Beyond the Image: Xiang and the Changing Functions of Christian Images in Late Ming and Early Qing China

Studies of Christian images in late-Ming China have largely focused on the iconographic and stylistic adaptation of European pictorial models. This article shifts attention from pictorial transformation to the changing functions of images across different contexts of circulation and reception. Taking Johann Adam Schall von Bell’s Jincheng Shuxiang 進呈書像 (1640) as its central case, it examines the historical semantics of xiang 像, the book’s material organization of text and image, differences among its surviving copies, and Yang Guangxian’s later appropriation of its illustrations in the anti-Christian Budeyi 不得已. The analysis situates xiang within the overlapping vocabulary of late-Ming illustrated books rather than treating it as a self-contained theory of religious images. More importantly, the transmission from Jincheng Shuxiang to Budeyi demonstrates that pictorial recognizability and image function did not necessarily travel together. Christian pictorial material could remain recognizable while being redirected from devotional and didactic contexts into anti-Christian polemical argument, while textual and pictorial components could follow partially independent trajectories of transmission.