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The article problematizes the apparent semantic equivalence between “art” in European traditions and the Chinese concept *yishu* 藝術, arguing that the supposed universality of the institution of “Art” is historically constructed and therefore cannot be assumed without mediation. Taking the Han dynasty and the intellectual framework between the ideal of the “liberal arts” and the *liuyi* 六藝 (Six Arts) as a point of reference, the author proposes that the Han understanding of “art” is articulated less through autonomous aesthetics and more through normative, pedagogical, and ritual functions linked to the formation of the moral subject and social order. Methodologically, the text undertakes a conceptual and historical-philosophical analysis, examining the genealogy of the terms and the implicit criteria used to classify and legitimize practices, with attention to how these practices were embedded in regimes of education and authority. The conclusions suggest that, in the Han period, “art” is not reducible to Beauty, representation, or individual appreciation, but rather corresponds to a complex of competencies (especially literate ones) that connect technical mastery, inner cultivation, and public recognition. Thus, the article reinterprets the *liuyi* as key to understanding the peculiarities of the Chinese idea of “art” before the consolidation of categories closer to Western modernism.

The article presents an annotated translation, aimed at a Portuguese-speaking audience, of excerpts from the "Bibliographical Treatise on Letters and Arts" (Yiwenzhi 藝文志), a section of the Hanshu 漢書 attributed to Ban Gu (班固). The central contribution is to argue that the TBLA should not be read as a mere bibliography, but rather as a political-intellectual device of knowledge taxonomization, capable of guiding both the history of ideas and the formation of the "scholar-bureaucrat" and, ultimately, the spiritual and moral life associated with the ideal of governance. Methodologically, the work combines a historical-cultural contextualization of the Han compilation with a philological and conceptual analysis of the term yi 藝 ("art"), demonstrating how the treatise produces an organic and systematic definition of "art" through the category of the "Six Arts" (here unfolded into nine works), each accompanied by collection lists and critical postfaces. Among the main results, the identification of the TBLA's role in the transition from oral to written traditions stands out, as well as the formulation of a canon that articulates the aesthetic competencies and moral discipline of the individual. Thus, the translation aims to highlight the primitive status of the "arts" as the foundation of a trajectory that would later be reorganized under the model of the "Classics."

The article analyzes how Charles R. Boxer interpreted the Portuguese colonial experience in the Americas, using his historiographical production and the singular position he occupied in the Luso-Brazilian debate of the twentieth century as its central axis. The central thesis maintains that Boxer should not be read as a "Brazilianist," nor as a direct heir of academic traditions that, from the United States or France, set the tone for readings of Brazil and Latin America. Instead, it argues that "Portuguese America" in Boxer results from an investigative agenda configured by other places and by an imperial sensibility shaped from Asia, articulating a multicontinental scale and a comparative focus. The methodology combines historiographical analysis and interpretive reading of Boxer's work, confronting his presuppositions with earlier British intellectual trajectories (e.g., Robert Southey and Edgar Prestage) and with the inflection of Brazilian thought in the period 1930–1940 (Gilberto Freyre, Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, and Caio Prado Júnior). As a result, the article demonstrates that Portuguese America appears within the intricacies of a history of the Empire marked by transoceanic connections and by a gaze that displaces the observer from the Atlantic to the networked Luso world. It concludes that Boxer's contribution resides less in a theory of Brazil and more in a reconfiguration of the intelligibility of the Portuguese Empire through intersecting routes and historiographies.

The article reassesses the importance of self-organized Portuguese commercial communities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, taking Macau and its networks with Southeast Asian ports—especially trade with Japan—as a privileged case. Starting from the question of whether “local history” can be interpreted as “global history,” the author argues that these formations, often situated on political margins and operating with relative autonomy from the direct control of empires and authorities (Portuguese, Castilian, Chinese, and Japanese), were simultaneously vulnerable and resilient. Vulnerability resulted from interferences and political, economic, religious, and military risks; resilience emerged from adaptive responses that allowed the networks to maintain themselves, negotiate, and at times thrive. Methodologically, the study mobilizes documentation from Portuguese and, above all, Spanish archives, proposing a comparative reading that highlights mercantile strategies and schemes of agents through reports and records. By identifying communities and individuals, the threats they faced, and the solutions they formulated, the article concludes that the transnational scale of exchanges does not stem solely from imperial structures, but also from the flexible action of peripheral actors. Thus, the trajectory of Macau demonstrates how maritime and commercial networks enabled the circulation of goods, people, and ideas, contributing to convergences and historical reconfigurations of global scope.

