Jesuits in China

《<古籍中的神跡：晚明沙勿略傳初版中文本>修訂本》，《合璧西中——庆祝顾彬教授七十寿辰文集》，外语教学与研究出版社，2016年，264-272页

沙勿略於一五五二年去世，四年後，依納爵也與世長辭。西班牙耶穌會士里瓦德內拉（Pedro de Ribadeneira，1527-1611）撰寫《依納爵傳》，一五七二年在義大利那不勒斯（Napoli）出了拉丁文初版  ，其中第四部第七章為「關於沙勿略之死」，首度將沙勿略的生平筆之於書。裡面所提供的信息雖較粗略，然來源可靠，符合史實。雖然如此，當時沙勿略已過世二十年，享有頗高的聖人聲譽，該書因而述及沙勿略的多起神蹟，但並未提供詳細根據。

This is the English original of a published Chinese-language article:
Chong Hai lai xin: Yesuhui dangan zhong de wan Qing Zhongguo difangshi 崇海来信 - 耶稣会档案中的晚清中国地方史 (Letters from Chongming and Haimen: Chinese local history in the Jesuit archives).
In Shidi 史地 , no.1 (2017): 39-53.  Rendered into Chinese by MA Xi 马玺 （Xavier Ma).

The fame of letters written by Jesuit missionaries in China is due largely to the significance of those letters as sources of knowledge of China for Europeans in seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This essay introduces unpublished letters from a later period of history, held in the Jesuit Archives in Vanves. The letters selected for this study were written by missionaries active in Chongming and Haimen counties, Jiangsu province, in the middle of the nineteenth century. Through transcription, translation, and interpretative commentary, the essay demonstrates the value of these materials as sources of local history, arguing that the very fact of their “strangeness” helped make the missionaries alert to aspects of daily life that might have been taken for granted by local people.

Fr. Matteo Ricci SJ (Li Madou, 利瑪竇 1552-1610) is probably one of the most famous Jesuit pioneers who arrived in China during late Ming dynasty. For this reason, scholars have been studying his writings and his efforts to establish a cross-cultural dialogue with Confucian literati. His zealous Christian life and his devoted study of the Chinese classics became an example for other missionaries. Yet, this image portrayed through the years lacks consideration of his deepest human sufferings that led him to embrace Chinese culture and Chinese philosophy. In Ricci’s letters one can appreciate not only his exemplary character but also his human weakness, his daily suffering, and his concerns about the mission in China.  Thus, his letters, that had been sent to several missionaries or relatives in Italy and elsewhere, narrate his periods of immense joy, his periods of profound suffering, and at the same time they elucidate several ideas that he developed during his journey. As a result, they are not solely relevant in order to study Ricci’s personal thought but also, in a philosophical sense, they mirror his existential path that is the base of the ideas he developed during his stay in China.
There is another dimension expressed in his letters: Ricci’s dreams. I attempt here to briefly describe not solely the existential portrait emerging from his writings but also the oneiric sphere, based on concrete dreams that he narrated to his fellow friends but also his hopes for the future. Therefore, I examine the philological problems that are part of the complex effort of rendering his letters into English and also the twofold dimension—the existential and the oneiric—emerging from his writings.  I will explore only a limited part of the extended corpus of Ricci’s letters and only few possible relevant topics. Yet, hopefully this would still be an example of their relevance in order to understand his personal adventure in China and his own creative mindset torn between a strong faith, a constant existential melancholy,  and the fear of time running out, that is an invitation to reflect on the brevity of life.

This is a lecture on global history of science which I have delivered in the course Early Modern Global Exchanges, led by Dr Carlo Taviani (part of the Curriculum Global Cultures, University of Bologna) on the 11th May 2020.
The lecture touched questions such as what is a global history of science, how methodologies such as SSK and ANT are used in its context, what is agency and how acknowledging its function can allow us to have a less Eurocentric view on scientific knowledge production. The lecture also elaborated on the interconnectedness of the concepts of knowledge transfers and networks by relying on and familiarising students with various recent authors who have written on the topic (Sivansundaram, Raj, Montero-Sobrevilla, Pomata, Kroupa, Mawson, Briuxius, Ghobrial, Roberts, among the many)

