Albert Chan. Chinese Books and Documents in the Jesuit Archives in Rome: A Descriptive Catalogue:Japonica Sinica I-IV. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2002. xliii + 626 pp. Bibliographical references andabbreviations, illustrations, indices. $145.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-7656-0828-6.

Reviewed by Eugenio Menegon, Department of Oriental and Slavonic Studies, Katholieke UniversiteitLeuven, Belgium.Published by H-Asia (February, 2003)

A Gate to the China Materials in the RomanJesuit Archives

Between the late sixteenth century and theeighteenth century, Catholic missionaries toChina--especially Jesuits--were the only foreignobservers allowed in the Chinese empire. Besidesengaging in their religious work, they also acted asthe first Western interpreters of China. The booksthey published in Latin and in a number ofEuropean languages on the history, geography andculture of China, based on first-hand experienceand knowledge of the country, offered to thescholars and "curious readers" of Europe a widerange of topics, going from descriptions of theimperial bureaucracy, to the philosophy ofConfucius, to Chinese pharmacopoeia. Most ofthis knowledge was derived from Chineseinformants, but also, to a large extent, fromChinese books. Besides consulting them in loco,missionaries also brought or sent Chinese booksback to Europe, both as curios and as proof of theirlabors in Asia. European bibliophiles since the latesixteenth century remained fascinated by thesebooks from China: their physical appearance, thethin, almost transparent paper of their pages, themysterious Chinese characters, all made theseobjects a prized collectible. And thus, sometimesby chance, sometimes by design, Chinese booksfound their way to a number of European royallibraries, as well as to the papal library in Rome.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuriesRome hosted in the aggregate of its libraries andarchives one of the largest concentrations ofChinese materials in Europe. Some importantcollections assembled through the efforts ofscholarly patrons such as Cardinal GirolamoCasanate in the late seventeenth century andCardinal Stefano Borgia in the second half of theeighteenth century included Chinese holdings, andwere occasionally opened to visiting European

"orientalists." Nevertheless, the most activeacademic centers of European proto-sinology wereelsewhere: Paris, Leiden, Berlin, and St.Petersburg.

One of the reasons for the scholarlymarginality of Rome in Chinese studies was thenarrow focus of the ecclesiastical collections: alarge portion of the Chinese materials found therewas gathered in the context of the famous--orrather notorious--Chinese Rites Controversy.[1]Starting in the 1650s, Rome became the main siteof a bitter theological struggle over missionarystrategies in China, pitting the Jesuits and theirsympathizers against other religious orders (mainlythe Dominicans and the Foreign Mission Societyof Paris). The issue of the so-called "ChineseRites" crystallized the essence of the diatribe: wasit possible to allow Chinese Christians toparticipate in ancestral rituals and in the cult toConfucius, seen as civil ceremonies with noreligious meaning, as the Jesuits thought, or wasthis a way to condone idolatry and superstition, asthe Dominicans and their allies believed? Otherconnected issues were the permissibility oftranslation of liturgical books and of the liturgyitself into Chinese, and the creation of a Chinese-Christian theological vocabulary.

A steady stream of treatises, letters, andreports from the Chinese missions continued toreach the Eternal City, debating the issue of theChinese Rites, of liturgy and terminology.Subsequently, disputes ensued in the papalcommissions of the Congregation De PropagandaFide (the "Ministry of Missions" of the Catholicchurch), as well as of the Holy Office, theinstitution that controlled the purity of the faith andran the Roman Inquisition. Often, along withreports in Western languages, Catholic bookswritten in Chinese, as well as other books onChinese philosophy and religion, were brought

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back by envo ys of the two factions to be used inthe battle. These texts were occasionally read by asmall number of "old China hands" who had leftthe mission and traveled back to Rome to defendtheir respective positions in the papal commissions.

