Early May 1693, ...somewhere at sea between Mozambique and Goa...' : Memories of Philippe Couplet of his confrere François de Rougemont
The Jesuit mission in the seventeenth century has an important place in the historiography of the contacts between China and the outside world. Numerous studies, devoted to Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) or Ferdinand Verbiest (1623-1688), for example, shed light on how these missionaries -successfully or not- proclaimed the Christian faith and Western sciences in China. Authors of these studies mainly based themselves on Western source material, but in the last twenty years or so, a shift has occurred due to a China-centred approach: it was no longer the missionary, but the Chinese themselves, convert or not, who came to be the centre of attention. Historians therefore became more interested in the way in which the Chinese received, processed or rejected Christianity and sciences. Chinese sources are the main carriers of information for this. The most recent development in the field of historical science, however, is a revival of interest in Western sources, complementary to the Chinese. This new trend is connected to a second important shift: until now, the focus was mainly on intellectual contacts between the elites - both missionaries and Chinese. As early as the seventeenth century, the image of a missionary dressed in a mandarin robe and surrounded by astronomical instruments was an example of this. But with the rise of anthropologically oriented historiography, interest in the daily experience of cultural contacts has grown: on the one hand, the 'ordinary' missionary in the Chinese interior, who moved from one hamlet to another on his pastoral journeys, on the other hand, the 'ordinary' Chinese convert who participated in Christian rituals and formed Christian communities with others. This interaction 'on the margins' is perhaps one of the most long-lasting contacts between the Chinese people and the outside world.