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The Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher (1601–80) gathered his information about China from Jesuit missionaries who had gained a privileged place in the emperor’s court and had adapted their religious practices to include the Chinese reverence for ancestors and Confucian ideals of moral behaviour.

He presented many facts (and quasi-facts) about China, its people, its wonders and its natural history. Everything from tea to flying turtles was described  with equal assurance and many of the descriptions  were enhanced with engravings.

In this plate, a woman plays with a bird. She is beautifully dressed and presented in a way which suggests that the engraver was aware of a genre of Chinese paintings known as ‘meiren hua’, or ‘paintings of beautiful women’. The text identifies the woman as ‘a palace noblewoman’.

Citation:
5. Athanasius Kircher, China monumentis qua sacris quà profanis ... illustrata (Amsterdam, 1667),
Marsh's Library Exhibits,
accessed May 16, 2025,
https://web.marshlibrary.ie/digi/items/show/561