The article discusses the configuration of "hells" in Sino-Taoist religious thought and examines their relationship with models of earthly justice, proposing that the image of punishment in the afterlife constitutes not merely a moral metaphor, but a cultural device that articulates law, governance, and social order. Based on the hypothesis that a structural analogy exists between underworld courts and human judicial practices, the author argues that infernal punitive rituals mobilize principles intended to be equivalent to Chinese positive law, customary norms, and even categories associated with "natural law" — engaging in a dynamic between transcendence and legality. The analysis, supported by theoretical frameworks on punishment and power (including comparative readings of Ruthven and historiographic references on the Western evolution of "torments"), compares the corporal logic of punishment — at times as retrospective retribution, at others as a mechanism of coercion — with the ambivalence present in both torture and infernal punishments. It concludes that, although Western modernity tends to shift punishment toward correction and discipline, the visual and normative culture of hells in China preserves the centrality of the body, integrating it into theologies, Confucian precepts, and mechanisms of religious justice.

Anthony Disney's article reconstructs, in a commemorative tone, the intellectual trajectory of Charles R. Boxer (1904–2000), emphasizing how his self-taught formation and the experience accumulated through direct contact with Luso-Dutch archives and sources contributed to the consolidation of a comparative historiography of the "Atlantic world" and the Portuguese empire. The central argument holds that Boxer became, over four decades, one of the world's leading specialists in the history of discovery, colonization, and missions, articulating economic, maritime, cartographic, and social dimensions in a body of writing driven by intensive documentary research. Methodologically, the text underscores the work of translating and reading ancient documents in Portuguese and Dutch, as well as the thematic breadth that enabled the cross-disciplinary reception of his oeuvre across fields such as navigation and cartography. The main conclusions are that Boxer's bibliographic production—including syntheses such as *The Portuguese Seaborne Empire (1415–1825)*, *The Golden Age of Brazil*, and *The Dutch Seaborne Empire (1600–1800)*—renewed research agendas and, in a manner relatively uncommon for his time, anticipated the analysis of the role of women and "non-Europeans" in the colonial context. The article further presents the author as an example of a lifelong commitment to the dissemination of knowledge, integrating personal trajectory and academic rigor.

António Aresta’s article, written in homage to Charles R. Boxer, argues that the British historian’s relevance to Macau studies is not confined to his bibliography, but stems above all from a rare combination of linguistic skills, documentary attention, and the capacity to mobilize academic networks. Drawing on autobiographical excerpts and the biographical framework available in the opening pages, the research reconstructs the pathways that enabled Boxer to work with Portuguese sources and, crucially, with Japanese documentation acquired during his military mission in Japan (1930–1933). The text also contextualizes how his experience of the Second World War, his academic career, and his predominant publication in English fostered the international dissemination of the knowledge he produced. As results, the article highlights that Boxer’s “fascination with Macau” translated into systematic research, including the valorization of archives and rare collections, as well as the implicit critique of institutional neglect in the preservation of historical heritage. It concludes that Boxer’s trajectory contributed to renewing the historiography of the Portuguese empire and, in particular, to consolidating a research agenda on Macau sustained by documentary rigor and access to previously inaccessible sources.

The article investigates the emerging discourse of "the rise of Asia" as a historically situated mode of speaking and thinking about continental development, arguing that it produces powerful discursive effects while simultaneously concealing its political and economic premises. Building on the recent centrality of the Chinese "leap" in the debate, the author proposes an understanding of the dissonance between celebrations of the "Asian century" and persistent anxieties about an uncertain future. Methodologically, this is a large-scale critical analysis (discourse studies and historical-structural reading), articulating the circulation of prognoses—both optimistic and skeptical—with the relations between economic transformations, hegemonies, and conflicts internal to the continent itself, as well as with extra-continental dynamics. The article concludes that the rhetoric of development frequently naturalizes Asia's integration into the framework of neoliberal global capitalism, displacing onto a "more developed future" tensions that, in reality, tend to persist: growing inequality and the inability to address ecological urgencies. Thus, the question "where is Asia going?" is reinterpreted as an inquiry into the very problem of discourse, which celebrates the present while remaining silent about the consequences it itself produces.

