Michael Boym's Medicus Sinicus

Home , Berlinka, Philippe Couplet

T’OUNG PAO 448 T’oung Pao Kajdański103-4-5 (2017) 448-472 www.brill.com/tpao International Journal of Chinese Studies/Revue Internationale de Sinologie

Michael Boym’s Medicus Sinicus: New Facts, Reflections, Conclusions

Edward Kajdański (Gdansk, Poland)

Abstract Following the author’s previous work on reconstituting the transmission to Europe, disappearance, and eventual publication under other names of the Polish Jesuit Michael Boym’s manuscript work on Chinese medicine, this article recounts the recent discovery of some of these manuscripts. They are kept at the Jagiellonian Library in Krakow, and were originally part of the Chinese Library of the Elector of Brandenburg, where they were acquired from Dutch officials who had earlier bought them from the Jesuit Philippe Couplet (who had obtained them from Boym’s last companion). The complex story of these manuscripts’ travels documents the keen interest in Chinese medicine among the many competing European powers and institutions in the seventeenth century; it also shows that we should be careful in assessing whether the publication of Boym’s seminal work under other names was willful plagiarism, or a result of contemporary tensions and confusion.

Résumé Cet article fait suite aux travaux antérieurs de l’auteur sur la transmission en Europe, la disparition puis la publication sous d’autres noms des travaux manuscrits sur la médecine chinoise du jésuite polonais Michael Boym. Il relate la découverte récente d’une partie de ces manuscrits dans la bibliothèque Jagiellonienne à Cracovie, et montre qu’ils viennent de l’ancienne bibliothèque chinoise du Grand Electeur de Brandebourg, où ils ont été originellement acquis auprès d’officiers hollandais qui les avaient achetés auprès du jésuite Philippe Couplet, qui lui-même les avait obtenus du dernier compagnon de Boym à la mort de celui-ci. L’histoire complexe des voyages de ces manuscrits met en lumière le fort intérêt pour la médecine chinoise de la part des diverses puissances et institutions européennes du 17e siècle, alors en vive concurrence ; elle nous engage aussi à la prudence quant aux jugements que l’on peut porter sur la publication des travaux pionniers de Boym sous d’autres noms,

ISSN 0082-5433 (print version) ISSN 1568-5322 (online version)Downloaded TPAO from Brill.com10/03/2021 02:41:23AM via free access Michael Boym’s Medicus Sinicus 449 qui doit autant aux tensions et confusions politiques du temps qu’à un plagiat intentionnel.

Keywords Michael Boym, Chinese medicine, Jesuits

Thirty years ago, my article “Michael Boym’s Medicus Sinicus” was published in T’oung Pao.1 There I referred to an earlier polemic opposing Paul Pelliot and Robert Chabrié2 regarding the authorship of two books on Chinese medicine which were published in Europe in the 1680s. Michael Boym (1612-1659), we may recall, was a Polish Jesuit missionary, who arrived in China in 1644—the very year of the Manchu invasion resulting in the capture of Peking and the establishment of the Qing dynasty, which then ruled China for nearly 270 years. Some supporters of the overthrown Ming dynasty withdrew to South China, where they organized resistance against the invaders. The last offspring of the Ming dynastic family, Zhu Youlang 朱由榔 (1623-1662), prince of Gui 桂王, es- tablished his seat in Zhaoqing (an old city not far from Canton), where he was crowned in 1646 as the last emperor of the dynasty – Yongli 永曆. Michael Boym found himself at the court of Yongli, which at that time adopted Christianity, and was sent to Europe in the rank of envoy to ask the Holy See for moral support and the European powers for military assistance. After the failure of his mission in Europe and after four years of confinement in the Loreto monastery, he was sent back to China, but was prevented from sailing to Macau as an entry-point to China, and was forced to reach Yongli’s court in Yunnan through Tonkin. He died from exhaustion and illness in the neighboring province of Guangxi. Boym was a prominent scholar, one of the pioneers of European sinol- ogy. During his stays in China and Europe, as well as on his long travels between the two continents, he translated (together with his travel companion, Andreas Zheng) and wrote himself many works concerning Chinese history, geography, botany, zoology, medicine, pharmacy,

1) Edward Kajdański, “Michael Boym’s Medicus Sinicus,” T’oung Pao 83 (1987): 161-89. 2) Paul Pelliot, “Michel Boym,” T’oung Pao 30 (1934): 95-151; Robert Chabrié, Michel Boym jésuite polonais et la fin des Ming en Chine (1646-1662) : Contribution à l’histoire des missions d’Extrême-Orient (Paris: Edit. Pierre Bossuet, 1933).

