History of Sinology/Chapter 2

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Chapter 2: The Jesuit Enterprise — From Missionary Linguistics to Proto-Sinology (1582–1773)

1. Introduction: The Jesuits and the Birth of European Sinological Learning

The previous chapter traced the long prehistory of European knowledge of China, from the earliest Greek references to the “Seres” through the medieval travel accounts and the Portuguese opening of maritime contact. It concluded with a broad overview of the Jesuit mission’s contributions to European understanding of China. This chapter returns to that mission and examines it in far greater depth, treating it as the single most important episode in the formation of Western sinology before the establishment of university chairs in the nineteenth century.

Between 1582, when the first Jesuits entered China, and 1773, when Pope Clement XIV dissolved the Society of Jesus, some 456 Jesuits labored in the Chinese mission. They produced an extraordinary corpus of scholarship: dictionaries, grammars, translations of the Chinese Classics, historical compilations, geographical atlases, astronomical observations, philosophical treatises, and a vast correspondence that constituted, in sheer volume and detail, the richest body of European writing on any non-European civilization before the modern era. They were the first Europeans to achieve genuine mastery of classical Chinese, the first to translate the Confucian canon into a Western language, and the first to compose original works of philosophy and science in Chinese for a Chinese readership.

Yet the Jesuits were not scholars in the modern sense. They were missionaries whose overriding purpose was the conversion of China to Christianity. Every scholarly enterprise they undertook — learning Chinese, studying the Classics, mapping the empire, calculating eclipses — was ultimately subordinated to that evangelical aim. This dual identity as both scholars and proselytizers profoundly shaped the character of the knowledge they produced: it was at once remarkably detailed and systematically distorted, genuinely original and deeply tendentious. As David Mungello has observed, “source materials were chosen with an eye to triumph rather than truth.” Understanding this tension between scholarly achievement and religious agenda is essential for any assessment of the Jesuit contribution to the history of sinology.

What follows proceeds chronologically and thematically, beginning with the pioneering work of Michele Ruggieri and Matteo Ricci, moving through the great compilatory projects of the seventeenth century, and concluding with the suppression of the Society of Jesus and the knowledge gap it created. The account draws primarily on David Honey’s analytical survey in Incense at the Altar, supplemented by Zhang Xiping on the transition from travel sinology to missionary sinology, and Wolfgang Kubin’s reflections on the institutional origins of German engagement with China (discussed in more detail in Chapter 7).

2. Michele Ruggieri: The First European Student of Chinese

The conventional narrative of the Jesuit mission in China begins with Matteo Ricci, and rightly so — Ricci was, by any measure, the dominant figure. But the pioneering work of Michele Ruggieri (1543–1607) deserves closer attention than it usually receives, for it was Ruggieri who first demonstrated that a European could systematically learn the Chinese language and use it as a tool of communication and study.

Ruggieri, a Neapolitan lawyer who entered the Society of Jesus in 1572, arrived in Macau in 1579 with the express purpose of studying Chinese in preparation for the mainland mission. He was the first Jesuit to undertake this task, and the difficulties he faced were formidable. No Chinese grammar or dictionary in any European language existed. The missionary vocabulary lists compiled by the Portuguese in Macau were rudimentary, and the gulf between spoken Cantonese (the language of Macau and Guangdong) and the classical written language was vast. Ruggieri’s approach was empirical and laborious: he hired Chinese tutors, memorized characters, and gradually built up a working knowledge of both spoken and written Chinese.

By 1583, when Ricci joined him in Guangdong, Ruggieri had achieved a sufficient command of Chinese to compose a catechism in classical Chinese — the first original work in Chinese by a European. He also began compiling a Portuguese-Chinese dictionary, fragments of which survive in manuscript. Though Ruggieri’s Chinese was always less polished than Ricci’s would become, his achievement in demonstrating the feasibility of direct Chinese-language study was fundamental. It was Ruggieri who established the principle that would distinguish the Jesuit mission from all previous European engagement with China: knowledge of China must be sought through Chinese texts, not merely through external observation or native informants.

Ruggieri returned to Europe in 1588, partly for health reasons and partly to advocate for a papal embassy to China. He spent his remaining years in Italy, working on a Latin translation of the Four Books and a Chinese-Latin dictionary, neither of which was published during his lifetime. His departure from China left Ricci as the undisputed leader of the mission, and it is to Ricci’s far more consequential career that the history of Jesuit sinology properly turns.

3. Matteo Ricci: Accommodation, Acculturation, and the Scholarly By-Products of Evangelism

Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) was born in Macerata, in the Marche region of Italy, and studied at the Roman College under Christopher Clavius, the leading Jesuit astronomer and architect of the Gregorian calendar. He arrived in Macau in 1582 and entered Guangdong province the following year. He would spend the remaining twenty-eight years of his life in China, dying in Beijing in 1610.

