Love the art, forget the ideas

“INDEED it is difficult,” wrote Gottfried Leibniz in 1699, “to describe how beautifully all the laws of the Chinese, in contrast to those of other peoples, are directed to the achievement of public tranquillity and the establishment of social order.” Leibniz was not the only European Enlightenment-era thinker to see in China a worthy and enviable model of an idealised state under the rule of benevolent—and, yes, enlightened—leaders.MORE