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Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 02:41:23AM via free access 450 Kajdański philosophy, and language. Only a small part of these were published under his own name, but most of his works were put to use by his numer- ous plagiarists and compilers. In my 1987 article I presented the view that the books on Chinese medicine and pharmacy under discussion—the Specimen Medicinae Sinicae (1682) and the Clavis Medica ad Sinarum Doctrinam de Pulsibus (1686), both published by Andreas Cleyer—had been written by Boym and were parts of his opus magnum sent to Europe from the Kingdom of Siam in 1658 under the title Medicus Sinicus. I also showed that both books contained texts either translated from the Chinese by Boym or written by himself, and based on Chinese medical works. This article also attempted to correct and broaden certain conclusions concerning the dispersion and disappearance of some of Boym’s manuscripts and their attribution to others. The original title of Boym’s medical work was Medicus Sinicus, and it was announced under that title in 1654 in the expanded version of his Briefve Relation,3 in which seven works prepared for printing in Europe were mentioned. Item VI of his Aduertissement au Lecteur had the following title: Medicus Sinicus seu singularis Ars explorandi pulsuum & praedicendi & futura Symptomata, et affectiones ægrotatium à multis ante Christum Sæcula tradita, et apud Sinas conseruata; quae quidem ars omnino est admirabilis & ab Europæâ diuersa. This title was confirmed by a letter written by Boym and found several years ago by Professor Noel Golvers in the Jesuit archives in Rome. The letter is addressed to the General of the Order, F. Goswin Nickel, and is dated 26 May 1658. In it Boym informs the General that the work on his text is completed and that he is sending it to Belgium (“Mitto in Belgium [placidum]librum qui titulus Medicus Sinicus”).4

3) Briefve Relation de la Notable Conversion des Personnes Royales, & de l’estat de la Religion Chrestienne en la Chine, faicte par le tres R. P. Michel Boym de la Compagnie de Iesus, enuoyé par la Cour de ce Royaume là en qualité d’Ambassadeur au S. Siege Apostolique, & recitée par luy-mesme dans l’Eglise de Smyrne, le 29. Septembre de l’an 1652 (Paris: Sebastien et Gabriel Cramoisy, 1654), “Aduertissement au Lecteur,” 72. 4) ARSI Jap. Sin. 162, no. 206, according to Golvers who notes that the manuscript survives in a poorly legible state (like part of Boym’s manuscripts in the ARSI archives). See Golvers, “Michael Boym and Martino Martini: A Contrastive Portrait of two China Missionaries-Map- makers,” paper delivered in Krakow in 2009 and made available to me by the author; later published in Monumenta Serica 59 (2011): 259-71.

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The present essay is divided into four parts: the first recounts my search for Michael Boym’s long forgotten or unknown manuscripts; the second describes their contents; the third traces the disappearance and dispersion of Boym’s medical writings; and the last mainly discusses their appropriation by other authors.

