Jesuit’s rich portrait of 17th century China, as told to a Florentine scientist, intrigued a fragmented Europe
- Florentine writer Lorenzo Magalotti wrote of the ways and culture of the Chinese in Relazione della China after being regaled by Father Johann Grueber in 1665
- Grueber spent several years in Peking before travelling overland to India by way of Tibet and Nepal, and witnessed life in the early years of the Qing dynasty
Marco Polo wasn’t the only adventurer who returned from China with a treasure trove of tales and mesmerising accounts of the Orient. For centuries, missionaries and traders were the savvy travellers who unlocked the mysteries of the Far East, relating them to avid European scholars and readers hungry for all things exotic.
In 1666, almost 400 years after Polo’s adventures, Florentine writer and scientist Lorenzo Magalotti published Relazione della China (“Report of China”), in which he enthusiastically recounted a colourful evening chat with an Austrian Jesuit priest who had spent several years in China. In 1665, Father Johann Grueber had passed through Florence and regaled Magalotti and a friend with tales of the culture, ways and lifestyle of the Chinese.
More than four centuries later, with China’s political and cultural influence on the rise, Magalotti’s book – which has been translated into French but not English – is undergoing a revival in Italy, republications proving popular among sinologists and the title becoming a key textbook at university faculties devoted to the Orient.
“Even though it’s brief, it is packed with details that fed the curiosity of Italians and Europeans for everything related to distant, unknown lands,” says sinologist Alberto Jori, a founding member of the Oriental Studies department at Milan’s Accademia Ambrosiana. “Following in the steps of famed missionary Matteo Ricci [an Italian Jesuit who landed in Macau in 1582], Jesuits were valued guests at the imperial court due to their astronomical knowledge. They had the privilege of dressing as mandarins and were witnesses of that world.”
Grueber arrived in China in 1656, as a professor of mathematics. In 1661, his superiors recalled him to Rome but a Dutch blockade of Macau prevented him from journeying by sea, so he instead embarked on a risky overland trip from Peking to Goa, India, by way of Tibet and Nepal.