Ricci’s approach to the Chinese mission differed radically from that of earlier Catholic missionaries. Where the Portuguese and Spanish Franciscans and Dominicans had treated the Chinese as idolatrous pagans to be converted through preaching and coercion, Ricci sought what later scholars have called “accommodation through acculturation” — an approach rooted in the Jesuit intellectual tradition of “Ancient Theology,” which taught “a more open stance towards pagan religious expression,” from Plato to Confucius. As Howard Goodman and Anthony Grafton have characterized him, Ricci was “a humanist and a scholar… he worked with texts: Confucian classics that he mastered as the price of entrance to conversations with the Chinese elite and Western classics that gave him the authority to offer an alternative to Confucianism.”

The practical consequences of this approach were profound. Ricci learned classical Chinese to a high level of proficiency. He adopted the dress of a Confucian scholar — initially the Jesuits had worn Buddhist robes, but Ricci recognized that Buddhism occupied a lower status in the Chinese intellectual hierarchy than Confucianism and switched accordingly. He engaged Chinese literati in philosophical conversation, using his European education in science, classical rhetoric, and mnemonic techniques as common ground. He cultivated friendships among the educated elite, earning their respect not through religious authority but through scholarly accomplishment.

As Ricci himself described the strategy:

We have been living here in China for well-nigh thirty years and have traveled through its most important provinces. Moreover, we have lived in friendly intercourse with the nobles, the supreme magistrates, and the most distinguished men of letters in the kingdom. We speak the native language of the country, have set ourselves to the study of their customs and laws and finally, which is of the highest importance, we have devoted ourselves day and night to the perusal of their literature.

This was not merely missionary pragmatism. Jonathan Spence has noted that Ricci shared with his learned Chinese converts “a love of books and printing” and observed that “all religious groupings tended to spread their message through books rather than through preaching or public discourses.” The Jesuit mission was, from the beginning, a textual enterprise, and its scholarly by-products were integral to its method, not incidental to it.

The scholarly works Ricci produced in China fell into several categories, each serving the dual purpose of impressing the Chinese elite and advancing the Christian mission.

Cartography. Ricci’s Kunyu wanguo quantu (Complete Map of the Myriad Countries of the World, 1602) was the first world map in Chinese to incorporate European geographical knowledge. It placed China at the center of the projection — a tactful concession to Chinese cosmological sensibilities — while revealing the existence of continents and oceans unknown to Chinese geographers. The map went through several editions and was widely copied and discussed in Chinese intellectual circles. It demonstrated, more powerfully than any verbal argument, that the Jesuits possessed knowledge worth having.

Philosophy and moral writings. Ricci’s Jiaoyou lun (On Friendship, 1595) drew on classical European sources — Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch — to compose a treatise on friendship in elegant classical Chinese. It was one of the first original works of European thought composed in Chinese, and it served as a calling card for Ricci’s intellectual credentials. His Tianzhu shiyi (The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, 1603) was a more ambitious work: a philosophical dialogue in which Ricci attempted to demonstrate the compatibility of Christianity and Confucianism, arguing that the ancient Chinese concept of Shangdi (the Lord on High) was essentially identical with the Christian God, and that the moral teachings of the early Confucian sages were compatible with natural theology.

Science and mathematics. In collaboration with the scholar-official Xu Guangqi, Ricci translated the first six books of Euclid’s Elements into Chinese (1607), introducing the Chinese to the deductive method of Greek geometry. He also composed treatises on Western astronomy, hydraulics, and mnemonic techniques.

Dictionaries and language study. Ricci compiled a manuscript dictionary that was utilized by succeeding generations of Jesuits in China, though it was never published. He also pioneered the romanization of Chinese — one of the earliest systematic attempts to represent Chinese sounds in the Latin alphabet.

None of these works was sinological in the modern sense. They were not studies of China but works produced in China, for Chinese readers, in service of the Christian mission. Yet they presupposed, and therefore advanced, an increasingly sophisticated European understanding of the Chinese language, Chinese literary conventions, Chinese intellectual traditions, and Chinese cultural sensibilities. The Ricci mission established the fundamental principle that serious engagement with China required serious engagement with Chinese learning, and the works Ricci and his successors produced constituted the essential raw material from which later European sinology would be constructed.

Ricci’s death in Beijing in 1610 — he was the first European to be granted a burial site in the Chinese capital, by imperial decree — marked the end of the founding phase of the Jesuit mission but not of its scholarly productivity. The accommodation strategy he had established continued to guide the mission for another century and a half, and the corpus of Jesuit scholarship on China continued to grow.

Yet Ricci’s approach also contained limitations that would prove consequential. His accommodation with Confucianism was selective: he embraced the moral philosophy of the early Confucian sages while rejecting later Neo-Confucian metaphysics (particularly the materialism of Zhu Xi) and Buddhism entirely. His engagement with Chinese thought was always instrumental — he studied the Classics not for their own sake but to find points of convergence with Christianity. And his image of China, transmitted to Europe through his posthumously published journals, was inevitably partial: it emphasized the rational, orderly, and philosophically sophisticated aspects of Chinese civilization while downplaying its religious diversity, popular culture, and the political realities of the late Ming dynasty’s decline.