Finding and Identifying Long-Forgotten Boym Manuscripts When I started to work on Michael Boym’s Medicus Sinicus in 1985, I only knew that the collections of the former Preussische Staatsbiblio- thek in Berlin had been partly lost during WWII, and that the same fate met the Chinese books and manuscripts that had been described by Julius Klaproth in the early nineteenth century.5 According to Klaproth, one of these manuscripts was “ein handschriftliges Verzeichnis Chi nesischer Arzenmittel, auf rothem Papiere geschrieben, mit Andreas Cleyers kurzer Lateinischen Beschreibung, die auch seiner Medicina Si- nica abgedrückt est.”6 I was convinced that it was a manuscript copy of Boym’s Medicamenta Simplicia, a part of his Receptarum Sinensium Liber that was published by Andreas Cleyer in the latter’s Specimen Medicinae Sinicae. I attempted to confirm the existence of this handwritten text, but the reply was that the Berlin Library had been destroyed during the war and that the Chinese manuscripts and books it owned were probably lost. In the meantime, however, rumors were confirmed that a part of the Berlin collections had found its way to Poland and was preserved at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. After the Berlin Library was bombed in 1941, these holdings were carried away from Berlin to Grussau (today’s Krzeszów) in Lower Silesia, and in 1945 were found and secured by the delegate of the Polish Education Ministry, to be eventually transported to Krakow. Until 1981, the fact that these books were stored at the Jagiel- lonian Library was in fact a secret. To access these “reserved collections” during the 1980s was extremely difficult. Only after getting a recommen- dation from the Polish Academy of Sciences was I allowed to have a look

5) J. Klaproth, Verzeischnis der Chinesischen und Mandschuischen Bücher und Handschriften der Königlichen Bibliothek zu Berlin (Paris: in der Königlichen Druckerei, 1822). 6) Ibid., 180.

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Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 02:41:23AM via free access 452 Kajdański at their content. At that time there was no catalogue, except a few type- script lists, but these excluded items written in Chinese, as there probably was nobody in the Library able to translate the titles or write a few words about the contents. I was therefore unable to find the manuscripts and books described by Klaproth, and dropped the matter. By accident, having a chance to order microfilms, I found several tens of sketches drawn by Andreas Cleyer in Batavia (today’s Jakarta); none of them, however, had any relation to Michael Boym. My conviction that the manuscript mentioned by Klaproth had been written by Boym was based mainly on the fact that he supplied his Re- ceptarum Sinensium Liber with two prefaces (not found in Cleyer’s 1682 Specimen Medicinae Sinicae, but appearing in Boym’s 1686 Clavis Medi- ca, probably unknown to Klaproth). However, there was another hint that it was authored by Boym, to wit, that it was written “on red paper.” In Ming China, using red paper for writing was restricted to high of ficials: indeed, Boym was a mandarin of the third rank and had been appointed by the Southern Ming court as its ambassador to Europe. Similarly, the letters by the Yongli emperor’s mother brought by Boym to Rome were written on “imperial yellow” paper, while those written by the head eunuch, the Great Chancellor and Director of Ceremonial Achilleus Pam (Pang Tianshou 龐天壽) were on red paper. After my return from Krakow, I abandoned the idea of trying to find the above-mentioned manuscript of Boym, but succeeded in getting copies of several other pieces, so far unpublished, thanks to the personal assistance of the general of the Society of Jesus, F. Hans Peter Colven- bach. In 2001, I was invited by the Beijing Foreign Studies University to participate in the translation into Chinese of all the known works of Boym that I had collected from different archives and libraries and that were either published exclusively in Latin or existed in manuscript only. Translating Receptarum Sinensium Liber turned out to be the most difficult and laborious part of the work, because the 287 names of Chinese medicinal plants, animals, and minerals which appeared in the Spe cimen were presented without Chinese characters, meaning that they had to be identified from their Portuguese romanizations. The book was finally printed in Shanghai in 2013 as Bu Mige wenji: Zhong-xi wenhua jiaoliu yu zhongyi xi chuan 卜彌格文集: 中西文化交流與中醫西傳 (A

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Collection of Michel Boym’s Writings: Chinese and Western Cultural Ex- change and the Westward Transmission of Chinese Medicine).7 In 2010, I obtained access to an article written by Monika Jaglarz, a librarian at the Jagiellonian University, in which I found some information about the “berlinka’s” Chinese manuscripts held by the library.8 It included the following mention:

Manuscripta Sinica—24 manuscripts, mainly Chinese, among them 21 codices and 3 scrolls. Nearly half of them are works on the Chinese language, among others Christian Mentzel’s nine-volume dictionary and the dictionary of Francisco Diaz (il. 2). Further, there are works concerning traditional Chinese medicine, as well as astronomical treatises. These manuscripts are mainly from the 17th century.9

After I had contacted the Manuscript Department to ask about the manuscripts concerning Chinese medicine, it was agreed that I would come to the Jagiellonian Library and examine them. But owing to other en- gagements I was not able to go to Krakow, and it took me six more years to convince myself that I had rightly suspected that the text written on red paper mentioned by Klaproth, as well as some other manuscripts of that small collection, were of Boym’s authorship. While trying in the early 1980s to find any printed copies or microfilms of Boym’s Atlas of China, I had written to the Czartoryski Library in Krakow and been informed that they had in their Prints and Cartogra- phy Department two unidentified seventeenth- or eighteenth-century maps of China. I went to Krakow and identified one of them as a printed Ming map of China dated from the thirty-third year of the Wanli reign (1605).10 It was kept in a sturdy leather case bearing a handwritten inscription indicating that it came from Lublin, a Polish city famous for its monasteries and convents, including those of the Jesuits. Polish histori- ans argued that a map of China had been in the possession of the Polish

7) Translated into Polish by Edward Kajdański; translated into Chinese by Zhang Zhenhui 張振輝 and Zhang Xiping 張西平 (Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 2013). 8) M. Jaglarz, “Zbiory rękopisów i druków orientalnych z byłej Pruskiej Biblioteki Państwowej w Berlinie przechowywanych w Bibliotece Jagiellońskiej” (Collections of Oriental Manu- scripts and Printed Matters from the former Prussian State Library in Berlin preserved in the Jagiellonian Library), in Toruńskie Studia o Sztuce Orientu 3 (2008): 49-52. 9) Ibid., 51. 10) It turned out that the map was unique and that no copy had survived in China.

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Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 02:41:23AM via free access 454 Kajdański king, Jan III Sobieski (1629-1696), and that it might have been brought to Poland by the Jesuits working at the Ming court.11 The provenance of this map remained unknown to the librarians. I was amazed to find that it was identical to the lost map of captain John Saris, the first map of China published in Europe by faithfully reproducing an original Chinese document. That map had been brought by Saris from a base of the Eng- lish East India Company in Bantam, and had been sold in 1614 to Rich- ard Hakluyt, who gave it two years later to his friend Samuel Purchas for publication.12 With the assistance of the librarians it became possible to reconstruct the history of the Lublin copy after it had been acquired by Adam Jerzy Czartoryski. Thanks to his friendship with the future czar Alexander I, Czartoryski became Minister of Foreign Affairs of Russia in 1804. A year later, he sent a diplomatic mission to China headed by count Golovkin, with Czartoryski’s relative, the famous writer and orientalist Jan Potocki, as head of the embassy’s scientific department. Potocki was accompanied by Julius Klaproth, at that time starting his career as eth- nographer and orientalist. Years later, in 1824, at a session of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, Klaproth put forward his proposal to give the name “Jan Potocki’s Archipelago” to a series of eighteen islands in the Yellow Sea (today’s Changshan qundao 長山群島) not shown on any European map at that time but which the embassy on its way to China had found on the above-mentioned Chinese map. By this gesture, Klaproth wished to honor a man who had supported him at the beginning of his scientific career. This name remained in use by Russian and French cartographers in the nineteenth century. I became so fasci- nated with this story that I started to search for details of Klaproth’s biography, and thus found in Lublin the only copy preserved in Poland of his catalogue, which, as noted, contains very useful hints concerning Boym’s writings kept in the Bibliotheca Regiae Berolinense. For the next six years, I was busy publishing four books in Poland and working with my Chinese colleagues on the Chinese edition of selected

11) B. Olszewicz, Polska I Polacy cywilizacjach świata (Poland and Poles in World Civiliza- tion) (Warsaw: Wyd. Głównej Księgarni Wojskowej, 1939), 215; B. Baranowski, Znajomość Wschodu w dawnej Polsce do XVIII wieku (Knowledge of China in Poland before the 18th century) (Lodz: Uniwersytet Łódzki, 1950), 234. 12) S. Purchas, Hakluytes Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes (London, 1625; rpt. Glasgow: Univ. of Glasgow, 1906), vol. 12, p. 471.