The essay analyzes the controversy generated by the 1963 publication of Charles Ralph Boxer's book *Race Relations in the Portuguese Colonial Empire, 1415-1825*, in a context in which the Portuguese colonial empire was beginning an irreversible collapse. The author argues that the reception of Boxer's work becomes particularly illuminating when discussing not only his critique of the Estado Novo's assimilationist discourse, but also a specific omission: the absence of Macau in the British historian's approach to Portuguese colonialism. Methodologically, the article reconstructs the historiographical debate by mobilizing Boxer's polemic with the Swede Magnus Mörner and the ideological framework of Luso-tropicalism, relating Boxer's theses to the mechanisms of cultural and racial legitimation that sustained Salazarist propaganda. It then contextualizes the instrumentalization of the empire in the 1960s, when the "overseas province" was presented as a coherent extension of European space. The conclusions indicate that the exclusion of Macau cannot be read merely as a descriptive gap, but as evidence of limits in the analytical grid and in the sources privileged by Boxer, revealing tensions between Anglo-Saxon historical writing on empires and the centrality of the colonial specificities of Portuguese Asia.

The article analyzes, from the perspective of cultural sociology and gender studies, the relationship between culture, the construction of gender identities, and processes of post-colonial nation-building in Timor-Leste. The author argues that "localization" does not constitute a counterpoint to "globalization," but rather a constitutive dimension of it, in which local knowledge generates new concepts and demands epistemic and phenomenological adaptations in the study of gender from an interdisciplinary and intercultural perspective. Methodologically, the work is based on selected readings of political and theoretical texts on gender in Southeast Asia and Timor-Leste, articulating them with frameworks on post-colonialism, plurality of arenas, and identity negotiation. It is argued that the construction of gender is a fluid and contingent process, shaped by ideological and material contexts, including social hierarchies, power relations, and economic, political, and cultural transformations. Narratives about women thus become devices for the validation and realization of national changes, revealing tensions between traditional female roles and strategies of recognition in social spaces dominated by masculine logics. The conclusion is that understanding gender in Timor-Leste requires mapping connections between everyday practices, discourses, and material forces, in a dynamic territory marked by the intersection between past and present, war and peace, and disputes between global hegemonies and local meanings.

The article analyzes how Lisbon was historically imagined, described, and represented between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a "port/gateway to Asia" for Europe. It argues that the city functioned as a device of planetary mediation—an "emporium" and "oriental bazaar"—in which the centrality of the Tagus and of Portuguese maritime-mercantile circuits enabled the consolidation of an image of imperial capital and showcase of the world's novelties. The research proceeds through a historiographical and documentary reading of coeval testimonies (correspondence, epistles, accounts, and works on urban grandeur), articulating eulogistic eloquence with the discursive construction of circulation networks. The analysis further considers the spatialization of this urban experience, highlighting the Ribeira das Naus and the Rua Nova dos Mercadores, as well as the presence of the "world" at Court and in the churches. It concludes that the representation of Lisbon as an Asian entrepôt is not limited to the economic register: it produces new sensory and cultural patterns, integrating products, people, and practices that arrived and spread from the port. Thus, the "entry" of Asia into Europe is simultaneously material, social, and rhetorical.

This article proposes reading "Chinese wallpaper" as a privileged object for understanding the intercontinental circulation of material culture and the production of imaginaries about China in the Portuguese domestic space. Building on a historiographical framework inspired by the work of Charles R. Boxer—focused on networks, routes, and global articulations—the authors argue that the commodity, initially undervalued by historiography, assumed a decisive role in the creation of "exotic settings," transforming interiors into spaces of Chinese visuality. Methodologically, the research combines documentary analysis with the reading of cargo records associated with the Carreira da Índia, supported by European descriptions and testimonies concerning Chinese decorative practices, especially from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The investigation follows the trajectory of wallpaper as a luxury, ephemeral, and fragile product, examining transport conditions and their visual impact, which enabled the materialization, in Portuguese daily life, of an aesthetically mediated experience of China. It concludes that wallpaper functioned simultaneously as a commodity and a cultural device: its mercantile trajectories enabled the transformation of Chinese decorative repertoires into symbols appropriated by Portuguese circuits of consumption.

