Manuscript in ink on paper. 4to, (269 x 198 mm), [2], 55 pp., complete; written in a fine, highly legible hand, arranged under thematic headings, most entries in four ruled columns recording Ouvrages, Auteurs or Interpretes, Dynasties, and Volumes. Modern boards, gilt-lettered leather title label to upper cover. Remarkably fresh and crisp throughout.

The manuscript opens “Catalogue des Livres Chinois apportés de la Chine par le Pere Foucquet Jesuite en l’année 1722” and presents Foucquet’s remarkable library systematically arranged by subject. The Chinese Classics occupy a prominent place: the Y King (Yijing), Chu King (Shujing), Chi King (Shijing) and Tchun Tsiou (Chunqiu) are followed by extensive bodies of commentaries and interpretations. Other sections encompass history, philosophy and religion, rites and ceremonies, dictionaries and philology, literature, mathematics and astronomy. Individual entries frequently identify the author or commentator, the dynasty to which he belonged and the number of volumes. The manuscript thus records not merely the contents of the collection but an early European attempt to comprehend and organize the textual traditions of China.

Particularly significant is Wagstaff’s statement on the title-page: “Transcribed from Monsignor Foucquet’s Catalogue (lent me by himself) in January 1737 N.S.” He adds a further note recording a correction personally communicated by Foucquet concerning the transcription of a Chinese bibliographical term. The manuscript therefore derives directly from Foucquet himself and documents personal scholarly contact between compiler and copyist while both were in Rome.

Jean-François Foucquet (1665–1741) went to China as a Jesuit missionary in 1699 and in 1711 was summoned to Beijing, where he worked in the intellectual environment of the Kangxi Emperor’s court and instructed the emperor in mathematics and astronomy. A gifted linguist and scholar, he became one of the leading representatives of the controversial Jesuit Figurist school, which sought correspondences between ancient Chinese texts and Judaeo-Christian revelation. His theories brought him increasingly into conflict with fellow Jesuits, but they also required an unusually profound engagement with Chinese classical literature. His library was consequently not assembled as a collection of curiosities: it was the working library of one of the earliest European scholars to undertake sustained research into the textual foundations of Chinese civilization.

When Foucquet left China in 1722, he carried this library with him aboard the Prince de Conti. His original autograph inventory, made before or during the journey and sold at Christie’s in 2006, contains some 340 numbered entries, principally abbreviated transliterations and short descriptions, accompanied by a parallel Chinese list probably written by his Chinese Christian amanuensis John Hu. That document was essentially a working inventory. After Foucquet’s return to Europe, a substantially more detailed and intellectually organized catalogue was prepared, arranging the collection into classes and supplying information about authors, commentators, dynasties and extent. The present manuscript records this developed form of the catalogue.

Foucquet reached France in 1722 and travelled to Rome the following year, his books arriving there in November 1723. He remained closely connected with the Congregation of Propaganda Fide and was appointed titular Bishop of Eleutheropolis in 1725. The present manuscript explicitly records the collection as being in the library of the College of Propaganda Fide, giving it particular importance as evidence for the early institutional history of Chinese books in Rome. Contemporary records confirm Foucquet’s continuing involvement with Propaganda Fide and debates surrounding the Chinese mission.

Foucquet’s library was exceptional in both scale and breadth. At a moment when the great European institutional collections of Chinese books were themselves still developing, he had assembled works covering the Chinese canonical tradition and its commentaries, history, philosophy, religion, language, literature, ritual, mathematics, astronomy and other fields. Noël Golvers’s detailed reconstruction of Foucquet’s collection has demonstrated its importance in the establishment of Chinese holdings in European libraries and has identified individual books from the collection now preserved in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.

The present catalogue is consequently important not only for reconstructing a dispersed library but also for understanding the transfer and classification of Chinese knowledge in eighteenth-century Europe. Its structure is particularly revealing. Chinese books are not simply enumerated: their authors and commentators are placed within dynastic chronology and their physical extent recorded, while related works are grouped into intellectual categories. It captures an early stage in the transformation of European knowledge of China from missionary intelligence and individual collecting into systematic bibliography and sinological scholarship.

Other classified catalogues of Foucquet’s books survive in major institutional collections. The British Library holds Add MS 20583 A, a quarto “Catalogue des livres Chinois, apportés de la Chine par le Père [Jean François] Foucquet ... en l’année 1722,” likewise arranged in classes; related catalogues and inventories are recorded in French and Italian collections. The present manuscript has a distinct documentary identity: it was made in 1737, fifteen years after Foucquet brought the books from China, and Wagstaff expressly records that the exemplar was lent to him by Foucquet himself.

Thomas Wagstaff provides a further remarkable dimension. An Anglican clergyman associated with the exiled Stuart community in Rome, he encountered Foucquet in a city that was simultaneously a centre of Catholic missionary administration, Oriental scholarship and Jacobite exile. His careful transcription preserves an unusually tangible instance of intellectual exchange across confessional boundaries: an English Anglican copying, from the French Jesuit missionary himself, the classified record of a Chinese library assembled under the Qing dynasty.

Foucquet’s collection was eventually dispersed, with books passing into important European institutional libraries. The catalogue therefore survives as an intellectual reconstruction of a library that no longer exists as a whole, preserving both the books Foucquet considered essential to understanding China and the system through which he attempted to make them intelligible to European scholarship. As such, it is an important primary document for the history of Chinese bibliography, Jesuit scholarship, the Chinese Rites controversy and Figurism, European collecting, missionary networks, and the circulation of knowledge between Qing China and Enlightenment Europe.

Provenance: H. P. Kraus, New York, his bookplate on front pastedown.

Noël Golvers, “Jean-François Foucquet’s Contribution to the Establishment of Chinese Book Collections in European Libraries: Circulation of Chinese Books,” Monumenta Serica, 63:2 (2015), pp. 361–416; John W. Witek, Controversial Ideas in China and in Europe: A Biography of Jean-François Foucquet, S.J. (1665–1741), Rome, 1982; British Library, Add MS 20583 A; Henri Cordier, ed., Foucquet, Récit fidèle, Revue de l’Extrême-Orient, I (1882); Jonathan D. Spence, The Question of Hu, New York, 1988.