This volume is intended to encourage an interdisciplinary dialogue and to contribute to a better understanding of institutions and the law as central to the discourse on China in comparative law and in the history of ideas and cultural history. It tries to achieve this by assuming both a European and a Chinese perspective and moving from eighteenth-century perceptions and representations to the reform initiatives and theoretical discussions that continue to this day. The final result is hopefully an enhanced awareness of the extremely important role that Sino-Western encounters and comparisons have played, not only at a cultural level in global history over several centuries, but also in today’s global politics and economics in which we are coping daily with concrete, pressing issues of reciprocal understanding in our efforts to achieve an enduringly peaceful and fruitful coexistence.