The book offered to the reader for many years will become a reference book for every specialist interested in the relationships and mutual influences of China and Europe, East and West. Part one contains two chapters devoted to information about China that came to Europe from travelers, traders and missionaries (mainly - Jesuits), who gave assessments of China in their works that corresponded to their policy of “cultural adaptation” and laid the foundation for the “myth” about China. The third chapter of the second part examines how the idealized interpretation of China by the Jesuits was transformed in the works of European thinkers and philosophers, respectively intellectual needs and the goals of their struggle against the absolute monarchy and the Catholic Church. The fourth chapter of the second part talks about how familiarity with works of Chinese decorative and applied art (especially those produced for export) created a distorted idea of China and its art and how to imitate these works modified European ideas about China. In essence, the book shows how the “myth” about China arose in the perception of European thinkers, writers, artists, masters of applied arts and the general reading public and why this myth dissipated.