New Perspectives in Global Latin: Second Conference on Latin as a Vehicle of Cultural Exchange Beyond Europe, edited by Elisa Della Calce, Paola Mocella, and Simone Mollea (de Gruyter, 2025), includes intriguing titles like “Afonso Mendes, the Catholic Patriarch of Ethiopia, and His Debates With Salomon: A Jew From Vienna, at the Court of the King of Ethiopia” by Leonardo Cohen and Paul Rodrigue, “Deities, Demons or Decoration? Asian Religions in Two Jesuit Latin Martyr Epics” by Yasmin Haskell, “From Martini to Prémare: Early analytic Descriptions of Mandarin Chinese in Latin” by Anna Di Toro and Luisa M. Paternicò, “Medical Knowledge in the Latin Language in 18th-Century Korea” by Kukjin Kim, and “Mercury and the Argonauts in Japan: Myths and Martyrs in Jesuit Neo-Latin” by Akihiko Watanabe. Everybody knows about Latin’s ubiquity in Europe, but it’s remarkable to see how far it spread. And the book is open-access!
Just re Afonso Mendes etc., about 30 years ago I saw a spectacular exhibition of Ethiopian icons* and one interesting bit was the stuff from circa the 16th century where renewed Western contact suddenly led to the style taking a left turn to more closely resemble (although not perfectly enough that it wasn’t still very distinctive!) sort of “normal” Italian-Renaissance devotional art.
*I think this is the catalog that went with it. https://www.amazon.com/African-Zion-Sacred-Art-Ethiopia/dp/0300058195
Speaking of Jason and the Argonauts, I found a very long and detailed article called “Other Versions of the Quest”. (No mention of Japan, unfortunately.)
https://timelessmyths.com/classical/heroic-age/argonauts/other-versions-of-the-quest
The negotiations for the treaty of Nerchinsk, 1698, when the eastward expansion of Russia bumped into the westward expansion of China, were conducted in Latin. Jesuits on the Chinese side; a Polish nobleman for the Russians. There were actually some Russian-speaking Han Chinese in the Chinese delegation, but the Manchu rulers trusted the Jesuits more.
The border markers were inscribed in Russian, Chinese, Manchu, and Latin.
I don’t know what the consensus of historians is as to whether it was prudent for the Manchus to pursue the trust-the-Jesuits strategy. It is probably true that the Jesuits had *different* potential conflicts than those that the Russophones available to the Manchus might have had. One side effect of these negotiations was the subsequent emergence of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albazinians as yet another wacky niche ethnoreligious subculture within the Manchus’ multinational empire.
I do think that anyone who was hypothetically fluently trilingual in Russian, Manchu, and some early version of Mandarin might reasonably be forgiven for lacking a command of Latin.