These limitations would be magnified in the work of Ricci’s successors, particularly the Figurists, who pushed the search for Christian truths in Chinese texts to extremes that even sympathetic observers found untenable. They would also provide ammunition for the critics of the Jesuit mission in the Rites Controversy, who charged that the Jesuits had compromised Christian doctrine by accommodating too freely to Chinese beliefs and practices.

4. The Linguistic Infrastructure: Dictionaries, Grammars, and the First Tools of Sinology

Before examining the great compilatory projects of the seventeenth century, it is necessary to consider the less glamorous but equally essential work of building the linguistic infrastructure that made all subsequent Jesuit scholarship possible: the dictionaries, grammars, and vocabularies that constituted the first tools of European sinology.

The Polish Jesuit Michael Boym (1612–1659) published the first two dictionaries of Chinese produced by a European: a Chinese-Latin dictionary in 1667 and a Chinese-French edition in 1670. Since Boym also produced works on Chinese medicine, cartography, geography, and botany, his modern compatriot Boleslaw Szczesniak has considered him “perhaps the first Sinologist of the true learning, who contributed most considerably to the foundation of Chinese studies in the Western World.”[^9a]

More extensive was the Chinese-Latin dictionary compiled by the Italian Jesuit Basilio Brollo (1648–1703) in 1694, revised in 1699. The first version contained 7,000 characters; the second expanded this to 9,000. Unfortunately, Brollo’s dictionary circulated only in manuscript and was never properly published during his lifetime. Its fate illustrates a persistent problem in early sinology: the gap between scholarship produced and scholarship disseminated. Brollo’s dictionary was later plagiarized as the unacknowledged basis of Chretian Louis Joseph de Guignes’s dictionary of 1813 — a reminder that the history of sinology, like the history of scholarship generally, is not free from intellectual dishonesty.[^9b]

The first grammar of Chinese to be published was the Arte de la Lengua Mandarina (Canton, 1703) of Francisco Varo, a Spanish Dominican who had arrived in China in 1654. As Harbsmeier notes, “this pioneering grammar avoided the use of characters and introduced the Chinese language entirely on the basis of transliteration.” It dealt exclusively with the spoken language and circulated in manuscript among missionaries in China, including the Jesuits, though it remained very rare in Europe. Varo’s grammar became one of the unacknowledged sources utilized by Fourmont in his later Grammatica duplex.[^9c]

The most important Chinese grammar of the eighteenth century, however, was Premare’s Notitia Linguae Sinicae (1728), which Harbsmeier has called “a simply astonishing scholarly achievement vastly superior to what preceded it.” For technical reasons it was not printed in Paris and only appeared in published form in Malacca in 1831. Nevertheless, in manuscript form it profoundly influenced Remusat’s grammar and, through it, the entire subsequent development of Chinese linguistics in Europe.[^9d]

These dictionaries and grammars, however imperfect, represented an essential transition: from learning Chinese through immersion and oral instruction to learning it through codified, transmissible tools. They made it possible, at least in principle, for a European who had never set foot in China to begin studying the Chinese language — a possibility that would be realized, with spectacular results, by Abel-Remusat in the early nineteenth century.

5. The Great Compilations: Martini, Kircher, and the European Reception

While Ricci and his immediate successors were engaged in the day-to-day work of the China mission, a parallel enterprise was underway: the compilation of large-scale reference works designed to present China systematically to the European learned public. The most important early contributions came from Martino Martini (1614–1661), an Italian Jesuit from Trento who arrived in China in 1643 and witnessed the dramatic transition from the Ming to the Qing dynasty.

Martini’s De Bello Tartarico Historia (History of the Tartar War, 1654) was the first detailed European account of the Manchu conquest of China. It has been called “the first serious, detailed, systematic scientific attempt to present Chinese history to Europeans.” His Atlas Sinensis (Atlas of China, 1655), containing seventeen maps based on Chinese sources, was the first European atlas to show the internal topography of the Chinese provinces in detail. It was incorporated into Joan Blaeu’s monumental Atlas Maior (1662) and remained the standard European cartographic representation of China for nearly a century. His Sinicae Historiae Decas Prima (First Decade of Chinese History, 1658) was the first European work devoted to ancient Chinese history, covering the period from the mythical beginnings to the birth of Christ.

Martini’s works represented a new stage in the European encounter with China. Where Ricci and his immediate circle had produced works primarily for Chinese audiences, Martini wrote for European readers. His compilations drew on Chinese primary sources — historical chronicles, geographical gazetteers, official histories — and attempted to present their content in a form accessible to the European learned public. The result was not yet sinology in the modern sense — Martini translated and compiled rather than analyzed or criticized — but it established the compilatory genre that would dominate European writing about China for the next century and reach its culmination in Du Halde’s Description.

A very different kind of compilation was Athanasius Kircher’s China monumentis qua sacris qua profanis… illustrata (China Illustrated), published in Amsterdam in 1667. Kircher (1602–1680) was not a Jesuit missionary in China but a polymathic scholar in Rome, sometimes called the “last Renaissance man,” whose interests ranged from Egyptology and magnetism to music and geology. He never visited China and knew little Chinese. His China Illustrata was assembled entirely from Jesuit reports, letters, and manuscripts, supplemented by his own prodigious erudition and boundless speculative imagination.

