I studied French literature during my undergraduate in Chengdu, China, and took an MA in Comparative Literature at King’s. I’m now doing my PhD research under the supervision of Professor Matthew Bell and Dr. Alice Xiang. My research is primarily grounded in the understanding that the 18th century marked a crucial moment when an ‘identified China’, distinct from the broader ‘Orient,’ emerged in European literary and philosophical discourse. Through the analysis of intertextual relations between Chinese original texts and European writers’ rewritings, the functional roles played by Chinese literary works in sociological dynamics will become the focal point of enquiry. The project will then take a step further by exploring the questions including: When drawing inspiration from Chinese philosophy and literature, where did the European philosophes place themselves in their society? How did they construct their own arguments and theoretical framework when trying to integrate Chinese canonical concepts into their political philosophy system? In what ways could the dynamics of canon formation in Europe serve as a lens to analyse which Chinese texts were adapted by European writers? And how this, in turn, might have reflected the way in which Europeans processed intellectual information about China prior to the emergence of Sinology as an independent scholarly discipline in 19th-century Europe?