How Western missionaries in early Qing China learnt Chinese? A point of view from a manuscript in the Vatican Library 从一份梵蒂冈宗座图书馆手稿浅谈清初西方在华传教士的汉语学习 En Zh

Résumé En

Although it is widely agreed that the achievements of the Jesuit mission in China between the 16th and 18th centuries were inseparable from the skills missionaries acquired in the relevant local languages, how missionaries actually acquired these skills remains unclear. In this paper, we attempt a reconstruction of missionaries’ didactical practices through the personal notebook of the French Jesuit missionary Jean-François Foucquet (1665-1741), preserved today at the Biblioteca Vaticana (Borgia Latino 523), in which he hand-copied two primers of Chinese language written by the Spanish Dominican Francisco Varo and the Portuguese Jesuit José Monteiro. Through a microhistorical analysis of the missionary community in late 17th century Fujian as the context surrounding the making of Foucquet’s manuscript, and through a detailed comparison of Foucquet’s version with other extant copies of these textbooks (including different language versions in Spanish, Portuguese and Latin), we aim to offer a dynamic picture of language learning materials and methods actually employed by the missionaries, and to understand how this body of knowledge was significantly reshaped during its circulation between sub-groups of missionaries.