The work was encyclopedic in scope, covering the various routes to China, the history of Christianity in China (including the Nestorian monument), Tibetan geography, the religions of China, Japan, and India, Chinese government and customs, flora and fauna, mechanical arts, and a treatise on the Chinese language with a long Chinese-Latin dictionary. Its primary purpose was to establish the authenticity of the Nestorian monument discovered in Xi’an in 1625, which Kircher saw as evidence that Christianity had reached China in the seventh century. But the work’s real significance lay in its extraordinary breadth and its appeal to a European reading public hungry for information about the exotic East.

Kircher was read throughout Europe. His China Illustrata was, in practical terms, the most widely disseminated compendium of information about China available to European readers before Du Halde. Yet its scholarly value was compromised by Kircher’s commitment to Hermeticism — the belief that all ancient civilizations preserved vestiges of the original divine revelation. This led him to propose, among other things, that Ham and his sons had brought Chinese characters to China when they migrated from Egypt — a thesis that derived Chinese writing from Egyptian hieroglyphics. Kircher’s treatment of the Chinese language and script was informed more by his grand synthetic vision of universal knowledge than by any close engagement with Chinese texts. As Honey observes, the proto-sinologists like Kircher “turn out to be just as religious in their assumptions and apologetics as the more mainstream Jesuits, with of course a different academic program to pursue.”

Kircher represents a type that would recur throughout the history of sinology: the European intellectual who writes about China without knowing Chinese, drawing on the reports of those who do. His work belongs more to the history of European intellectual culture than to the history of sinology proper, but it played an important role in shaping the European imagination of China during the formative period of the discipline.

6. The Figurists: Bouvet and the Search for Biblical Truths in Chinese Texts

Among the most intellectually ambitious — and most hermeneutically problematic — of the Jesuit approaches to Chinese learning was Figurism, a movement that sought to find encoded references to biblical truths in the Chinese Classics. The Figurists took Ricci’s accommodation strategy to its logical extreme: where Ricci had argued that ancient Chinese religion was compatible with Christianity, the Figurists argued that the Chinese Classics actually contained Christian revelation, preserved in allegorical or symbolic form since the time of the biblical patriarchs.

The leading Figurist was Joachim Bouvet (1656–1730), a French Jesuit who arrived in China in 1687 as part of the first French mission and became a favorite of the Kangxi Emperor. Bouvet was fascinated by the Yi Jing (Book of Changes) and developed an elaborate theory that its hexagram system encoded the same truths as the biblical account of creation. He believed that the legendary Chinese sage-king Fuxi was identical with the biblical patriarch Enoch, and that the hexagrams were a divinely inspired system of symbols that preserved the original revelation given to Adam.

Bouvet corresponded extensively with Leibniz, who was intrigued by the apparent correspondence between the binary structure of the hexagrams and his own binary number system. Leibniz’s famous Explication de l’arithmetique binaire (1703) drew in part on information supplied by Bouvet, though Leibniz was more cautious than Bouvet in his claims about the hexagrams’ significance. The Bouvet-Leibniz correspondence is one of the most fascinating episodes in the history of the European intellectual engagement with China, revealing both the genuine insights and the systematic misunderstandings that attended the cross-cultural encounter.

Other Figurists extended Bouvet’s methods to different Chinese texts. Joseph de Premare (1666–1736), one of the most linguistically gifted of the French Jesuits, produced a Figurist reading of the Shi Jing (Book of Songs) in which he identified one of the hymns (Mao #245) as a paean to the nativity of Christ. Premare was also the author of the Notitia Linguae Sinicae (1728), which Christopher Harbsmeier has called “the most important Chinese grammar of the eighteenth century” — a work of genuine philological value that stands in striking contrast to the speculative excesses of Premare’s Figurist exegesis.

The Figurist program was never accepted by the Jesuit order as a whole, and it was eventually condemned by Rome as incompatible with orthodox theology. Its scholarly value was minimal: the Figurists’ readings of Chinese texts were driven by predetermined conclusions and bore little relation to what the texts actually said or meant. Yet the Figurist episode is significant for the history of sinology in several respects. It demonstrated the intense seriousness with which at least some Jesuits engaged with the Chinese textual tradition — Bouvet and Premare were genuinely learned in Chinese, whatever the uses to which they put their learning. It also illustrated a fundamental problem that would plague Western sinology for centuries: the tendency to approach Chinese texts with frameworks and questions derived from Western intellectual traditions, reading into them meanings that their authors never intended.

7. The Confucius Sinarum Philosophus (1687): A Landmark in Translation

As discussed briefly in Chapter 1, the publication of Confucius Sinarum Philosophus (Confucius, Philosopher of the Chinese) in Paris in 1687 was one of the most consequential events in the history of European engagement with Chinese thought. What follows examines the work in greater detail, focusing on its methods, its distortions, and its impact.