The article argues that the historiography of texts linked to the Indian Ocean circuit (focusing on the western coast of India—Konkan and Malabar—and the Straits of Malacca) tends to fail when analyzing them in isolation, according to national canons or stabilized colonial categories. Advocating a comparative and network-based approach, the author proposes that certain “creole texts” (that is, productions born from complex local histories and simultaneously embedded in multilingual literary and philological trajectories) illuminate social and cultural aspects often overlooked. The method combines textual reading and historiographical contextualization, following the “origins and trajectories” of works in different languages and tracing how their meanings were reconfigured by shifts in colonial framing. As a central case, the Sejarah Melayu is discussed: its colonial renaming (from Sulalatus as-Salatin to “Malay annals”) is interpreted as a crucial transformation in the perception of the text, shifting it from a dynastic/multilayered narrative to a more ethnic emphasis. It concludes that treating these materials as creole allows them to be inserted into broader oceanic histories, revealing confluences of knowledge, translation, and circulation that exceed traditional analytical divisions.

The article analyzes the holding, between 27 and 31 March 1935, of the Congress of the Communist Party of Indochina (PCI) in Macau, interpreting it as a limit case of "clandestinity and control" in the context of the Portuguese Estado Novo. The central thesis maintains that the colony functioned as a strategic and paradoxical space: despite the regime of surveillance, repression and political control exercised by the colonial administration, the Portuguese authorities not only failed to detect but also tolerated (or failed to prevent) the prolonged presence and operational organization of Vietnamese delegates — including first-generation figures and leaders of ethnic minorities — as well as their press activity. Methodologically, the author articulates a critical reading of the historical narrative on "clandestinity" in Macau with the reconstitution of the Indochinese–Macanese connection and of the Macau–Hong Kong–Canton triangle, situating the congress within the radical dynamics of the period between the 1920s and 1930s. The conclusions underline, on the one hand, the vulnerability and permeability of clandestine organizations to infiltration and, on the other, the existence of "blind zones" in colonial control, possibly resulting from diplomatic priorities and political-multijurisdictional calculation (including extradition issues). The article further suggests that the congress had lasting historical impacts on the fate of the participants.

This article proposes an interpretation of the status and scope of "musical art" in archaic China, arguing that the category of *music* must be understood beyond its modern sense. Based on the assumption that Chinese cultural specificity and the "archaic" framework require their own conceptual instruments, the author contends that, in this period, "music" functioned as a term of greater extension: any performative practice in which a melody was present — directly or indirectly — could be classified as such. Methodologically, the text adopts an interpretive and contextual approach, grounded in a philological and historical-cultural reflection on the limits of the canon and on the conditions of translation between contemporary categories and traditional Chinese notions. The conclusions point to the need to reconfigure the understanding of repertoires, functions, and mediations associated with musical performance, shifting the focus from a restricted definition to a relational and multifunctional comprehension of the sonic phenomenon. Thus, the analysis offers a methodological "thread" for future studies on music in archaic China and on the criteria of inclusion/exclusion that guide the canon itself.

The article argues that the theory of “art” in imperial China must be understood in terms of its canonical dimensions: heterogeneous texts that, across different dynastic periods, established vocabularies, hierarchies of value, and regimes of legitimacy for poetry, music, and painting. Rather than treating such writings as mere “aesthetic reflections,” the author proposes a culturalist approach that highlights their constitutive function in the organization of taste, moral education, and the production of an authorial space where creation simultaneously negotiated dogma and autonomy. Methodologically, the work is organized as a project of annotated and modular translation, grounded in the direct study of sources. The first cycle selects canonical documents in the strict sense, such as the “Great Preface” to the *Classic of Poetry*, the chapter “Record of Music” in the *Classic of Rites*, and sections of the “Bibliographic-Artistic Treatise” of the *Book of Han*, followed by texts from canonical authors (between Han–Tang and, finally, Tang–Song) that refine theorization and terminology. The analysis is accompanied by a continuous commentary aimed at revealing subtleties of archaic Chinese and at rejecting expectations of impartiality or “rational” clarity characteristic of modern readings. It concludes that the canon operates less as a stable set of doctrines and more as a historical device of “translation” between cultural values and artistic practices, offering a privileged avenue for understanding the condition of the individual and the limits of creation in the Sino-imperial context.