Besides the books housed in the VaticanLibrary, the two main collections of China-relatedmaterials in early eighteenth-century Rome werefound in the hands of the Jesuits and theDominicans. The Jesuits kept their collections inthe library of the famous Jesuit "Collegio Romano"(Roman College) and in the central Jesuit archiveskept at the "Professed House" (seat of the JesuitGeneral). The Dominicans, on the other hand, kepttheirs in the Biblioteca Casanatense.[3] Even ifonly a narrow street separated their libraries in thecenter of Rome, the two groups of priestsresearching the China materials remained bitterand divisive tow ard each other.

The old Jesuit China materials today inRome are mainly divided between tworepositories: the Archivum Romanum SocietatisIesu (ARSI), i.e. the central archives of the JesuitOrder, and the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale diRoma "Vittorio Emanuele II" (Italian CentralNational Library, BNCR). These collections arethe survivors of the difficult history of the Societyof Jesus at the end of the Ancien Regime and intothe nineteenth century. In 1773, due to pressuresfrom secular governments all over Europe, and to amounting wav e of opposition from within thechurch, the papacy decided to dissolve the Societyof Jesus. The Archives at the Professed Housewhere the General resided (in today’s Piazza delGes=) were seized by Pontifical authorities, andremained under the control of the Roman Curia.Between 1773 and 1814, some of the documentskept at the Professed House were taken bycardinals and other individuals, and ended up indifferent collections (such as the archives ofPropaganda Fide in Rome, the French NationalLibrary, or the Chapter Archives of the ToledoCathedral, Spain). Whether the China materialswere also partly pilfered, we do not know. Afterthe restoration of the Society in 1814, part of thearchival documents returned in the hands of theJesuits, but we know little about those years. In1873, when the new Italian state suppressed thereligious corporations in Rome, the Jesuits firstsecretly transferred the archives from the ProfessedHouse to the nearby Torlonia Palace. Later on, thearchives were moved to a depot in the Jesuit

Collegium Germanicum (German College), at thetime in the Borromeo Palace (Via delSeminario).[2]

The China materials traveled along.However, between 1890-1893 all archivaldocuments were discreetly transferred to Exaten,the Netherlands, by order of the Jesuit GeneralLuis Martin, who feared further confiscation.During the "Dutch exile" the documents were re-ordered, restored (many by irreversible oldmethods like the coating of documents with gelatinand cellophane), and inventoried. The documentsremained in the Netherlands until 1939, when theywere finally transferred again to Rome, in the newGeneral Curia, in Via dei Penitenzieri. In 1993, anew archives building, located in the garden of theCuria, has been opened to the public.

The ARSI Chinese materials also migratedto the Netherlands in 1893, and it is there that theyreceived their present classification. Thesematerials, remarkably well preserved, all camefrom the old central archives at the ProfessedHouse, and not from the Library of the CollegioRomano.[4] The Chinese collection of this latterinstitution, instead, mostly ended up in the ItalianCentral National Library of Rome. A colorfulepisode regarding the library of the CollegioRomano shows how the Jesuits tried with all theirforces to resist the confiscation of their materialsby the Italian state. In 1877, four years after theCollegio Romano had been occupied by theItalians, thanks to the information offered by acitizen, the authorities discovered a trapdoor in thelibrary leading to a storage room where they founda great number of precious manuscripts (over threethousand), rare books and objects, probably hiddenthere by the last Jesuit Prefect of the library forsafe-keeping. Among them were also someChinese books, and the manuscript of a Chinese-Portuguese dictionary, which had been studied in1869 by the Italian orientalist Carlo Valenziani,with the permission of the Jesuits.[5]

Through their covert transfer operations, theJesuits had better luck in preserving their archivalrecords, including today’s ARSI Chinese materials.With the publication of Albert Chan, SJ’s ChineseBooks and Documents in the Jesuit Archives inRome: A Descriptive Catalogue: Japonica SinicaI-IV, we finally have a complete overview of thoseChinese materials. Chinese Books and Documentsis a handsome hardbound volume of xliii + 626pages, the publication of which was sponsored by

