The 45th anniversary of diplomatic ties between China and Italy recalls centuries of a unique relationship

This year marks the 45th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Italy and China. While the US national security adviser Henry Kissinger and China's premier Zhou Enlai were negotiating the terms of president Richard Nixon's historic meeting with Mao Zedong, the Italian foreign minister Pietro Nenni was making the arrangements for Rome and Beijing to normalize their relations.

Six years after Gaullist France's decision to recognize the People's Republic of China but nine years before official ambassadors could organize the diplomatic exchanges between Beijing and Washington, Italy and China opened, in 1970, a new chapter in the rich history of their interactions.

Michelangelo by the Chinese Master Fan Zeng. Provided to China Daily

The numerous observations on the growing weight of the Sino-German economic exchanges, on the political significance of the Sino-French or Sino-British relations, contrast with the scarcity of comments on the highly meaningful features of Sino-Italian relations even if they constitute a fundamental element of Sino-European relations.

But a look into Sino-Italian relations is an invitation to go beyond quantitative analyses. Trade between the world's second-largest economy and the ninth largest is important, the Italian peninsula is the home of the largest Chinese population in Europe, but it is the combination of historical and intellectual themes that makes the uniqueness of the relations between two genuine cultural superpowers.

It is with a reference to silk that Ferdinand von Richthofen (1833-1905) named the ancient network of routes that connected the two edges of the Eurasian continent, and by doing so he highlighted the links between the Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 220) and the Roman Empire. In love with silk, the ancient Romans imagined a Far East - Serica and its inhabitants the Seres - as the land of the precious fiber and co-created with the Parthians and others a Eurasian axis of trade, known since Richthofen's studies as the Silk Road.

The West was certainly fascinated by the treasures of the East, but the classical Chinese use of Da Qin to name the Roman Empire was a recognition of Rome's prestigious status in the eyes of imperial China. Da Qin, Great Qin, was a highly respectful denomination since it contained a mention to the Qin, China's first dynasty, established in 221 BC by Qin Shi Huang.

It is true, as Henry Yule noticed that "even the rest of the nations of the world which were not subject to the imperial sway were sensible of its grandeur, and looked with reverence to the Roman people, the great conqueror of nations. Thus even Scythians and Sarmatians sent envoys to seek the friendship of Rome. Nay, the Seres, came likewise - Cathay and the way thither (1913).

Sent in AD 97 on a mission to Rome by the general Ban Chao (AD 32-102), Gan Ying never reached the center of the Roman Empire and one can only imagine what could have been an encounter between the Chinese envoy and the Emperor Nerva or Trajan.

Having what has become a rich metaphor for the Sino-European exchanges, the Silk Road, as a common collective memory, contemporary Rome and Beijing are ideally positioned in the 21st century to play a key role in what President Xi Jinping chose to call, in reference to the ancient trans-Eurasian routes, the New Silk Road.

If silk, like porcelain or tea, has been a powerful connector, it is Marco Polo (1254-1324) who first truly reduced the distance separating China and Europe. The Description of the World, or The Travels of Marco Polo, written by Rustichello da Pisa but inspired by the impressions of the Venetian merchant traveler following a grand Eurasian tour of 24 years, expressed a constructive tension between what were depicted as the most exotic customs of faraway regions and the fact that they had become accessible.

From Coleridge's Kubla Khan to Orson Welles' Citizen Kane or Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Marco Polo's record of Cathay and Manji, the Chinese space of the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368), shaped Western perception of the Orient, and the very name of Marco Polo embodies the West's endless quest of the East.

The Travels had also had a profound impact on European representation of the world, and it triggered indirectly Christopher Columbus' great discovery of the New World since the Genoese explorer, following Toscanelli's suggestions, was first convinced that it would have been by sailing West that he could have reached more rapidly the extraordinary lands that Polo mentioned. It is on what he believed to be a journey to Polo's Cathay that Columbus jumped into America and put world history onto another course.

Marco Polo's vivid depiction of Cathay and Manji excited Europe's imagination, but it is Matteo Ricci's 28 years in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) that really brought European and Chinese civilizations closer to one another. If the four Chinese characters for Marco Polo - Ma Ke Bo Luo - are mere phonetic transliteration, it is by his Chinese name of Li Madou that the Jesuit priest of Macerata is still remembered in the Chinese world.

Less spectacular than the adventures of Marco Polo, the patient work of Ricci (1552-1610) stands as a symbol of the scientific and intellectual exchanges between civilizations. From mathematics - translation of Euclid's Elements of Geometry - to geography - in 1602 he published the famous Kunyu Wanguo Quantu, "A Map of the Myriad Countries of the World" - Ricci took to China the fundamental elements of European civilization.

Defining a friend as "a second me" in his 1595 Treaty on Friendship addressed to the Ming literati in classical Chinese, the Jesuit priest found the rare wisdom to strike the perfect balance between otherness and sameness.

In his approach of China, Ricci was not only inspired by European humanities and the Christian tradition but he also integrated the Chinese thinking of yin and yang in which inclusive opposites permanently balance each other.

Four hundred and five years have passed since Ricci died in what was the capital of the Ming Dynasty, Beijing, but despite the vicissitudes of two long dynasties, the tragedies of wars and civil wars, the revolutionary founding of two republics and the furor of the "cultural revolution" (1966-76), his tomb, like his name and his works, has been preserved at the heart of the People's Republic of China.

Reminiscent of the Italian renaissance, China rightly sees itself as undergoing its own process of renaissance (fuxing). By definition, any phase of "renaissance" follows a period of decline, and it is in the strong awareness of this fundamental principle of long-term alternation that a junction can be made between Italianness and Chineseness.

No other countries, indeed, have experienced so many falls and rises, the relativity of collective greatness - or of its opposite - is more evident along the Tiber or the Yellow River than in other younger political constructions.

Generally not misled by grand illusions nor the calls of nihilism, Chinese and Italian minds comprehend with an unparalleled acuity the interconnected ups and downs of historical cycles and fully appreciate, when it manifests itself, the sign of genius unaffected by the passage of time.

The author is director of the Academia Sinica Europaea at China Europe International Business School, Shanghai, Beijing & Accra, and founder of the Euro-China Forum. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

( China Daily European Weekly 03/06/2015 page10)