For this study, I returned to the corpus used in my last book : Prisonniers de l’Empire Céleste. Le désastre de la première ambassade portugaise en Chine : récits et témoignages portugais et chinois (1517-1524). We had two sets of sources, Western and Chinese, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. I identified different ways of expressing space and compared how information was gathered.According to J. Needham, when it came to the transmission of geographical information, there was a twofold movement of influences: a West-East movement of transmission of Renaissance geography to China by Matteo Ricci at the end of the 16th century and a movement in the other direction, from East to West, of transmission of Chinese geographical data in the 17th century. According to my documents, this transmission from East to West existed a century earlier; I was very pleased to obtain this result after meticulous investigation.