birds of prey or falconers in Ming China, or even consulted Chinese sources that mention this common hunting technique in the Yuan period. Thus, he argues that including such Information could lie in the pretence of associating an activity with China that enjoyed prestige in Europe. By this, Mendes Pinto was able to please his audience and confirm the positive image of China and Japan dominant in Portugal and Europe. In this matter (as in others), Mendes Pinto clashes with European accounts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, where such hunting was associated with the Islamic sphere and índia, instead of China and Japan. Since the original manuscript of Peregrinação is not available and, therefore, it is impossible to assess the dififerences in comparison to the edition princeps of 1614, Ptak ends his analysis by casting an intriguing doubt (legitimised by the work of authors such as Roger Chartier3). What if the references to falconry and birds of prey did not originate with Mendes Pinto but with the editor, who saw them as marketable> elements? 3 More recendy, see Chartier 2014. 4 Loureiro 1997. This section continues with a contribution by Rui Loureiro that falis within the framework of the dissemination of knowledge about China in sixteenth century Europe - a topic on which the author has already produced a vast and recognized body of work. In this chapter, Loureiro returns to a non-Portuguese writer, the Dutch traveller Jan Huygen van Linschoten, author of the Itinerário, first published in Amsterdam by the mid-1590s, that Loureiro edited in 1997.4 The contributor explores the “impressions” of China that exist in the account of Linschotens adven- turous journeys, through textual Information, illustrations, and maps. Similar to other authors who wrote about China, Linschoten never visited the country, and his information was based on Portuguese and Spanish accounts. Having lived in Portugal and índia during the Iberian Union, he had access to many manuscripts and printed materiais about China, both in Portuguese and Spanish. Among these sources, one well-known book by Juan Gonzalez de Mendoza stands out, as identi- fied by Loureiro. Like Mendes Pinto, the Dutch traveller also established associations or affinities between Europe and China with the purpose of giving the Ming Empire a prominent place on an eventual civilizational scale, as highlighted by Loureiro. Plus, as Ptak has pinpointed in the previous chapter, it was a way to show that the “Other” was not so different from the "Self”. Achieving a remarkable editorial suc- cess, the Itinerário and two other books by Linschoten, published simultaneously, contributed in Europe to the broad circulation of news from China of Iberian origin. However, these accounts, collected on the Chinese shores, were then on the verge of becoming out of date, following the presence of the Jesuit missionaries in mainland China, which resulted in a ' revolution, in European knowledge about China. 14
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