The generation of missionaries which followed Ricci's method after his death in the 17th century, continued to work among the Chinese literati, producing a variety of religious, philosophical, and scientific treatises. Yet, the Jesuits, including Ricci himself, did not neglect the instruction of new converts through simpler text (doctrinae), devised to teach the Christian dogmas in a language that could be easily recited by those who could read, and memorized by the flock. One of the most well-known missionaries of the post-Ricci generation was the Italian Giulio Aleni (1582-1649), active in the southern provinces of Zhejiang and Fujian between the 1620s and 1649. Aleni was not only interested in converting the literati, but also tried, with the help of Chinese Christians, to build a strong local church at the popular level. Among his numerous works in Chinese, one which certainly bears witness to this evangelical effort at the grass root level is a booklet entitled The Four-Character Classic of the Holy Religion of the Lord of Heaven (Tianzhu shengjiao sizi jingwen, original ed. 1642; revised 1663 ed.). For whom was this Christian primer written? How was it used in religious education? How did it compare with similar texts in other religious traditions of China? These are questions I will try to answer in this essay.
Riassunto. La generazione di missionari che seguì il metodo di Ricci dopo la sua morte nel corso del Seicento continuò a lavorare tra i letterati cinesi, producendo una varietà di trattati religiosi, filosofici e scientifici. Tuttavia, i gesuiti, compreso lo stesso Ricci, non trascurarono l'istruzione dei nuovi convertiti attraverso testi più semplici (doctrinae), ideati per insegnare i dogmi cristiani in un linguaggio che potesse essere facilmente recitato da coloro che sapevano leggere, e memorizzato dai fedeli. Uno dei missionari più noti della generazione post-Ricci fu l'italiano Giulio Aleni (1582-1649), attivo nelle province meridionali di Zhejiang e Fujian tra gli anni 1620 e 1649. Aleni non era solo interessato a convertire i letterati, ma cercò anche, con l'aiuto dei cristiani cinesi, di costruire una chiesa locale a livello più popolare. Tra le sue numerose opere in cinese, una che certamente testimonia questo sforzo evangelico è un libretto intitolato Il Classico dei Quattro Caratteri della Santa Religione del Signore del Cielo (Tianzhu shengjiao sizi jingwen, ed. originale 1642; ed. riveduta 1663). Per chi fu scritto questo abbecedario

This paper examines the set of fifteen prints included in the seventeenth-century Chinese text Song nianzhu guicheng. This catechism was translated by Portuguese Jesuits serving in the China mission and consists of instructions for spiritual meditation on the fifteen mysteries of the Rosary. The processes of visual acculturation of Christian art will be examined in the context of the transmission of doctrine and instructions for spiritual meditation. The paper discusses the Chinese visual experience and the particular circumstances of the Catholic missions in China during and after the Nanjing persecutions. This paper demonstrates that although the illustrations of the Song nianzhu guicheng were executed and adapted by Chinese artists, the ontological principles of European Renaissance art and the precepts of Christian iconography are still a structural component in the Jesuit methods of teaching and preaching.

The accommodation of Confucianism articulated by Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) reflected a Neoscholastic approach in which rational agreement was the primary hinge of in-terreligious engagement. Ricci's rationalism, however, was somewhat atypical among Jesuits of the late sixteenth century who often made overtures towards typology to explain the cultural and religious phenomena encountered in their missionary activities in East Asia and the New World. This article focuses on the writings of two Jesuits, the encyclopedist Antonio Possevino (1533-1611) and the China missionary Michele Ruggieri (1533-1611), who collaborated on the first European-language publication to include an extract of the Confucian corpus. It examines how Possevino adapts the manuscripts on China that Ruggieri provided him while in Rome in the early 1590s, and the tensions between the scholastic approach to evangelisation proposed in earlier chapters of the Bibliotheca selecta and the more extravagant typological strategies articulated in Ruggieri's original manuscripts.

The article presents Wojciech (Albert) Męciński, S.J., (ca. 1598-1643), a Jesuit martyr and the first Pole to reach Japan through the prism of his vocation to the country. The outlined historical background of Męciński's travel was supplemented by references to his letters, from which there emerges an image of a man deeply convinced about the necessity of a personal testimony of faith. The stability of Męciński's decision – twenty years passed from the moment of making it to its realization – becomes clear after an analysis of deep religious motivation. Męciński is almost silent about the country which is the objective of the journey of his life, stressing his devotion to Christ. On his way to Christ, he is heading to Japan, and thus combines the love of Christ with his willingness to give up his life in the country he did not know.