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Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 02:41:23AM via free access Michael Boym’s Medicus Sinicus 455 works by Boym. It was only in April 2016 that I again contacted the Man- uscripts Department of the Jagiellonian Library, asking them to check whether any among those twenty-four manuscripts described as “Chi- nese” were written on red paper. The reply was that there were two, and from that moment I was sure that these must be the writings of Michael Boym.

Boym’s Manuscripts and Drawings Found in the Jagiellonian Library The manuscripts held by the Jagiellonian cover the full text of Boym’s Receptarum Sinensium Liber. This work consists of two chapters: the first is a translation of a sixteenth-century compilation containing notably Wang Shuhe’s 王叔和 (4th century AD) work on pulse diagnostics, the Maijing 脈經; the second is Boym’s own compendium of three hundred Chinese simple drugs, apparently those he deemed the most effective ones, largely found in the Shennong bencao 神農本草. (As mentioned above, the lack of Chinese characters made translating the names of such materia medica from Specimen Medicinae Sinicae extremely difficult: yet they are present in Boym’s handwritten original.) Among these papers are also found thirty freehand drawings by Boym, inserted by Cleyer as “anonymous” in Specimen, as well as excerpts from the Bencao gangmu 本草綱目. Let me at this point provide a detailed list of the manuscript copies of Boym’s works found in the Jagiellonian Library. They are:

MS. Sin. 11—This is certainly the manuscript mentioned by Klaproth as written on red paper (no. XII in the chapter “Naturhistorische und Medizinische Werke” of Klaproth’s inventory). It had been described by the Jagiellonian librarians as a work of “Chinese anatomy” because the first few pages, added probably in the late nineteenth century, contain an article titled “Anatomie in China,” published in 1899 under the name of Von W. Cohn. The latter inserted there and discussed Boym’s drawing of man’s internal organs. The internal cover bears the stamp “Ex Biblioth. Regiae Berolinense,” while the opposite page has the inscription “1. Tabu- lae tres (quatuor) magnae, 2. Textus folia 12, 3. Tabulae minores

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orto,” topped by the manuscript’s accession number (MS no. 11). Then follow four large printed tables dated 1577, one of them with the following handwritten title (not in Boym’s hand) pasted on it: “Rudis delineatio singulari partium humani corporis seu musculorum quos inter aut cauterium ad breve tempus adhi- bent, aut cum acu aurea candefacta partem afectam perforant.” Next are nine autograph manuscript pages by Boym, without title: they contain a list of three hundred Chinese simple medicines and certainly constitute the part of Receptarum Sinensium Liber published by Cleyer under the title Medicamenta simplicia. It is a rough copy, written on white paper, including Chinese characters, their Portuguese transcriptions, and short descriptions of the drugs, with their characteristics (according to the “five tastes and four climates”) and main uses. Under every sheet is an unfin- ished manuscript clean copy on red paper, with the names of medicines written in Chinese, but still without a rough Latin text later found in Specimen. The remaining three small pages contain Boym’s rough sketches presenting the sequence of acupuncture and moxibustion points. And finally there are eight small sheets with Boym’s drawings of fourteen vital energy channels—twelve regular, corresponding to “full” (zang 臟) and “hollow” (fu 腑) internal organs, and two additional, as well as the organs themselves, and two drawings showing the Chinese method of mea- suring the pulse.

MS. Sin. 15—A very thick copy-book of about 300 pages sewn together and with the title “Herbarium Chinensium” on the leather back- strip. Only two single pages feature hand-drawn illustrations of the ginseng plant (no. 4 in Boym’s Medicamenta simplicia) and of the tortoise, shown under the Chinese name pie-kia (biejia 鱉甲, the breast-plate of Amyda chinensis, under no. 244). Several tens of pages have been torn out of the copy-book, with no hint of why, when, and by whom this was done.

