T o the eyes of Europeans, China had been nothing else but a curious, exotic, and mysterious land before Jesuit missionaries arrived at its shore in 1582. It is with a wealth of information the missionaries sent back via official reports and personal letters that substantial understandings and perception on the distant empire has increased throughout Europe. Publications based on the Jesuit materials enjoyed wide readership and eventually contributed to the formation of European view on China in the eighteenth century. During the first half of the century China has received a breadth of favorable approvals as the Chinoiserie prevailed in the opposite side of Eurasia. Studying such Sinological books from the preceding century as China Illustrated and Confucius sinarum philosophus, early exponents of the Enlightenment, who challenged social absurdities of the Age of Absolutism, eulogized the Confucian monarchy as a nation that has achieved a civilized code of universal morality and rationality. The enthusiastic approval had to do with the Jesuits who held a favorable attitude toward China while making missionary approaches of cultural adaptation and accommodation. Description de la Chine, encyclopedic volumes on China published by a French Jesuit in 1735, shows an influence from the early Enlightenment thinkers given that it attempts to fill the text with experiential learning and unbiased facts, removes visual images illustrating Chinese idolatry or bizarre hearsay, and includes maps with geographical features. And yet the late eighteenth century saw a different phase.