Among the human sciences, history may be considered the "art of the other." Within this discipline, the history of contact between peoples and cultures comes to occupy a privileged place since the "other" adopts a central position. Which methodology are we to employ when studying this encounter with the other from an historical point of view? This paper reflects upon this question by taking the various ways in which the contact between China and Europe in the early seventeenth century has been studied as a case. The four parts of the paper present a different "framework" within which this contact between China and Europe has been studied: transmission, reception, invention, and interaction. They describe the main discernible characteristics of each framework by taking "Ricci's world map" as an example.
