本文將《三寶太監下西洋記通俗演義》置於晚明江南知識生產轉化異域想像的文化語境中，檢視其作者羅懋登如何揀擇素材、排列重組、想像創造，製作出一個揉雜想像與紀實，文本中的「世界」，並立論作者的世界建構、趣味營造乃至無力整編的瑕疵與寫作徵候，合而構成一個異常豐富的文本空間，可供考察晚明世界想像背後的認識樣態和感知模式。文分三部分。第一節「世界的架構」檢視小說中所援引實證地理知識之來源、性質，作者取用並改造地理志書內容的策略，並分析其做法在晚明當時的文化意義。第二節「世界的肌理」分「胡僧與回回」以及「地圖與犀牛」兩節。前者檢視作者如何藉由文本拼貼，化史實入神魔，既刻畫下西洋團隊的異國色彩，同時平衡敘事內部的中國與海外元素，在作異好奇和化異趨同兩種操作原則間往復迴旋。後者透過環繞「地圖」與「犀牛」的兩段敘事，分析當舊說遇上新知，典籍載錄對上實地經驗，多重層次的知識觀點造成何種認識困境，作者又如何創造解決問題的方法？第三節「世界的盡頭」考察作者如何透過變換西洋團隊與各國的互動方式，提出想像華夷、邦國關係的不同可能，並討論小說中下西洋之行以酆都鬼國為終站的設計，透露何種安頓秩序的敘事機制與文化心理。

The Record of Eunuch San-Bao’s Voyage to the Western Ocean, a late-sixteenth century novel loosely based on the historical expeditions commanded by Zheng He (1371-1433), is a peculiar mixture of factual accounts of foreign lands and fantastic narratives. In this work, popular Buddhist and Daoist figures living in a mythological landscape encounter a new worldview founded on firsthand geographical accounts of maritime voyages recorded as early as the fourteenth century. While the novel is often regarded as a literary failure, a hodgepodge in which the author imitates and copies earlier texts and jumbles them together, this paper proposes understanding such “failure” as a multi-faceted response to the rapidly expanding cognitive sphere of that time. Situating this novel within the context of the late Ming publishing boom and knowledge dissemination, this paper examines the novelist’s choices of source materials in connection with his target reader and the strategies he employs to maneuver between the exotic and the familiar. It also scrutinizes the ways in which he negotiates between empirical geography and Buddhist/Daoist cosmologies and the epistemological disjunctions he faces in the attempt to create a narrative that encompasses “the end of the Western Ocean.” It argues that this novel, as a project of “world-making” which incorporates diverse sources and complex redesign, reveals many important changes in the popular conceptions and feelings about the world beyond China in the late sixteenth century Jiangnan area.