The project had its origins in the earliest years of the Ricci mission. Ricci himself had begun translating the Four Books into Latin, and his successors continued the work over several decades. The published edition, a folio volume of 412 pages with illustrations, was compiled and edited by Philippe Couplet (1622–1693), a Belgian Jesuit, and listed sixteen Jesuits as contributors, though as many as one hundred and sixteen may have participated over the decades-long gestation of the work. It presented Latin translations of three of the Four Books — the Lunyu (Analects), the Zhongyong (Doctrine of the Mean), and the Daxue (Great Learning) — together with a biographical sketch of Confucius and a chronological table of Chinese history. The Mengzi (Mencius) was omitted, apparently because its political philosophy — with its justification of the right of the people to overthrow tyrannical rulers — was considered too subversive for European monarchies.

The Confucius Sinarum Philosophus was a collaborative and cumulative enterprise, and its translation method reflected the evolving priorities of the Jesuit mission over the course of the seventeenth century. As Mungello has demonstrated, the translations underwent a significant shift: the “over-spiritualized translations of earlier Jesuits became over-rationalized” in the published version. The early translators, working in the spirit of Ricci’s accommodation, had tended to find Christian spiritual meanings in the Confucian texts. The later editors, writing for an increasingly rationalist European audience and seeking to present Confucius as a philosopher of natural reason compatible with Christianity, stripped away these spiritual overtones and presented a more secular, more rationalized Confucius.

This editorial process inevitably involved distortion. The Confucius of the Sinarum Philosophus was neither the Confucius of the original texts nor the Confucius of the Chinese commentarial tradition, but a figure shaped by the needs of the Jesuit mission and the expectations of the European reading public. He was more philosopher than sage, more rationalist than ritualist, more universal moralist than Chinese patriarch. In the words of Paul Rule, the Jesuit interpretation of Confucianism involved “a process of creative misunderstanding that was intellectually productive even if textually unfaithful.”

Despite these limitations, the impact of the Confucius Sinarum Philosophus on European intellectual life was enormous. For the first time, European thinkers had access to a systematic presentation of the philosophical core of Chinese civilization. The image of Confucius as a rational moral philosopher, teaching virtue and good government without recourse to revelation or supernatural authority, proved enormously attractive to Enlightenment thinkers. Leibniz cited the work in his Novissima Sinica (1697). Voltaire drew on it for his portrayal of Chinese philosophy. Christian Wolff used it in his controversial 1721 lecture at Halle on the practical philosophy of the Chinese, which argued that morality was possible without divine revelation — a lecture that resulted in his expulsion from the university and became a cause celebre for Enlightenment advocates of intellectual freedom (as discussed in Chapter 1, section 6.1).

The Confucius Sinarum Philosophus thus functioned as a transmission device, carrying Chinese philosophical ideas into the mainstream of European intellectual discourse. That these ideas were transmitted in distorted form — filtered through Jesuit theology, adapted to European philosophical categories, stripped of their Chinese cultural context — is undeniable. But the fact of transmission itself was epochal. It established Confucius as a figure in the Western intellectual canon, created a permanent European audience for Chinese philosophy, and set the agenda for much of the sinological work that followed.

8. The French Jesuits and Antonine Gaubil

The arrival of the first French mission to China in 1687, led by Jean de Fontaney (1643–1710) and consisting of Jesuit mathematicians dispatched by Louis XIV, marked a new phase in the Jesuit enterprise. The French Jesuits brought with them the intellectual ambitions and institutional resources of the most powerful Catholic monarchy in Europe. They enjoyed direct royal patronage, which gave them independence from the Portuguese padroado (the papal grant that gave Portugal control over Catholic missions in Asia) and allowed them to pursue a more ambitious scholarly agenda.

The greatest French Jesuit sinologue resident in Beijing was Antonine Gaubil (1689–1759), who arrived in 1733 and remained there until his death twenty-six years later. His main works include Histoire abregee de l’astronomie chinoise (1729), Histoire de Yen-tchis-can et de la dynastie de Mongou (1739), Le Chou-king, un des livres sacres des Chinois (1770), and Traite de la chronologie Chinoise divise en 3 parties (1814). Unfortunately, most of his writings were published only after his death.

Gaubil’s scholarly approach was characteristically modest and methodologically sound. C.R. Boxer summarized it thus: “He made no pretence at being an original author, but explained that he was trying to give Europeans some exact and critical notions of Chinese history as related by the most reliable Chinese historians.” He was one of the few Jesuits, along with Joseph de Mailla, to acknowledge his dependence upon native informants, once complaining of the dearth of capable Chinese assistants. Gaubil’s emphasis on accuracy and his willingness to subordinate his own interpretive ambitions to the faithful rendering of Chinese sources anticipated the methodological standards of professional sinology.

Joseph de Mailla’s Histoire generale de la Chine (1777–1783), a thirteen-volume work largely based on translations from Zhu Xi’s Tongjian gangmu, was another major product of the French mission. Despite initial claims of objectivity, the work was not free from the pro-Chinese biases characteristic of Jesuit scholarship, and Marianne Bastid-Bruguiere has characterized it as “the last major attempt of the Jesuits to rescue China’s image as well as their own credibility.”

