AHC: spread of Neo-Confucianism into Europe/Americas

Just had this wild idea, I don't know how this may work however.
POD should be after the Ming loses their capital city.
 
This is a kind of tricky one.

How about Confucius and subsequent scholars gain popularity in the West during the Enlightenment? That seems plausible enough, and it can occur in the 17th Century, soon after the Ming collapse. Just translate some texts and ship them to Europe, and Chinese philosophers could have a reputation matching the Greeks'.

Unfortunately, that wouldn't come with all of the social change that accompanied Neo-Confucianism in China, Japan, and Korea. I'm not sure how that could be accomplished, since Christianity's a pretty heavy stone to move and, by this era, not one very open to syncreticism in Europe.
 
Didn't the Jesuits try synthesizing Christianity and Confucianism (or at least say they were compatible) in order to better evangelize China before the Papacy shot them down and they were repressed.

If say you have the Jesuits translating the works and passing them off to Catholic Europe, you could potentially have Europeans latch onto it.

You'll probably also want to keep Europe's good opinion of China to facilitate this. There was a time when Europe really idealized China, but then (maybe it was the Manchu takeover, I'm not sure) they had a real big disenchantment and started really disliking China.

So, you probably want two things. A group actively disseminating Neo-Confucian works, and a better European opinion of China.
 
Here's a question: could neo-Confucianism become popular in Russia if they chose to pursue their expansion in the east instead of the west?
 
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