Józef Kowalewski’s Diary Entry on Secret Societies in China in the Beginning of the 19th Century.

Abstract

The article provides a bibliographic commentary on O.M. Kovalevsky's entry in the Diary of Activities for 1832 regarding secret societies in China. This is one of the earliest mentions of this scientific problem in Russian Sinology. The source of the record is defined as a message in the missionary magazine Indo-Chinese Gleaner for 1818, which is an English translation of the text from the official Qing Peking Gazette for 1817. The author substantiates the attribution of the translation to the preacher of the London Missionary Society, W. Milne. His independent authorship should belong to the second part of the journal message listing the secret societies that existed and a short comment on their practice. We refer only to one of his entries in the Diary of Activities for 1832, dedicated to secret societies in China. A small entry in the available editions of this diary has remained without comment. This topic became popular in the middle of the XIX century on the eve of the Taiping Uprising and remains so in modern Chinese studies. The entry of Józef Kovalevski not only testifies to his keen sense of regional studies, but also points to possible, albeit not realized at the time, trends in future Chinese studies education. Kovalevski's record, in fact, introduces into scientific use a problem that really attracted the attention of domestic sinologists only in the XX century. The Indo-Chinese Gleaner original text source for Kowalewski’s diary record is attached.