The French mission also maintained an extensive correspondence with Europe. The Lettres edifiantes et curieuses ecrites des missions etrangeres (34 volumes, Paris, 1703–1776) compiled letters from Jesuits throughout the mission field, but the China letters were among the most voluminous and most eagerly read. These letters, conveying vivid impressions of Chinese life and culture across the seas, took the place of the dispassionate analysis that a more mature discipline would eventually demand. Yet they created and sustained an enormous European appetite for information about China that would ultimately drive the institutionalization of sinological studies.

9. Du Halde’s Description de l’Empire de la Chine (1735): The Encyclopedia of China

Jean-Baptiste Du Halde (1674–1743) was a French Jesuit who never visited China. He was, however, the editor of eighteen of the thirty-four volumes of the Lettres edifiantes et curieuses, the great collection of Jesuit correspondence from the overseas missions, and he had spent decades immersing himself in the reports, letters, and studies produced by the China Jesuits. His Description geographique, historique, chronologique, politique et physique de l’Empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise (1735) was the synthesis of this accumulated knowledge: a four-volume encyclopedia of Chinese civilization that drew on the work of Martini, Le Comte, Gaubil, and dozens of other Jesuits to produce the most thorough European account of China yet attempted.

The Description covered virtually every aspect of Chinese civilization: geography, history, government, laws, customs, religion, language, literature, science, medicine, agriculture, manufactures, and commerce. It was based primarily on translations from Chinese sources, supplemented by firsthand Jesuit observations and reports. It was translated into English, German, Dutch, and Russian, and became the standard European reference work on China for the rest of the eighteenth century.

Erik Zurcher has called Du Halde’s Description “the bible of European sinophilia,” and the characterization is apt. The work presented China in the most favorable possible light, systematically avoiding anything that might cast Chinese civilization in a negative light or undermine the Jesuit argument that China was a rational, well-governed society ripe for Christian conversion. Its sources were carefully selected, its presentation was skillfully managed, and its omissions were strategic. The Description was not a work of scholarship in the modern sense but a work of advocacy — the culmination of the Jesuit project of presenting China to Europe in terms calculated to serve the interests of the mission.

Yet for all its biases, the Description was also a genuinely useful compendium of information. Much of what it reported about Chinese geography, history, and institutions was accurate, drawn as it was from Chinese primary sources by men who could read them. It made available to European readers a body of factual knowledge about China that was unparalleled in its time. For more than a century after its publication, virtually every European who wrote about China — philosopher, historian, political theorist, novelist — drew upon Du Halde as a primary source. It shaped the Enlightenment image of China more than any other single work, and its influence can be traced in the writings of Voltaire, Montesquieu, Quesnay, and many others.

Du Halde’s compilation also illustrates the structural limitations of the Jesuit approach to Chinese studies. Because it was assembled from reports by missionaries whose primary concern was evangelization, it reflected their priorities and perspectives. Topics relevant to the Christian mission — the history of religion in China, the moral philosophy of Confucius, the rationality of Chinese governance — received disproportionate attention. Popular religion, local customs, and the daily life of ordinary Chinese people were largely ignored. The Manchu perspective, reflecting the fact that the Jesuits’ primary patrons were the Qing emperors, colored the presentation of Chinese history.

As a work of compilation rather than analysis, the Description did not advance the study of China methodologically. It transmitted information but did not create knowledge in the sense that critical scholarship does. It assembled facts but did not develop the tools — grammars, dictionaries, critical editions, historical methodologies — that would be needed to verify, correct, and extend those facts. This work of toolmaking would be left to the first professional sinologists of the nineteenth century, above all Abel-Remusat (as discussed in Chapter 4).

10. The Chinese Rites Controversy and Its Impact on Scholarship

The Chinese Rites Controversy, briefly introduced in Chapter 1, was the great crisis of the Jesuit mission in China, and its consequences for the development of sinology were far-reaching. The dispute centered on two questions: (1) whether the Chinese terms Tian (Heaven) and Shangdi (Lord on High) could legitimately be used to translate the Christian concept of God, and (2) whether Chinese converts to Christianity could continue to practice ancestral rites and participate in the cult of Confucius.

The Jesuits, following Ricci’s accommodation strategy, answered both questions affirmatively. They argued that Tian and Shangdi referred, in the earliest Chinese texts, to a supreme being essentially identical with the Christian God, and that the ancestral rites and Confucian cult were civil and social ceremonies, not religious worship. The Dominican and Franciscan orders, who had their own missions in China, disagreed sharply. They contended that Tian and Shangdi were the names of pagan deities, not the Christian God, and that the ancestral rites and Confucian ceremonies constituted idolatry.

The controversy escalated over the course of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, eventually involving the papacy, the French and Portuguese crowns, and the Kangxi Emperor himself. In 1704 and again in 1715, Pope Clement XI ruled against the Jesuit position. The Kangxi Emperor, outraged by what he regarded as papal interference in Chinese affairs and an insult to Chinese civilization, issued edicts restricting missionary activity. In 1742, Pope Benedict XIV definitively condemned the Chinese rites, and in 1773, Pope Clement XIV suppressed the Society of Jesus entirely (though not solely because of the China controversy).

