Reading Chinese in Oxford - Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer - page 44

whose theological achievements included reconfirming, against Galileo, that the
earth did not revolve around the sun, and declaring that Mary not only conceived
Jesus without human insemination but was herself conceived by virgin birth - a
view that James I derided when he visited the Bodleian Library in 1605, wishing
that such objectionable views 'could be altogether suppressed rather than be toler-
atedtothecorruptionofmindsandmanners'.Couplet'sfearsprovedwellfounded.
Alexander VII was not about to let the word of God undergo translation into any
language, and certainly not into Chinese.
Couplet also had concrete tasks for which he needed Michael. The Jesuits who
were confined to Canton through the latter half of the 1660s had decided to make
use of their enforced inactivity by organising propaganda for their mission back
in Europe. One project was a massive 'historical description' of China translated
from Chinese into Latin. Couplet wrote to Joan Blaeu, son of Willem Blaeu -
whose family rivalled and then supplanted Jodocus Hondius as the major carto-
graphic publisher in Amsterdam and produced the globes that James II fingered at
the Bodleian Library - to convince him to take on this project. Blaeu hesitated. He
was unwilling to shoulder such an expensive publication, which would in any case
have competed with his earlier Atlas Sinensis , the work of the previous generation
of Jesuits. Couplet brought a copy of Luo Hongxian's 1555 atlas of China to assist
with the maps that would illustrate such an encyclopaedia, but the project never
went forward.
TheotherprojecttheytookupduringtheirCantonconfinement wasthetransla-
tion of the seminal four texts of the Confucian tradition, known as the Four Topics:
two short treatises entitled The Great Learning and The Doctrine of the Mean , the
Analects or sayings of Confucius, and the writings of his follower Mencius. Only
the first three were completed, but that was enough for Couplet to take back to
Europe and see through to publication as Confucius Sinarum Philosophus ('Con-
fucius, Philosopher of the Chinese'). Although four authors are named on the title-
page, as James II noted, the topic was mainly the work of Philippe Couplet.
Confucius was the most ambitious scholarly work on China the Jesuits would
produce that century. Not merely another cheerful representation of China, it
pitched the argument that European and Chinese cultures derived from a common
originofbeliefinGod.'TheChinese,fromthebeginningoftheirorigintothetime
of Confucius,' Couplet explained in an abridged popularisation of the topic, 'paid
adoration only to the Creator of the universe.' Not knowing the name of God, they
called Him Xam Ti, but they knew that He existed and even built temples to Him.