MS. Sin. 16—Undoubtedly the manuscript described by Klaproth as follows: “Ein kleiner folioband enthaltend Me-kiue-fu-fang, oder die zum Buche Me-kiue, das dem Wang-schu-cho beigeliegt wird,

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gehörigen Recepte; auf rothem Papiere geschrieben.” This is Boym’s translation of Wang Shuhe’s work under the Chinese handwritten title: Maijue fufang: Xi Jin Wang Shuhe zhuan (脈訣附方: 西晉王叔和傳). In all, there are sixty-six sheets with handwritten Chinese characters, Latin transcriptions in the Portuguese way, and translation opposite each character.

Let me try to clarify as far as possible the fate of these Boym manuscripts, beginning with Boym’s own explanation, presented in his preface to the Receptarum Sinensium Liber:13

In this book, there are presented medicines used for treating diseases detected by pulse diagnostics, which I was anxious to determine scrupulously and precisely to make them useful for consultation [in Europe]. If I have committed mistakes, these happened contrary to my intentions and are mainly a result of my lack of experience. It seems to me that there are also drugs which are completely unknown [in Europe] and for that reason it is impossible to identify them and to find them in European books. I was anxious to find a remedy for these difficulties, hence the proposal of preparing an herbarium of Chinese drugs which are used in China, with their merits discussed in the corresponding descriptions and with inserted drawings. However, even though I have collected materials for this work over a long period, devoting to this aim all my free time, I still am not in possession of much and, if God permits, will finish this work. A long time ago, when I depart- ed from China to Europe and stopped at Goa, I had enough money for my expen- ditures in Poland and asked [probably his friends, or Jesuits from Macau] to send me the Chinese drugs, the whole catalogue of which I enclose here. This was necessary to enable me to discuss them further with Europeans and to learn from my own experience whether there are similar [drugs in Europe] that can be used to replace them. In the end, this wish was impossible to realize at that time. I also tried to purchase these drugs from merchants in India or Macau and took care to have their names in this book written in Chinese characters. Some of them, like for example rhubarb [Rheum tanguticum] or the Chinese root [Smilax china], were collected and have already been delivered to Europe. There are, however, many other valuable drugs native to and collected in the different parts of the Chinese Empire.

It is clear from this preface that besides describing those Chinese medicinal plants that “had been collected and already delivered to Europe”

13) See Alia praefatione ante receptarum librum ponenda, in Clavis Medica, 10-12.

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(as rhubarb and the Chinese root described by Boym in Flora Sinensis), Boym worked on two projects of “herbariums.” One was “a small herbarium (herbarium parvum),” that is, “this book,” the whole catalogue counting about three hundred simple medicines, “which I enclose here,” providing their names “written in Chinese characters”—and this is undoubtedly the Receptarum Sinensium Liber found in manuscripts MS Sin. 11 and MS Sin. 16. Another “Chinese herbarium” was under prepara- tion when the preface was written, which Boym expected to complete “if God permits” (si Deus voluerit). This in my opinion corresponds to MS Sin. 15, which was destroyed by someone after Boym’s death.

The Disappearance and Dispersion of Boym’s Medical Works and their Appropriation by Others For many years, I have tried to establish the circumstances in which Boym’s medical works disappeared, then were scattered, and eventually resurfaced in Europe with the omission of the author’s name. I found it necessary to consider the role played in this affair by Boym’s companion during his last journey from Europe to China, Philippe Couplet (1623- 1693). In mid-1657, Boym traveled from Lisbon to Goa, leading seven young Jesuits, one of whom was Couplet. At that point, he learned that, as a result of conditions imposed by the Manchus—the withdrawal of all support for the Ming court—he had become, because of his mission to Europe, persona non grata in Macau. He was therefore forced to part with his companions and made his way by land to San Thomé (today’s Madras) on the Coromandel coast of India, in the hope of finding a ship there sailing to one of the Burmese ports. From there he planned to travel by land directly to the Chinese province of Yunnan, which was still under Ming rule. Since he could not find such a ship, he boarded a Mos- lem ship calling at the ports of Malacca and Tenasserim on the Malayan Peninsula. He then proceeded to the port city of Thon Buri, which belonged to the Kingdom of Siam, and to Siam’s capital, Ajutthai (Ayuthia). There, he tried to receive permission to travel to Laos, which also bor- dered on Yunnan, but this was denied and he returned to Thon Buri, where he again met with the Jesuits who had accompanied him earlier,