The Rites Controversy generated an enormous polemical literature — pamphlets, treatises, correspondence, papal bulls, imperial edicts — much of which contained detailed discussions of Chinese religion, philosophy, language, and ritual practice. In this sense, it stimulated European scholarly attention to China, even if the attention was polemically motivated. The question of how to translate Tian and Shangdi forced European scholars to grapple with fundamental problems of cross-cultural hermeneutics that remain central to sinological inquiry today.

More directly, the controversy shaped the intellectual agenda of early sinology. The Jesuits’ defenders needed to demonstrate their mastery of the Chinese Classics to support their interpretive claims. Their opponents needed to acquire enough knowledge of Chinese to challenge those claims. The result was a significant expansion of European expertise in classical Chinese, driven not by disinterested scholarly curiosity but by the urgent practical need to win an argument.

The controversy also had a chilling effect on Jesuit scholarship, however. After the papal condemnations, the Jesuits in China were placed under severe restrictions. They could no longer practice the accommodation strategy that had been the foundation of their scholarly engagement with Chinese civilization. The intellectual freedom that had allowed men like Ricci, Bouvet, and Premare to explore the Chinese textual tradition — however tendentiously — was curtailed. The final decades of the Jesuit mission in China were characterized more by institutional survival than by scholarly innovation.

11. Noelas and the Dao De Jing Translation: Reading the Trinity into Laozi

One of the most revealing episodes in the history of Jesuit scholarship on China was the translation of the Dao De Jing produced around 1720 by the French Jesuit Jean-Francois Noel (also known as Noelas, 1651–1729). Noel’s Latin rendering of Laozi’s classic was shaped so thoroughly by Christian theological assumptions that it transformed the text into something its author would not have recognized.

Noel identified the Daoist concept of the Dao with the Christian Logos, the De (virtue or power) with the Holy Spirit, and the entire metaphysical framework of the Dao De Jing with Christian Trinitarian theology. The famous opening line, Dao ke dao, fei chang dao (The Way that can be spoken of is not the constant Way), became, in Noel’s rendering, a statement about the ineffability of the divine nature. The cosmological passages of the text were read as veiled accounts of creation. The political philosophy was interpreted as an anticipation of Christian principles of governance.

This translation is significant not because it was good scholarship — it was not — but because it exemplifies with unusual clarity the hermeneutic problem that lay at the heart of the entire Jesuit encounter with Chinese thought. The Jesuits approached Chinese texts with a fixed interpretive framework (Christian theology) and a fixed purpose (conversion). When they found apparent correspondences between Chinese and Christian ideas, they treated these as confirmations of the fundamental unity of human religious experience — or, in the more extreme Figurist version, as evidence that the Chinese had received the original divine revelation and preserved it in allegorical form. When they found discrepancies, they either ignored them or explained them away as later corruptions of an originally pure tradition.

This pattern of interpretive appropriation would persist, in various forms, long after the Jesuit mission itself had ended. Nineteenth-century European sinologists, though freed from the evangelical imperative, would continue to approach Chinese texts with frameworks — Hegelianism, evolutionism, Aryanism — that were no less distorting than the Jesuits’ Christian theology (as discussed in Chapter 4, section 8). The challenge of reading Chinese texts on their own terms, rather than through the lens of Western intellectual categories, remains one of the central methodological problems of sinology.

12. The Suppression of the Jesuits (1773) and the Knowledge Gap

The suppression of the Society of Jesus by Pope Clement XIV on 21 July 1773 brought the Jesuit mission in China to an abrupt end. The dissolution was not caused solely by the China controversy — the Jesuits had powerful enemies throughout Catholic Europe, particularly among the Bourbon monarchies — but the Rites Controversy had contributed to the erosion of the Society’s credibility and influence. In China, the Jesuits who remained were absorbed into other religious orders or continued their work under increasingly restrictive conditions.

The suppression created a significant gap in European knowledge of China. For nearly two centuries, the Jesuits had been the primary channel through which information about China flowed to Europe. Their network of correspondents, their libraries, their language skills, their contacts at the Chinese court — all of this was disrupted or lost. The flow of new translations, reports, and observations that had sustained European interest in China since the sixteenth century slowed to a trickle.

The consequences of this knowledge gap were felt acutely in the decades that followed. When Jean-Pierre Abel-Remusat was appointed to the newly created chair of Chinese at the College de France in 1814, he lamented that he was entering “a desert land, still uncultivated. The language with which we shall occupy ourselves in this course is known in Europe only by name… We have no model to follow, no advice to hope for; we must, in a word, be self-sufficient, and draw everything from our own resources.” This was somewhat exaggerated — Remusat had access to Premare’s grammar in manuscript, to Fourmont’s dictionaries, and to the accumulated Jesuit literature — but it captured a real sense of intellectual isolation. The institutional infrastructure of the Jesuit mission had been dismantled, and no comparably organized enterprise had replaced it.