The article analyzes the "canon of orthodox Chinese music" through an annotated selection of excerpts from the Yuel Ji 樂記 chapter of the Liji 禮記, translated and commented upon by the author as "Notes on Music." The central thesis maintains that, within the Confucian-ritual tradition (li 禮), the notion of music (yue 樂) is prescriptive and legitimizing: it is distinguished from mere sounds (yin 音) by being bound to conformity with tradition and to the moral and sociopolitical efficacy of ritual. Methodologically, the work articulates translation and exegesis with a comparative historical-cultural framework, drawing parallels with the European and Indian definitions of music as formation, prescription, and cosmology (for example, in the Platonic tradition and in ragas), while underscoring the Chinese specificity of the relationship between natural order and human order. Among the results, the evolution from a religious foundation toward an increasingly "moralizing" reading of behavior stands out, without abandoning the logic of correspondence by affinity (gan ying 感應), which sustains the causal interaction between human practices and natural processes. It is concluded that the Notes function as a canonical reference for the organization of teaching, conduct, and social stability, integrating music, rites, and governance within a single horizon of legitimacy.

The article by Giorgio Sinedino presents an annotated translation of the "Great Preface" 《毛詩大序》 to the Mao Poems, engaging with the debate on the "limits of the canon" in Chinese poetics. Based on the edition of Kong Yingda 孔穎達 (7th century), which consolidates the interpretation of the "Maoshi Zhengyi" 毛詩正義 (combining traditions attributed to Mao Heng 毛亨 and the school of the Classic of Poetry), the study also draws on the glosses of Zheng Xuan 鄭玄 (2nd century). Its central contribution is to offer a philological and hermeneutic reading of the text, discussing, where historical data are insufficient, the controversy over authorship and, above all, the editorial function of the "Great Preface" and the (subsequently separated) "Little Preface." Methodologically, the translation follows Kong’s segmentation (20 passages), didactically reorganized into two parts: one dedicated to the foundations of poetry (ideals, emotions, unity with music and dance, "correspondence by affinity," and political-doctrinal role) and the other to a global reading of the Classic of Poetry. In its conclusions, the article maintains that the "Great Preface," regardless of its contested canonization in the Song tradition (reinterpretations by Zhu Xi 朱熹), remains decisive for interpretive orthodoxy, framing the work in notions such as "six aspects" and "four beginnings" and converting it into a theory of the history of the Zhou dynasty.

The article analyzes the Chapel of Our Lady of Guia (Guia Chapel) in Macau and, in particular, its recently identified and recovered mural painting program. Situating the analysis within the historical framework of the city — marked by the confluence of the Portuguese and Jesuit presence with local authorities — the author argues that the chapel, despite its nineteenth-century neoclassical façade, constitutes one of the oldest buildings in the territory, dating back at least to the last quarter of the seventeenth century. Methodologically, the text articulates an art-historical reading of the architectural space with a reconstruction of the material fate of the paintings, taking into account the long-standing practice of covering them with whitewash/lime wash (until 1998), the subsequent hydrolysis and re-emergence of fragments, as well as the systematic survey carried out in the late twentieth century under the auspices of the then Cultural Institute of Macau, culminating in the complete discovery of the program in 2001. The main conclusions emphasize that the mural program, although predominantly ornamental and occasionally conveying Christian rhetoric through cartouches, is distinguished by the integration of motifs of Chinese inspiration into its decorative language. The article thus interprets the chapel as a privileged space of cultural synthesis, where iconography and ornamentation establish a visual continuity between Eastern and Western artistic traditions within the context of Christian worship.

The article interrogates how to define Macau's identity within the framework of its post-return status to Chinese sovereignty, arguing that, despite demographic and cultural diversity, the cultural trait 'chineseness' constitutes the most determining core of the forms of identification and social coexistence in the Macau Special Administrative Region (MSAR). Building on a theoretical-conceptual discussion of identity/identities and a historical-institutional reading of the 'way of life' enshrined in the Basic Law, the text articulates the historical formation of Macau society—shaped by successive migratory flows of Chinese from different origins, as well as African, Indian, Malay, Portuguese and other communities—with the persistence of institutions and practices that support this cultural continuity. Methodologically, the author draws on results from questionnaires and household survey data (one hundred families), comparing them with evidence from other regional contexts (such as Hong Kong). The conclusions indicate that self-identification as 'chineseness' surpasses strictly 'Macanese' identity: 65% affirm 'chineseness', with 46% registering as 'Chinese of Macao' and 19% as Chinese only. Thus, the internal diversity of the 'Chinese world' is recognized, but the everyday reproduction of this 'chineseness' is presented as a central condition for socio-cultural stability in the MSAR.