Title

The Original Manuscript of Notitia linguæ sinicæ in the British Library and Manuscript Copies, Circulation, and Contents

Author

Paul Kua

Genre

Article

Pages

743-787

DOI

10.6503/THJCS.202112_51(4).0004

Download

PDF

Language

Chinese

Key words

Joseph Prémare, Notitia linguæ sinicæ, Étienne Fourmont, Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat, François Montigny, manuscript studies

Abstract

French Jesuit Joseph Prémare (1666-1736) arrived in China in the late 17th century as a missionary; and in the early 18th century, while exiled to Canton by the Qing court, he drafted Notitia linguæ sinicæ, his magnum opus intended to help Europeans learn Chinese. His hope to have this published in Europe was realized a century later and only in Asia, partly due to efforts to sabotage it by Étienne Fourmont (1683-1745), to whom Prémare had sent the manuscript. In recent years, scholars East and West have shown interest in the various manuscripts and publications of the work and have issued articles and even monographs with different approaches to this topic, supplementing the already rich studies of earlier, mostly Western, sinologists.

This paper first sorts out the history surrounding the original manuscript sent to Fourmont; then examines the original manuscript currently held by the British Library; and offers alternative views and fills knowledge gaps in past studies by Henri Cordier (1849-1925), Knud Lundbæk (1912-1995) and Li Zhen 李真 on various aspects of manuscript studies related to this work. Specifically, this paper

1. concludes that the British Library manuscript is not an incomplete version of the one received by Fourmont, as contended in earlier research, but fragments of a distinct third manuscript;
2. deduces that this British manuscript comes between the copy received by Fourmont, i.e., the most recent, and that which is currently held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, i.e., the oldest;
3. identifies François Montigny (1669-1742) as the earlier owner of the British manuscript, before it was owned by Heinrich Julius Klaproth (1783-1835), and then purchased by the British Museum; and
4. suggests that the British manuscript can enrich the known texts of this work, with a new chapter and some improvements, and can provide a better manuscript for a possible new translation of the book.