a people from a mysterious country, not listed among Ming tributary States, and where children were devoured. Making use of a set of European and Chinese doc- uments related to this embassy which Girard compiled and edited in 2013,1 she introduces us, in a comparative perspective, to the issues of geography in Europe and China, and perceptions of space. What are the views of the space or country of the other that emerge in these documents? What parameters determine one set of interpretations and descriptions in one case, and others in another? How is the process of knowledge of space constituted? Is it possible to observe approaches with a pre-scientific dimension? What are the distinctions and affinities between the two sets of documents? These are some of the questions that Girard raises throughout her chapter, and to which she provides answers. The perceptions and knowledge observed in the two sets of documents examined by Girard are influenced, as she shows, by a greater or lesser institutionalisation of their authors; by a greater or lesser authority; and by a greater or lesser degree of rupture with texts and prior knowledge, while also depending on the authors social and professional status. Furthermore, they are guided by concerns and/or reflections of a military scope (both in terms of defence and conquest of territory). It is particularly interesting to note that, on both sides, there are examples of pre-scientific approaches, both by the geographer Gu Yanwu 候直炎武 and by the Portuguese prisoner Vasco Calvo. Gu Yanwu due to the exhaustive verification of documentation carried out in its quest for the country of the Folangi\ and the second owing to inquiries conducted in the field using Chinese books and interpreters. Furthermore, it is precisely through the work developed by Calvo that Girard establishes the transmission of geographical knowledge from China to Europe one hundred years earlier than has previously been thought. 1 Pascale and Viegas 2013. 2 Ptak 2011; Ptak and Hu 2015. In the following three contributions, Roderich Ptak, Rui Loureiro and Marília dos Santos Lopes address the extremely favourable image of China prevalent in Europe during the early modem period and the prominent role of Portuguese/ Iberian mediation. Their analysis focuses either on books and objects. In his contribution to this volume, Roderich Ptak revisits a work that he is very familiar with, the Peregrinação of Fernâo Mendes Pinto, and explores a topic he has been interested in recent years, namely birds of prey.2 Ptak examines the information retrieved from Mendes Pintos book about hawks, goshawks, and eagles, and the hunting carried out with them in China, Japan and Chiang Mai (northern Thailand). The author shows that this topic is dealt with in a similar way to other themes in Peregrinação, a work well-known for masterfuily mixing reality and fiction. According to Ptak, it is unlikely that Mendes Pinto has observed 13
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