In the dissemination of Western learning by the Jesuits in late Ming China, various instruments bearing the Western scientific culture called great attention. As a category, the surveying instruments for measuring heights (or depths) and distances (or breadths, etc.) were introduced due to the perceived relevance of their practical functions to social life, including quadrant, cross-staff, geometric square and planispheric astrolabe or quadrant with shadow square(s). The “Small Quadrant”, one of the surveying instruments introduced in Celiang Quanyi (Complete Explanations of Measurement, 1631) which was translated and compiled by the Jesuits Giacomo Rho and Johann Adam Schall von Bell, was a circular geometric square in which the gradations of a shadow square were projected onto the quarter-circle, rather than a real quadrant. The prototype of this instrument probably was a new invention of the German astronomer and cartographer Peter Apian, or its derivative designs. Inspired by this “Small Quadrant”, the Confucian scholar Chen Jinmo designed and produced a similar instrument named “Xiao’an Geometric Square” during the last years of the Ming dynasty. In addition, he provided an explanation of his design by making use of some annotations for the Chinese mathematical and astronomical classic Zhoubi (Gnomon of the Zhou). This case showed the Jesuits’ efforts to introduce European cutting-edge knowledge to China, as well as the Chinese scholars’ approach to accepting foreign knowledge in the context of their indigenous traditions and to interpret ancient Chinese classics with new learning.

明季西學隨耶穌會士入華，儀器作爲西方科學文化的重要物質載體尤爲時人矚目，切合社會需求的高遠測量儀器即其中之一，主要有象限儀、十字杆、幾何矩及設有影矩的星盤或象限儀等。羅雅谷、湯若望等譯撰的《測量全義》（1631）中所介紹的“小象限”並非象限儀，而是一種影矩標度投射於象限弧的圓邊幾何矩，很可能來自天文學家、製圖學家阿皮安的新近發明或類似設計，展現出耶穌會士輸入時代新知的積極努力。受此啟發，明季儒士陳藎謨設計、製作出形制相近的“䃤菴矩度”，並藉《周髀算經》的注釋文句予以解釋，表現出以本土傳統接納外來知識、以新穎學說詮釋古代經典的學術旨趣。

1. Hacia un corpus de arquitectura jesuítica. Bases actuales y líneas de trabajo futuro, por M.ª Isabel Álvaro Zamora y Javier Ibáñez Fernández 

2. La ratio aedificiorum di un'istituzione globale tra autorità centrale e infinità del territorio, por Richard Bösel 

3. Episodi emergenti dell'architetture gesuitica in Italia, por Richard Bösel 

4. La provincia di Sicilia, por Marco Rosario Nobile 

5. Le architetture della Compagnia di Gesù in Sardegna (XVI-XVIII secolo), por Emanuela Garofalo 

6. L'architecture jésuite en France: état de la question et perspectives de recherches, por Alexandre Gady y Pascal Julien 

7. Étienne Martellange: un architecte de la Compagnie de Jésus en France au XVIIe siècle, por Adriana Sénard 

8. The architecture of the jesuits in the Southern low Countries. A state of the art, por Joris Snaet y Krista de Jonge 

9. Jesuits architecture in Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1564-1772, por Andrzej Betlej 

10. La arquitectura jesuítica en Castilla. Estado de la cuestión, por Alfonso Rodríguez G. de Ceballos 

11. La arquitectura jesuítica en Andalucía. Estado de la cuestión, por Alfredo J. Morales 

12. La arquitectura jesuítica en Valencia. Estado de la cuestión, por Mercedes Gómez-Ferrer 

13. La arquitectura jesuítica en Aragón. Estado de la cuestión, por Javier Ibáñez Fernández y Jesús Criado Mainar 

14. De historias globales y locales: una aproximación a la historiografía de la arquitectura de los jesuitas en Hispanoamérica, por Luisa Elena Alcalá 

15. Arquitectura de los jesuitas en Portugal y en las regiones de influencia portuguesa, por Paulo Varela Gomes y Rui Lobo 

16. Arquitectura jesuita en Filipinas y China, por Pedro Luengo

In 1702, the second emperor of the Qing dynasty ordered construction of a new summer palace in Rehe (now Chengde, Hebei) to support his annual tours north among the court's Inner Mongolian allies. The Mountain Estate to Escape the Heat (Bishu Shanzhuang) was strategically located at the node of mountain "veins" through which the Qing empire's geomantic energy was said to flow. At this site, from late spring through early autumn, the Kangxi emperor presided over rituals of intimacy and exchange that celebrated his rule: garden tours, banquets, entertainments, and gift giving.