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Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 02:41:23AM via free access Michael Boym’s Medicus Sinicus 459 waiting for a ship to take them to Macau. It was then that he handed over to Couplet an already completed study of Chinese medicine, being confident that Couplet would take it to Macau, and from there send it back to Europe for publication. Now, the Dutch had a trading factory in the vicinity of Thon Buri, and unluckily for Boym, Couplet, who came from Flanders and spoke perfect Dutch, made the acquaintance there of a Dutch factor called Jan van Rick. Instead of taking the manuscript to Macau as he had promised, he gave it to the Dutchman, presumably in order to have it sent by Dutch vessel to Europe. At the time, the Dutch Protestants were the greatest rivals and foes of the Portuguese (and also, of course, of the Jesuits) on the trade routes to Japan and China. As might have been foreseen, the Governor of Batavia, Johann Maetsuyker (1606-1678) confiscated Boym’s medical text. There, it came into the hands of some doctors of the Dutch East India Company who were interested in Chinese medicine, and for twenty years all trace of the manuscript was lost. In 1671 and 1676, however, excerpts from the work were published anonymously in France14 and Italy.15 What happened to Boym’s medical manuscripts between 1658, when he gave them to Couplet, and 1676, when more than half of them were sent to a publisher in Amsterdam by Cleyer? My research confirms that Boym, like many other authors sending their work from Asian countries to Europe, did not write just one copy, but kept one for himself in case the ship transporting the original sank.16 We know from various printed sources (Eva Kraft adds several unpublished ones to the list17) that the complete manuscript of Medicus Sinicus given to Couplet in Siam was

14) Les secrets de la medecine des Chinois, consistant en la parfaite connaissance du pouls : Envoyez de la Chine par un François, Homme de grand mérite (Grenoble: chez Philippes Char- vys, 1671). 15) Secreti Svelati Della medicina Chinesi, cioe della cognitione de Polsi, de prognostici di morte & altre utili curiosità. Tramandati dalla China in Italia da un Francese, Uomo di molta stima. Trasportati nella lingua Italiana dal Sig. Pietro Francesco D’Amphous di Torino, Dottor di Leggi. Dedicati al Molto Illustre Sig. Bartolomeo Guidetti, Medico eccellentissimo. In Milano MDCLXXVI, Apresso à Francesco Vigone. Conlic. de Superiori & Privil. 16) His general map of China has been found in three copies. The manuscripts kept in the Archivum Romanum and sent almost certainly to Kircher are copies of the original bearing corrections in Boym’s hand. The existence of two copies of Boym’s medical work is confirmed both by Couplet’s letter quoted below (see footnote 42) and by documents in the Algemeen Rijksarchiv. 17) Eva Kraft, “Frühe Chinesische Studien in Berlin,” Medizinhistorisches Journal 2 (1976): 121.