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the China and California Provinces of the Jesuitorder, and by the Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History at the University of SanFrancisco, with support from the Henry LuceFoundation. After a brief preface by the authorexplaining the genesis of the volume in the early1970s, a list of the books and documents orderedby signaturae (call numbers), and a list ofbibliographical references and abbreviations, thetext itself starts without preambles, arrangedmainly by the signatura of the archival documentsand books. Indexes of book titles in Wade-Gilesromanization (the system used throughout thevolume) of the ancient Chinese printing houses andpublishers of the texts, of place names, and ofsubjects and persons, make searching the volumean easier task. A list of popes, Jesuit Generals, andthe China mission superiors during the sixteenth-eighteenth centuries, and a short vita of AlbertChan, SJ close the volume.

The main text (pp. 1-561) is a detaileddescriptive catalogue of the materials contained inthe ARSI section Japonica Sinica I-IV. While mostof the Japonica Sinica section [i.e. Documentsfrom Japan and China, without any romannumeral] in ARSI contains Western-languagesmanuscript letters and reports from East Asiawritten by Jesuit missionaries in the sixteenth tothe eighteenth centuries; the part of JaponicaSinica with roman numerals I-II-III-IV mostlyconsists of Chinese-language manuscripts andprinted books (some Japanese items can also befound, hence the name Japonica).

The present organization of the collectiondates to the days of Exaten, although we cannotexclude that it followed some previous archivalordering.[6] Jap. Sin. I (no. 1-224) containseditions of Chinese classical and philosophicalwritings, mainly in the Confucian tradition, as wellas the manuscript and printed writings of Chineseconverts, and catechetical printed works bymissionaries, grouped by authors. A few Japaneseworks and some miscellaneous works in Latin arealso included. Jap. Sin. II (no. 1-173) gathersmainly Chinese-language works of naturalphilosophy, sciences, linguistics, as well asmiscellaneous works in Latin, imperial and royaledicts, and some catechisms. Jap. Sin. III (no.1-24) is an assemblage on the translation efforts ofthe Jesuits in Confucian thought, and of historicaland biographical works on the history of the Chinamission. Finally, Jap. Sin. IV (no. 1-30) is a series

of mostly Latin works on the Jesuit interpretationof the Chinese classics and of Chinese historiesand chronologies. Such a diverse collection seemsnaturally to cluster around enduring themes of theJesuit engagement with China: the study of theChinese Confucian classics (to the detriment ofserious appreciation for the Buddhist and Daoisttraditions); the compilation of texts harmonizingCatholic doctrine with Confucian sensibilities;internal discussions on the problems of rites; theintroduction of Western knowledge to the Chineseliterati; and the composition of apologetic writingsattacking Chinese "superstitions," as well asglorifying the Jesuit enterprise in China.

Obviously, this collection is (and has been)very precious in exploring the Jesuit interpretationof Confucianism and its commentarial sources, thescientific approach of the Jesuits in China, as wellas the internal debates between Jesuits and theirconverts on thorny ritual issues. Many texts are notunique, and other copies or editions of those textscan be found in the Bibliotheque nationale deFrance (Paris), the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana(Vatican City), or elsewhere. But a number of textsin ARSI are unique or very rare, and recently a vastselection of these texts has been offered to thesinological public in the collection edited byNicolas Standaert and Adrian Dudink, YesuhuiLuoma Dang’anguan Ming-Qing Tianzhujiaowenxian - Chinese Christian Texts from the RomanArchives of the Society of Jesus (Taipei: TaipeiRicci Institute, 2002), 12 vols. (For a presentation,see<http://www.usfca.edu/ricci/resources/pubs/RASJ%20Order%20form.pdf>).