The gap between the suppression of the Jesuits in 1773 and the establishment of the first university chair in Chinese in 1814 — a gap of forty-one years — represents a transitional period in the history of sinology. During this interval, the study of China in Europe was carried on by a small number of isolated individuals, working without institutional support, without adequate reference tools, and often without colleagues. The most important of these figures — Fourmont, Bayer, the two De Guignes — are discussed in Chapter 4 in the context of the founding of academic sinology.

The suppression of the Jesuits also meant the loss of a particular kind of expertise: the deep, immersive knowledge of Chinese language and culture that could only be acquired through decades of residence in China. The Jesuit sinologues had lived in China, spoken Chinese, read Chinese texts with Chinese informants, participated in Chinese intellectual life. Their successors in the nineteenth century — Remusat, Julien, Saint-Denys — were, with few exceptions, sinologues de chambre (armchair sinologists) who had never visited China and worked exclusively from texts in European libraries. This transition from experiential to textual knowledge had profound methodological consequences, as the new professional sinologists developed a more rigorous but also more detached and decontextualized approach to Chinese studies (as discussed in Chapter 4).

13. Assessment: What the Jesuits Achieved and What They Distorted

The Jesuit contribution to European knowledge of China was, by any measure, extraordinary. In the space of two centuries, the Jesuits were the first Europeans to achieve genuine mastery of classical Chinese and to use it as a tool of scholarly communication. They produced the first Chinese-European language dictionaries and grammars, beginning with Michael Boym’s Chinese-Latin dictionary (1667) and culminating in Basilio Brollo’s dictionary of 1694 (containing 9,000 characters in its revised edition). They translated the Chinese Classics — the intellectual foundation of Chinese civilization — into Latin and made them available to the European learned public. They compiled the first European atlas of China (Martini), the first history of ancient China (Martini), and the first wide-ranging encyclopedia of Chinese civilization (Du Halde). They introduced European mathematics, astronomy, and cartography to the Chinese court and contributed to Chinese scientific development. And they generated an enormous body of correspondence, reports, and observations that constituted the richest European archive on any non-European civilization before the modern era.

As Honey observes, Mungello “has pronounced the earlier Jesuit missionaries, at least on the linguistic level, as more scholarly in both their aims and their methods than the so-called secular ‘proto-sinologists’ of Europe; at least the published works of most Jesuits were grounded in Chinese or Manchu language sources.”

Yet the Jesuit legacy was also deeply problematic. The knowledge the Jesuits produced was shaped at every point by their evangelical mission, and this produced systematic distortions that would take generations to correct:

1. Selective presentation. The Jesuits presented China in the light most favorable to their mission, suppressing or minimizing information that might undermine their argument that China was a rational, well-governed society ready for Christian conversion. Du Halde’s Description is the most obvious example, but the tendency pervaded the entire Jesuit corpus.
2. Hermeneutic distortion. The Jesuits read Chinese texts through the lens of Christian theology, finding in them meanings that their authors never intended. The Figurists represent the extreme case, but even the more moderate Jesuits — Ricci included — interpreted Confucianism as a system of natural theology that anticipated and confirmed Christian truth.
3. Social bias. The Jesuits engaged almost exclusively with the Chinese elite — the literati class and the imperial court. Their image of China was overwhelmingly an elite image, focused on high culture, official institutions, and canonical texts. Popular religion, local customs, the lives of ordinary people, the diversity of Chinese society — all of this was largely invisible in the Jesuit record.
4. Manchu perspective. The Jesuits’ most productive period coincided with the early Qing dynasty, and their closest relationships were with the Qing court, particularly the Kangxi Emperor. This meant that their account of Chinese history was colored by the Manchu perspective, and their political sympathies lay with the ruling dynasty rather than with the conquered Chinese population.
5. Dependence on informants. Even the most linguistically accomplished Jesuits relied heavily on Chinese informants and collaborators for their translations and compilations. This dependence, while unavoidable and in many ways productive, introduced an additional layer of mediation between the European reader and the Chinese text.

The transition from Jesuit missionary sinology to professional academic sinology was not a clean break but a gradual process. Many of the first professional sinologists — Remusat, Julien, Legge — were deeply indebted to the Jesuit legacy, drawing on Jesuit grammars, dictionaries, and translations as essential tools. At the same time, they sought to transcend the limitations of the Jesuit approach: to study China dispassionately rather than apologetically, to develop critical methods for evaluating Chinese sources, and to build institutional structures — university chairs, learned societies, academic journals — that would sustain the study of China on a permanent, professional basis.

This transition is the subject of Chapter 4. The Jesuit enterprise, for all its limitations, had made it possible. As Johansson has argued, European sinology functioned as “an important epistemological bridge between cultures” — a “cross-cultural space where an indigenous Asian cultural tradition could fuse with Western scientific standards.” The Jesuits built the first span of that bridge. The professional sinologists of the nineteenth century extended it, refined it, and made it permanent. The debt of modern sinology to the Jesuit pioneers is immense, even as the distortions of the Jesuit legacy continue to be identified and corrected.

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References

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