French Jesuit missionaries in China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

Abstract

The content of this book is more limited than the title suggests. Firstly, it deals with Jesuit scientific activity in China from ca. 1688 (F. Verbiest’s death) to A. Gaubil’s early work in Beijing (since 1723) and assumes that it ceased with the Society’s suppression in 1773 (p. 4). However, the Jesuits were scientifically active in China soon after Matteo Ricci’s arrival in 1582 and continued to be so until after that suppression (J. B. de Almeida was in the staff of Beijing’s observatory until 1805). Although vague, the expression ‘‘Late Imperial China’’ denotes more than a half century. Secondly, until 1687 Jesuit missionaries in China belonged to the Society’s Portuguese Assistance, although nearly all those engaged in scientific work came from other European countries. Hsia, however, focuses on the French missionaryscientists, who arrived in Beijing in 1688, considering the Portuguese mission’s work only for the pre-1688 years, and solely as background to some distinctive traits of the French missionaries, whose scientific work is also dealt with partially, since some of them remained after the Society’s expulsion from France (1762–1764). Another basic aspect of Hsia’s book, not reflected in the title, concerns her methodology. She does not describe events, but ‘‘the historical emergence and fortune of [the] puzzling figure’’ of the Jesuit missionary-scientist (p. 2). That figure, she says, was a ‘‘personation’’ produced by the Society’s strategy to infiltrate all levels of human society (p. 4). So the book tries to determine how the scientific ‘‘persona’’ came into being and was progressively shaped in the Jesuits’ Asian missions (Chapters 1–3). Then, it considers the French mission in China as representing the most advanced stage of this process, due to the circumstances surrounding the mission’s origins and its institutionalized link with French academic science. Finally, Hsia investigates why the French Jesuits’ scientific results did not match expectations, in quantity and in quality. Hence, the book is ‘‘less concerned with evaluating