Chan’s work in fact represents an ideal guideto this collection of primary sources, and to muchmore. Chinese Books and Documents in fact is notsimply an inventory of the collection, but rather adescriptive catalogue, and herein lies its value.Many entries run to several pages, and supply awealth of bibliographic information on the texts(often unique manuscripts), their authors, and thescholarship about them. Only with time, possibleomissions or errors (such as identification ofindividuals mentioned in the sources), derivingfrom the pioneering nature of this large work andthe relative lack of research on certain aspects ofthe Jesuit mission, may emerge through the effortof scholars.[7] Nevertheless, the quality of thescholarship is high throughout, as we would expectfrom a careful Ming historian like Albert Chan,trained both in the traditional Chinese curriculum

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and in the Western historical method.

I hav e only two general criticisms, one onthe style of the entries, and another on thesecondary scholarship employed. First, there is acertain lack of uniformity in the entries, which aresometimes quite long, sometimes too brief, andwhich offer differing levels of details about thephysical form of the texts (number of folios orpages, dimensions of the pages, number ofcharacters per page, etc.) and their provenance.

Secondly, the scholarship cited is notupdated to the latest research. After the first draftof the catalogue was completed in the early 1980s,"due to various circumstances" almost two decadeselapsed before publication. Chan thereforeacknowledges at p. xv that "references tocatalogues and studies published after the 1970sare few and mainly restricted to the early 1980s."For an update on the exciting work in this fieldpublished in the 1980s and 1990s, readers areadvised to turn to the pages of the recentHandbook of Christianity in China (edited byNicolas Standaert; Leiden: Brill, 2001).

In sum, Chinese Books and Documents is arich introduction to a variety of materials, coveringthe Chinese classics, Christian-Chinese topics, andChinese religions, and offers a convenient andlearned gate to the ARSI materials. It will be aneeded addition for any sinological library, and asource of research ideas for years to come in thefields of Chinese-Western relations and ofChristianity-in-China.

Notes

[1]. There were exceptions, however. In1684, the Jesuit Philippe Couplet brought to Romea collection of Chinese Christian books that wasdonated to the pope as a propaganda move onbehalf of the Jesuit mission. Those books are stillhoused in the Vatican Library today. Moreover,some cardinals collected "exotic" orientalmaterials, including Chinese ones, in their privatelibraries (for example Cardinal Corsini andCardinal Casanate in the seventeenth century).Later on, Cardinal Stefano Borgia, Prefect ofPropaganda Fide, became an avid collector oforientalia and archeological artifacts. Hiscollection of Chinese books is now housed in theVatican Library; on orientalism in Rome, see, e.g.,Paola Orsatti, Il fondo Borgia della BibliotecaVaticana e gli studi orientali a Roma tra Sette eOttocento (Citt= del Vaticano: Biblioteca

Apostolica Vaticana, 1996); Anna Germano andMarco Nocca, eds., La collezione Borgia:curiosit= e tesori da ogni parte del mondo(Napoli: Electa, 2001).

[2]. The Archives of the Jesuit GeneralProcurators, kept in the Collegio Romano after therestoration of the Society, howev er, wereconfiscated by the Italian government in 1870following the incorporation of Rome into theKingdom of Italy. In 1873 they became part of theRoyal State Archives of Italy and were returned tothe Jesuits only in 1924, forming the so-called"Fondo Gesuitico" in ARSI. After 1873, themodern section of the Jesuit archives moved withthe General Curia to Fiesole near Florence, whilethe early section remained hidden in the GermanCollege in Rome. On the history of ARSI, see e.g.Edmond Lamalle, "L’archivio di un grande ordinereligioso. L’Archivio Generale della Compagnia diGes=," Archiva Ecclesiae 24-25 (1981-82): pp.89-120.

