Claude de Visdelou

💬 Famous Quotes

"The French Jesuit Claude de Visdelou (1656–1737) was one of the missionaries sent to China by Louis XIV in 1687, and he acquired a wide knowledge of the Chinese language and literature. When the papal legate Charles-Thomas Maillard de Tournon came to China in 1705 to settle the question of the Chinese Rites, Visdelou was the only Jesuit favourable to their prohibition. Secretly consecrated bishop in Macau in 1709, he went on to Pondicherry, where he lived in great retirement in the house of the French Capuchins until his death nearly thirty years later, working almost solely on the more than 500 Chinese volumes he had taken with him."

📋 Basic Information

👤 Gender

Male

🏴 Nationality

French

✝️ Religion

Catholicism

⛪ Denomination

Catholic

🏛️ Order / Mission

Society of Jesus (Jesuits)

🌍 Mission Region

China

🏯 Historical Era

Qing dynasty

1656

Born

Erquy, Brittany, France

1687

Mission Began

Age 31

1709

Mission Ended

Age 53

1737

Passed Away

Age 81

Pondicherry, French India

🏷️ Tags

missionary Jesuit

📖 Biography

Claude de Visdelou (12 August 1656 – 11 November 1737), Chinese name Liu Ying (刘应), courtesy name Shengwen (声闻), was a Frenchman, a Jesuit missionary and a sinologist. With Joachim Bouvet (白晋) and others, five in all, he was sent by King Louis XIV of France to China as a missionary. He came to China in 1687 and stayed until he left in 1709. In 1693, together with Jean de Fontaney (洪若翰), he presented cinchona bark (quinine) to the Kangxi Emperor and cured the emperor of malaria.

Liu Ying studied the history of both China and Central Asia. His Histoire de la Tartarie gathers material from the Chinese histories on the Xiongnu, Tatars, Mongols, Turks and others, and was included in the supplement (compiled with Antoine Galland) to the 1779 Hague edition of d'Herbelot's Bibliothèque orientale. He also wrote a History of China in Latin in six volumes, a History of the Religion of the Chinese Philosophers, a work on the Rites and Sacrifices of the Chinese, and Notice du livre chinois nommé Y-king (Notice on the Chinese Book Called the Yijing). He also translated and edited a number of Confucian classics in Latin, including the Book of Rites (Liji), the Book of Documents (Shujing) and the Doctrine of the Mean (Zhongyong).

📚 Major Works

Supplément à la Bibliothèque orientale [Supplement to the Bibliothèque orientale] 1779

A supplement to d'Herbelot's Bibliothèque orientale, containing studies of the Huns, Tatars, Mongols, Turks and other peoples of Central and East Asia. The Bibliothèque nationale de France's Gallica holds the complete text (300 pages); the title page reads “MM. C. Visdelou et A. Galand”, i.e. compiled jointly by Visdelou and Galland.

Notice on the Yijing, in Pauthier's Les Livres sacrés de l'Orient 1840

Visdelou's annotated account of the Yijing (Y-King, ou Livre canonique des changements, avec des notes), included in Les Livres sacrés de l'Orient, edited by the French sinologist Guillaume Pauthier (Paris: Firmin Didot frères, 1840); the book's table of contents lists it as “Notice du Y-king, par le père Visdelou”. The link is to the 1840 edition held by archive.org.

📚 References & Sources

📖 Wikipedia (ZH)