Abstract: Dictionaries compiled in the last phase of the manuscript age (late 16th to early 19th century) acted as metaphorical soldiers of the ‘empire of paper’ that European observers in China - predecessors of the modern China watchers - enlisted to crack the secrets of the Chinese language and to convert the Chinese to Christianity. Through them, information on China, its language, and culture circulated in Europe, and assisted the birth of academic sinology. The story of a Vocabulary preserved at the Vatican Library, the object of this study, illuminates the past of the Catholic mission in imperial Beijing during the eighteenth century, and in particular the operations of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith or de Propaganda Fide, the ‘ministry of missions’ of the Holy See. It also shows how linguistic knowledge of Chinese was treasured and sought for by European diplomats, linguists, and missionaries alike, and how manuscript culture continued to have an important role in the cross-cultural circulation of knowledge about China well into the nineteenth century.
Eugenio Menegon received his training in Chinese language and culture at Ca’ Fòscari University, Venice, Italy, and earned an M.A. in Asian Studies and Ph.D. in History from the University of California at Berkeley. He teaches Chinese and World History at Boston University, and was Director of the Boston University Center for the Study of Asia between 2012 and 2015. His interests include Chinese-Western relations in late imperial times, Chinese religions and Christianity in China, Chinese science, the intellectual history of Republican China, the history of maritime Asia, and Chinese food history. His book Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars: Christianity as a Local Religion in Late Imperial China (Harvard Asia Center Publication Programs and Harvard University Press, 2009) was the recipient of the 2011 Joseph Levenson Book Prize of the Association for Asian Studies, and centers on the life of Catholic communities in Fujian province between 1630 and the present. His current book project is an examination of the daily life and political networking of European residents at the Qing court in Beijing during the 17th-18th centuries. He is also co-investigator for the digital humanities project The China Historical Christian Database. He currently is Berenson Fellow at the Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies at Villa ‘I Tatti’ in Florence, Italy, as part of the research program “Italy in the World.”
