By the start of the seventeenth century Catholic Europe as a whole had become involved in the attempt to bring Christianity to China. They sent missionaries who brought back a lot of knowledge. The eighteenth century in Europe was marked by a willingness to take China seriously, but the average British writer seems to have gone out of his way to debunk the notion that China was anything special.
歐洲天主教國家在十七世紀大量派遣傳教士入華，把豐富的知識和資源帶回他們的國家，到了十八世紀，歐洲已經相當嚴肅對待漢學研究，而英國卻忙著駁斥這些「中國奇想」，視有心研讀漢學者為異端狂徒。