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Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 02:41:23AM via free access 460 Kajdański lost in Batavia and that certain portions found their way with some phy- sicians and botanists there; we will see below what happened to the copy Boym kept with him to his death, which also passed through the hands of Couplet. Couplet’s conduct has aroused the suspicions of several students of Boym’s biography. The earliest was the German historian and orientalist Teophilus Siegfried Bayer (1694-1738), who was connected with the Rus- sian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. As I wrote in my Ambasador Państwa Środka, Bayer remarked in his Museum Sinicum18 on the link between the disappearance of Boym’s work and the unsuccessful embassy sent by the Dutch to Peking (1655-57) with the aim of establishing trade relations with China. In Bayer’s opinion, the Dutch blamed the fi- asco of their mission (not entirely without good reason) on Adam Schall, the superior of the Jesuits at the court in Peking, and the seizure of Boym’s works was a sort of revenge taken by the Dutch on the Jesuits. Bayer’s view was shared by the French sinologist and doctor Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat,19 who went so far as to call Cleyer a “plagiarist publisher.” However, Paul Pelliot considered Cleyer’s actions as positive, “contrary to the legend cited by Bayer and spread by Rémusat” and others, because they saved Boym’s work from oblivion.20 This is a thesis that, in my opinion, requires some clarification. For if indeed Cleyer did not know whose work he was printing, stipulating only that it came from a “European learned man,” one can of course concur with it. However, Pelliot’s critical judgment of Bayer’s information is groundless, because when Bayer resided in Berlin in 1717 at the invitation of the Elector of Brandenburg, he came across a range of original documents, including a letter from Couplet to Mentzel dated 26 April 1687 in which he confirmed that both Specimen medicinae sinicae and Clavis medica had been written by Boym. Bolesław Szcześniak considered that “Couplet really did not care too much for Boym’s literary ownership of his texts; this fact is contrary to the traditional respect of

18) Bayer, Museum Sinicum (Petersburg: Ex Typographia Academiae Imperatoriae, 1730), 28-30. 19) Biographie universelle ancienne et moderne (2nd ed., Paris: Mme C. Desplaces, 1854), vol. 5, p. 390. 20) P. Pelliot, “Michel Boym,” T’oung Pao 30 (1934): 145.

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Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 02:41:23AM via free access Michael Boym’s Medicus Sinicus 461 the Jesuits towards the authorial rights of their fellow members of the Order.”21 Let us look more closely at Couplet’s role in all this confusion concerning the disappearance of Boym’s medical works and their publication in Europe. After handing over to Jan van Ryck the manuscript of Medicus Sinicus he had received from Boym, Couplet sailed to Macau, where he remained until April 1659. He was then directed to engage in missionary work in southern China. From 1662 onward, he lived near Fuzhou, where a Dutch fleet lay at that time, anchored by the coast of Fujian province under the command of Balthazar Bort (1626-1684), awaiting the return from Peking of the Dutch trade mission. It was counting on gaining permission to sell the goods it carried and on buy- ing silk, tea, and porcelain in China. However, the Chinese authorities in Peking did not agree to the landing of Dutch goods and ordered the fleet to leave the coast of China. The first reference to Boym’s Clavis medica appears in Couplet’s correspondence in 1662. In a letter to Balthazar Bort, dated 12 October 1662, he writes that this work was sent to Maet- suyker, the Governor of Batavia, along with a letter addressed to Martino Martini. Eva Kraft asks why, and considers this step to be incomprehen- sible.22 I share her amazement. Because of his personal relationship with Boym, Martini was not the person on whom one could rely to send Boym’s work to Europe for printing. They were not only rivals as scien- tists and writers, but stood on opposite sides of the political and military divide. Even greater amazement should be aroused by the later discovery of so many of Boym’s manuscripts and books in the library of the Great Elector of Brandenburg in Berlin. It is known that Friedrich Wilhelm (1620-1688) was interested in China and Japan, and even wished to set up his own East India Company on the model of the Dutch company, and that he allocated considerable sums of money for the creation of a “Chinese library.” Its curator in the 1670s was Andreas Müller (1630-1694).

21) B. Szcześniak, “The Writings of Michael Boym,” Monumenta Serica 14 (1955): 490-538. 22) “Warum dem Boymischen Werk ein Brief an P. Martini beigelegen haben soll, ist mir unverständlich.” Cf. E. Kraft, “Christian Mentzel, Philippe Couplet, Andreas Cleyer und die Chinesische Medizin. Notizen aus Handschriften des 17.Jahrhunderts,” in Fernöstliche Kul- tur: Tôyô bunko. Wolf Haenisch zugeeignet von seinem Marburger Studienkreis, ed. Helga Wormit (Marburg: Elwert, 1975), 186.

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Müller’s successor was Christian Mentzel (1622-1701), already mentioned. