Jesus.

But when Nobunga was murdered, the conversion program started to fail. Hideyoshi, his successor, seemed to hate Christianity and did everything from expelling the missionaries to killing the Japanese who managed to convert. After that, many more actions were carried out to prevent any existence of Christianity, including the import of Christian books, and permitting ships only to a certain group of cities. China and Japan’s interaction with the West was a fluctuating one.

China, Japan, and the West benefited from the trading, but had many conflicts with the Christian missionaries coming in and trying so hard to convert the Chinese and Japanese. China and Japan’s isolating played a big part in their communication with the West, which gave the West a negative attitude towards the converting incidents, but both were still influenced by a few cultural aspects like clothing and art. China, Japan, and the West had a twisted and changing relationship with each other.