| Summary: | In an 1881 letter to his colleague Paul Pelet, the geographer Élisée Reclus explains that, during the redaction of the 7th volume of his Nouvelle Géographie universelle consecrated to Oriental Asia, he tries first to understand the viewpoint of the cultures he deals with: “I become Chinese”, he writes. In this task he is assisted by two cultural transferors, rather influent at that time in the field of the “oriental” studies, like the Russian geographer and anarchist Léon Metchnikoff and the Geneva sinologist François Turrettini. First, we analyse this original scientific network, and then we deal with the Reclus’ texts on China, to rethink the construction of this country as a geographic object, in the works of the first European scientists who tried to apprehend Extra-European peoples on a plan of parity. They deal with cultural differences according to a method, which we can call today ‘empathic’, without stating a preconceived European superiority. Moreover, these geographers are already very attentive to the economic and demographic dynamics of China, foreseeing for the following decades the reshaping of Europe and the ‘geopolitical’ rising of the Pacific’s scenario. As Reclus writes in 1885 in a letter to Peter Kropotkin, the peoples that the ethnographers called at that time ‘non-Arians’, including Chinese people, “are not negligible quantities”.
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