"中国来的鱼鹰" —— 近代欧洲之中国知识生成举隅

One day in the early years of the seventeenth century, the king of Maldives saw a big fishing bird in the Indian Ocean. When he asked where it came from, he was told it was “a fishing bird from China.” This article examines the descriptions of cormorant, the so-called China's fishing bird, supplemented with European records on China’s fish fry, and thus illustrates the production, reproduction, and circulation of China’s knowledge about modern Europe by collecting and connecting various texts(both Chinese and Western ones)spanning more than 500 years. The descriptions present an excellent opportunity to get a glimpse of the details of Sino-foreign cultural interactions. Maritime Asia, as illustrated in the paper, was an important maritime route which facilitated such interactions.