[3]. Smaller collections were also kept insome Franciscan convents in Rome, and partlyended up in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale diRoma "Vittorio Emanuele II" (BNCR); see MarinaBattaglini, "Libri cinesi e giapponesi allaBiblioteca Nazionale [pp. 7-10 "I fondi di origineecclesiastica"]," in Pa gine dall’Oriente. Libricinesi e giapponesi della Biblioteca Nazionale,edited by Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale VittorioEmanuele II - Roma (Roma: Bardi Editore, 1996),pp. 7-14. On the library of the Collegio Romano,see Ricardo Villoslada, Storia del CollegioRomano dal suo inizio (1551) alla soppressionedella Compagnia di Ges= (1773) (Roma:Universit= Gregoriana, 1954); Virginia CariniDainotti, La Biblioteca Nazionale VittorioEmanuele al Collegio Romano (Firenze: Olschki,1956); on the Chinese materials in theCasanatense, see Eugenio Menegon, "TheCasanatense Library (Rome) and its ChinaMaterials. A Finding List," Sino-Western CulturalRelations Journal XXII (2000): pp. 31-55.

[4]. An eighteenth-century catalogue of theChinese books in the old Jesuit archives is stillpreserved in ARSI: Index librorum Sinensium juxtarerum classes distributus, Jap. Sin. 152.2, ff.23r-38r; see Chan, Chinese Books, p. 436. Acomparison of the Latin renderings of the titleskept then in archives and the today-existingChinese books and documents could help usreconstruct the history of the collection.

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[5]. See Costanzo Bizzocchi, "Il ’ripostiglio’della Biblioteca del Collegio Romano," Gesuitidella Provincia Romana 2 (1971): pp. 17-21;Carini Dainotti, La biblioteca, pp. 68-71. TheLibrary of the Collegio Romano apparentlyremained intact between the suppression of theSociety and its resurrection in 1814. In 1842, anerudite described the library as still rich with80,000 volumes; see Moroni’s Dizionario dierudizione storico-ecclesiastica, as quoted inVilloslada, Storia, p. 193. On the presentcondition of the Chinese collection in the BNCR,see e.g. Battaglini, "Libri cinesi...," pp. 7-10.

[6]. A forthcoming article by Ad Dudink inthe journal Monumenta Serica (2002 issue)explores the layering of the ARSI Chinesecollection and its archival structure. Dr. Dudinkwas also responsible for overseeing the scholarlyediting of Albert Chan’s Chinese Books andDocuments, and making bibliographicimprovements and additions throughout. In thesame issue of Monumenta Serica, Paul Rule willoffer a review of Chan’s catalogue, includinginformation on the origins of the Japonica Sinicacollection in ARSI. A preliminary version ofRule’s review is available on the site of the RicciInstitute (University of San Francisco), in PDFformat at:<http://www.usfca.edu/ricci/resources/pubs/chan_review.pdf>.

[7]. For an example of problems inidentifying individuals mentioned in ARSI Chinesedocuments, see the diverging interpretations on theidentity of Western missionaries mentioned bytheir Chinese names in Jap. Sin. I (38/42) 41/1c,respectively by Nicolas Standaert, The FascinatingGod. A Challenge to Modern Chinese TheologyPresented by a Text on the name of God Written bya 17th century Chinese Student of Theology(Rome: Editrice Pontificia Universit= Gregoriana,1995), p. 27, and by Huang Yinong (Huang Yi-Long), "Bei huluede shengyin: jieshao ZhongguoTianzhujiaotu dui ’Liyi wenti’ taidu de wenxian"("Neglected Voices: Literature related to thereaction of contemporary Christians toward the’Rites Controversy’"), Tsing Hua Journal ofChinese Studies NS XXV, no. 2 (1995): pp.137-160 (see pp. 142-143). Chan, Chinese Booksand Documents, pp. 63-64 offers yet anotherinterpretation on their identity.

Library of Congress call number: Z7059 .C44 2002 PL2455Subjects:

•Jesuit Archives (Rome)

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•Chinese literature--Bibliography.

Citation: Eugenio Menegon. "Review of Albert Chan, Chinese Books and Documents in the JesuitArchives in Rome: A Descriptive Catalogue: Japonica Sinica I-IV, H-Asia, H-Net Reviews, February, 2003.URL: http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=294851047523464.

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