Stephen Whiteman draws on resources and methods from art and architectural history, garden and landscape history, early modern global history, and historical geography to reconstruct the Mountain Estate as it evolved under Kangxi, illustrating the importance of landscape as a medium for ideological expression during the early Qing and in the early modern world more broadly. Examination of paintings, prints, historical maps, newly created maps informed by GIS-based research, and personal accounts reveals the significance of geographic space and its representation in the negotiation of Qing imperial ideology. The first monograph in any language to focus solely on the art and architecture of the Kangxi court, Where Dragon Veins Meet illuminates the court's production and deployment of landscape as a reflection of contemporary concerns and offers new insight into the sources and forms of Qing power through material expressions.

韓琦：《南巡、傳教士和外交——兼論康熙對禮儀之爭和教廷特使多羅來華的反應》，《文化雜誌》，總102期，第57-65頁。

1684年至1707年間，康熙皇帝曾六次南巡。康熙不僅巡視河工、祭拜孔子與明陵，考察官員，瞭解民情，同時也藉機籠絡江南漢族士大夫。本文將根據國內和歐洲所藏文獻和檔案，揭示南巡過程中康熙與傳教士的互動，並重點討論最後一次南巡（1707），分析康熙、直郡王和內務府官員在處理禮儀之爭時對教廷特使多羅（Carlo Tommaso Maillard de Tournon, 1668-1710）來華和傳教士的態度。

This database, under construction at Boston University's Center for Global Christianity & Mission, in partnership with the Institute of Qing History at Renmin University of China and the Ricci Institute at the University of San Francisco,  is an essential tool to visualize and map Christian presence in China (1550-1950). Please open the PDF and click the links for more information! To collaborate, email: emenegon@bu.edu

Technical images like charts, maps, and diagrams that saturated early modern visual culture provided fertile opportunities for cross-cultural communication. The Double Hemisphere Star Atlas 赤道南北両總星図 that Jesuit and Late Ming astronomers produced in Beijing, demonstrates how such imagery did more than simply transmit knowledge across borders. Through works like this celestial map, the Jesuits in China framed their brand of science as an empirical (and therefore trustworthy) practice. More specifically, the article considers how technical images functioned as a form of diplomacy, and how the idea of empiricism central to such epistemic images relate to Jesuit devotional art and spiritual practice at the Collegio Romano. Analyzing the rhetoric of empiricism that the early modern missionary scientists employed, this paper considers the agency of technical images in the making of a multicultural society.

Since the suppression of the Jesuits in 1773, community members gradually took control of the Catholic community in Jiangnan. After waiting for decades and making great efforts to appeal for bringing back Jesuits to China, finally the first three “new Jesuits” arrived in Jiangnan in 1842. But soon, some Jiangnan Catholics realized that those “new Jesuits” were quite different from the “old Jesuits” that they had expected, so conflicts erupted. In order to fight against the authority of the bishop Ludovico de Besi(罗类思) and the “new Jesuits”, Jiangnan Catholics had to appeal to authority of former Chinese Catholic Texts which were written before 1800. In response to it, the missionaries not only discouraged Jiangnan Catholics from reading these texts, but also emphasized the authority of Latin books instead. Moreover, Besi chose two former Chinese Catholic Texts—Shengjiao qieyao(圣教切要) and Sizhong lüeyi(四终略意) to re-edit and republish. Both texts stood on his side and agreed with the conclusion of the Chinese Rites Controversy, which had aroused criticism from Jiangnan Catholics. Meanwhile, the involvement of Protestant missionaries made things more complicated. Walter Henry Medhurst(麦都思) republished some former Chinese Catholic Texts and revised them according to the discipline of Protestant, which was a threat to the authority of Catholicism. This paper aims to show the significant influence of former Chinese Catholic Texts in the 1840s, and demonstrate how the European missionaries and Jiangnan Catholics treated this heritage.

Many people are familiar with European missionaries like Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) who served as cultural bridges between China and the West. Not only did they bring Western knowledge and Christianity to China, translating in collaboration with Chinese literati important works of philosophy, theology and science, they also brought knowledge of China to the West, through letters, reports, books about China, and notably through their Latin translation of the Confucian books in the Confucius Sinarum Philosophus (1687). In the last thirty years, scholarship came to stress the role of Chinese individuals and local communities in this cultural transmission. I would like to highlight here the life and role of Fan Shouyi 樊守義 (1682-1753), a Christian Chinese who have lived and studied in Europe for ten years (1708-1718), who became priest in Europe, and who was the first Chinese to write impressions of Europe and the Americas. With his double identity as a Chinese subject of the Kangxi emperor and as a Jesuit priest, he made efforts to fulfill his religious and political duties at the difficult times of the Rite Controversy.

De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas suscepta ab Societate Iesu (About Christian expeditions to China undertaken by the Society of Jesus) was perhaps the most infl uential description of China, which had been published during the first half of the seventeenth century. This monumental book covers the period
from 1583 until 1610, in many ways the most exciting and revealing years of the Jesuit mission and contains an overview of the late Ming China’s geography, politics, and culture, its philosophy and religions, and describes the history of
Christianity’s inroads into China (primarily, the work of Ricci himself and his fellow Jesuits, also an accommodationist policy).
The book was written by two authors – Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) and Nicolas Trigult (1577-1628) – to be precise: Trigault translated Ricci’s memoirs into Latin, written in Italian, which after Ricci’s death were found unfi nished by his fellow Jesuits in his Beijing offi ce. However, in editing the translation, Trigault rearranged the order of the passages and added much interesting materials from other sources. The goal of that paper was to describe the history and contents of this monumental book, presented shortly by Trigault in the dedication for the Pope Paul V.

韓琦：《南明使臣卜彌格的中國隨從——教徒鄭安德肋史事考釋》，《清史研究》，2018年第1期，2018年，第121-126頁。

In 1651, the Chinese Christian Andreas Chin was sent to Rome from Macau as an attendant of Michael Boym (1612-1659), the envoy of Southern Ming. Based on the documents found in the Roman Jesuit Archives, this paper tries to figure out his Chinese name and his relationship with the missionaries of Society of Jesus. In addition, it will analyse his essential role he played in helping A. Kircher in identifying the Chinese Nestorian text found in Xi’an.

本文根據羅馬所藏檔案，並結合其他中西文獻，討論1651年隨南明使臣、波蘭耶穌會士卜彌格（Michael Boym, 1612-1659）出使羅馬的中國教徒鄭安德肋，對其姓名、事蹟略作考釋，並討論他在《中國圖志》（A. Kircher, China Illustrata, 1667）一書編寫中的作用。

Chinese linguists of the past had never compiled descriptive grammars of their language. Only the Catholic missionaries in China during the 16th and 17th century, pressed by practical needs and by propaganda exigencies, engaged themselves into writing works to describe Chinese. In doing so, the Jesuits addressed their interest mainly to the language used by the learned class who detained the power, the so‐called Mandarin. Of many of these grammars we have knowledge only through references in other works, but they have apparently gone lost; this is because the most of them used to circulate in manuscript form and were never printed. Thus, so far, the Dominican friar Francisco Varo has been credited to be the first to have his grammar, Arte de la lengua mandarina, published in 1703.
According to previous studies, the grammar of the Chinese language of the Jesuit missionary Martino Martini was probably written some time between 1651 and 1652, during two long stops that Martini was forced to make while traveling back to Rome as Procurator of the China mission. It circulated widely in manuscript form in Europe, becoming a useful tool to learn Chinese for intellectuals and future missionaries, presumably without ever being printed.
Martini’s original manuscript has not been retraced yet. Nevertheless, a fair number of copies have been found in different European cities and this enables us today to retrace the development stages Martini’s grammar followed in the tangled series of passages from one owner to the next. As a matter of fact, the manuscripts that have been found through this research, together with those that had been discovered in the past, even though very similar in the general organization, show substantial differences and, in some cases, the intervention of other authors.
The investigations conducted for this study have also been able to prove that Martini’s grammar of the Chinese language had actually been printed and attached to a few copies of 1696 edition of Mélchisedec Thévenot’s Relations des divers voyages curieux, thus becoming the first grammar ever printed of Mandarin Chinese.
Through the comparative analysis of the extant copies in both manuscript and printed form, and at the same time trying to separate the contribution to the original work given by other scholars who possessed it, the present study aims at reconstructing the evolution course of Martini’s grammar from the older Grammatica Sinica to the refined and annotated copy of the Grammatica Linguae Sinensis. This last version is included into this study in annotated transcript and English translation.

Christian chronology practiced during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was centred around the creation of the world. When introducing Christian doctrines to their Chinese converts, however, the Jesuits found that Biblical chronology contradicted Chinese history. Issues about Chinese chronology and astronomy arose. The Jesuit missionaries had to review these issues. In this paper, I will present a survey of the Jesuits and their study of Chinese chronology and astronomy in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Europe.

“Amicitia Palatina: The Jesuits and the Politics of Gift-Giving at the Qing Court.” In Magda Abbiati and Federico Greselin eds., Il liuto e i libri: Studi in onore di Mario Sabattini, Series ‘Sinica Venetiana’ 1, Venice: Edizioni Ca’ Foscari, 2014, pp. 547-561.

This is the sixth volume to be dedicated to the pioneering linguistic work produced by missionaries in Asia. This volume presents research into the documentation, study and description of Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese and Tamil. It provides a selection of papers which primarily concentrate on the Society of Jesus and their linguistic production, but also covers linguistic works written by Franciscans, the Order of Discalced Carmelites and works of other religious institutions, such as the Propaganda Fide and the Missions Étrangères de Paris. New insights are provided regarding these works and their reception among European scholars interested in these ‘exotic’ languages and cultures. Each text is placed in its historical context and various approaches to some of the most important descriptive problems faced by these linguists avant la lettre are analyzed, such as the establishment of an adequate romanization system, the description of typological features of these Asian languages, such as tonality and aspiration in Chinese and Vietnamese, agglutination and derivational morphology in Japanese and Tamil, and, pragmatics, in particular politeness in Japanese. This volume not only looks at methodology and descriptive techniques, but also comments on missionary linguistic policies in Asia and offers articles of interest to historiographers of linguistics, historians, typologists, descriptive linguists and those interested in translation studies.

This article focuses on the role of the Jesuits in communicating informations about the Chinese empire to Europe between the sixteenth and the eighteenths century. These informations were an integral part of western imagination about the East. The writings of the Ignatians circulated among the European educated elite, conveying multiple visions that reflected their fascination with various aspects of Chinese society. The sources adopted are the journals and letters written by the Jesuits during the long years in which they were the protagonists, along with the Chinese Mandarins, of a rich process of cultural encounter. The analysis of these sources leads to the conclusion that the priests of the Society of Jesus, in their many activities, were exceptionally integrated in the Chinese society, reaching positions of prestige among many emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties. Such integration was reflected in their opinions often favorable to Confucianism and the various practices and representations of the Middle Kingdom, which drew criticism coming from other orders that did not approve the Ignatian method of missionary work. There remained, however, in the Western imaginaire, a fascination with China, largely motivated by information conveyed by the Jesuits.

Joachim Bouvet (1656-1730) was one of the king's five mathematicians who were sent to China by the French King Louis XIV. Based on his manuscripts found in Rome and Paris, the paper analyzes Bouvet and his study of the Yijing within its social context. It tries to point out why Bouvet studied the Yijing and why the Kangxi emperor ordered him to study it. It also explains the role Bouvet played in linking Leibniz and the Kangxi emperor.

“Michał Boym was lucky with researchers. Although it often grieves us that he is forgotten by his followers, it was written more about him than about any of the six Polish Jesuits working in the Far East in the Xvii and XVIIIc.” – writes Duc Ha Nguyen. In fact the last two centuries have brought many monographic articles and four books dedicated to the person and the work of Michał Boym (1612–1659), a Polish Jesuit who because of his research deeds is an important scholar in the European sinology. Also wrote about him his brethren from the Society of Jesus (eg.: J. de la Sérvier, E. Malatesta, J. Krzyszkowski), and also secular researchers – scientists researching various aspects of his research (e.g.: R. Chabrié, P. Pelliot, B. Szczęśniak, E. Kajdański). The bibliography of works mentioning Michał Boym – mostly swiftly mentioned, sometimes yet as a crucial element – contains a couple hundred items. Among them are trials to depict the whole life and work of the Polish Jesuit, and also works devoted to small parts of it (e.g.: the Venetian episode of Boym’s stay in Europe, his cartographic works or his attitude to the writings of Marco Polo).
The variety of the publications subjects, as well as their scientific importance, is comparable to Michał Boym’s diversity of works and the intensity of his life. Regardless of the subject of a publication, almost all of them, similarly to every biographical note in the dictionaries or encyclopaedias, the name Boym is accopmanied with a title Flora Sinensis. This natural connection of the author and his most famous work does not mean that this work has been fully and completely analysed. Published in 1656 in Vienna Flora Sinensis was the first in Europe systematic description of the Far East Flora. The earlier partial, sometimes completely fictional information about that world of flora could only be found in ancient works, starting from Herodot, and the next centuries and great expeditions to the East (e.g. the expedition of Alexander the Great in IVc. BC, Marco Polo trips in XIIIc.) systemetically enlarged the knowledge. In XVII often in the travel dairies of missionaries and tradesmen exotic plants and animals were mentioned, but always they were only observations made by non-professionals off their geographic, ethnology and trade observations.
Michał Boym as the first European tried to systemise the plants of the Far East, creating it the issue of his work. His composition gave the XVIIc. Europe a systematic, wide knowledge about fauna and flora of the Far East, which were presented from two perspectives: the first criteria of the selection was unusual character, oddity of the described plants and animals, the second one – their usefulness (almost every description contains information on the economic or medicinal values). Boym does not present the full picture (the size of Flora is not big enough, the work contains only 71 pages), but presents certain items of the Far East flora and fauna – the most interesting ones. In this manner, presenting almost pars pro toto, depicts the whole picture of an exotic world of fauna and flora and it literary speaking depicts, as the text is accompanied with woodcut pictures, which in some specimen were hand painted using water paints.
At the moment of the publishing Flora Sinensis reached a wide interest in the scientific milieu of Europe, and was quickly translated into French and was partly published in monographs devoted to China and in compilations dealing with the Far East. It was then the prime information source for all eager to gain knowledge about still yet misterious China. The XXc. changed the perspective and in the studies of his contemporaries Flora Sinensis became one of the items to learn about the history of nature sciences in Europe. The researchers of the XXc. (as S. Krzemieniewski, B. Namysłowski, E. Kajdański, J. Zabłocki, H. Walravens) present its modernity in contrast with the knowledge of the time on the nature of the Far East, the correctness of the given data, author’s competence. Regardless of the change in the function of the work which occurred with time, Boym’s work has always been treated as a botanic writing (it was put aside – not without a cause – even the zoological issues) and in this context was analysed more or less carefully, while with a more careful analysis this text bears much wider selection of topics and issues. Flora Sinensis is an interdisciplinary piece of work, and researching it requires joining the competence of different scientific fields, as on its pages research fields from classical philology, sinology, history of the missions and botanic join.
Presenting the many threads of Boym’s work, I shall reveal that we can perceive Flora Sinensis simultaneously as a botanic and zoological work, medical, missiological, political, sinological and also as a litera­ry piece. It shall be done with the presentation of a wide historic and political background, which had a great influence on the final shape of Flora Sinensis, and also a detailed theoretical and literary analysis of particular parts of the work, with a particular focus on the role of the introductory part, almost completely discarded from the research. A particular attention shall be focused on scientific talks of the work, pointing to a specific construction of Flora Sinensis and poetry reserved for scientific papers. It seems that the problem of the talks in Latin scientific writings has not been properly analysed yet.
As a basic tool for the analysis I used rhetoric theory – worked out in the ancient times, which became more detailed and transferred according to the Baroque taste. The treatment of rhetoric not only as a research subject but also as a key to interpreting works, was already established among the researchers of literature in Poland and other countries. H. Lausberg used as a subtitle in his monumental work Literary rhetoric a statement “The basics of literature knowledge”, and presenting the aim of his work in the preface he wrote that it is to help philologists dealing with the practical interpretation of texts”. Because in Poland in XVII c. the influence of rhetoric, which was a basis for the whole system of Jesuit’s schooling system, was on every work overwhelming, thus more correct it seems to make the rhetoric theory a tool for a better understanding of a form and the content of this baroque piece of work as is Flora Sinensis. The rules of invention and elocution which Michał Boym acquired with his education in the Jesus Society’s colleges became thus a basis for the construction of the work and its ordering power.
The presentation of the origins of Boym’s work and the analysis and interpretation of its contents, and also its meaning in the history of European science is a vast introduction to the editing of the text of Flora Sinensis. Despite its particular importance in the author’s country Flora Sinensis has not been critically published or translated into Polish. And there was not a re-edition of the text, which was worked out by western researchers (e.g. extracts of Boym’s work were translated into German by H. Walravens17, who later published a wide – yet still not complete – translation along with an introduction in a digitalised form on a CD). Such negligence seems to be more severe as Boym’s work not only confirms the membership of XVIIc. Polish literature to the circles of European Latinitas, but also widens its interest range. Thus proves that the scientific and research impulse from the central and east Europe enriched the common European heritage19. It is worth remembering in the context of contemporary integration of our continent, when we search for people and models confirming Poland’s membership within the European family.
To fill in the gap, in the second part of this publication I placed a transcription of the Flora Sinensis text with a translation to Polish and a commentary. The text of the transcription might be compared to photocopies of the original, enclosed with this book on a CD. The basis for the edition is a copy of Flora Sinensis from the Kórnik Library collection (sign. 412), which photocopies were available to me by courtesy of Stanisław Sierpowski, the manager of the library, whom I would like to show my gratitude.
The worth of this issue is in giving the researchers the Latin text of Flora Sinensis, the original of which was difficult to reach. It may become a basis for future research on Latin in Baroque, with its peculiar syntax, orthography, punctuation and vocabulary and also on the scientific discourse within the XVIIc. works. Pointing attention to the form and poetry of scientific works at the beginnings of modern natural science will let, in my belief, the better understanding of the development of scientific writings in subsequent centuries till present days. However, the translation of the work into Polish and a wide commentary, with information on history, mission history, literature, botany, zoology, biographical notes, the interpretation of Chinese terms and also linguistic and literary theory explanations, shall become a bridge between different scientific fields, which are interested in Flora Sinensis. They might be helpful for specialists not dealing with neo-Latin (e.g. research historians, sinologists, culture experts, missions historians), for whom Latin is not a study subject nor a research tool, but who are eager to get familiar with Boym’s work and its exotic subjects.

When Rubens painted his altarpiece The miracles of St. Francis Xavier, he included among the onlookers in the background a man in a yellow robe, turquoise trousers, and a curious conical hat (figs. 1, 2). The figure was probably based on an earlier drawing that is now known as Man in Korean costume (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles) (fig. 3). The drawing has been related to Siamese ambassadors in London, pagan priests in Goa, and European missionaries in China, but the association with Korea has been most persistent since it was first put forward in 1934: the sitter may have been a freed Korean slave who traveled from Japan to Rome, where Rubens could have met and portrayed him.  The drawing’s degree of detail suggests that at least the dress was done from observation. When the Getty Museum devoted an exhibition to the work in 2013, its experts concluded that the costume may have been authentically East Asian. They also called Rubens’s rendition an ‘imaginative’ interpretation that ‘defies categorization’: he did not face a Korean man. 
The following will put forward another view, namely that Rubens’s drawing was based on an earlier work by another artist. This was a portrait of an individual: a Chinese merchant who traveled on a ship of the Dutch East India Company – in fact the first Chinese to visit Europe whose identity is documented in such detail. The new conclusion is based on an entry in an album amicorum of the Dutchman Nicolaas de Vrise, dated 1595-1609 (fig. 4, 5).  One of this album’s contributions, of 12 January 1601, is a colored drawing similar to Rubens’s. The image is furnished with an inscription in Chinese and an explanation in Latin on the reverse. These texts identify the sitter as the Chinese merchant Yppong who traveled, via Java, to Middelburg where he arrived on 31 May 1600. Additional Dutch and Chinese sources document Yppong’s successful career after his return to Southeast Asia, as a middleman for the Dutch East India Company.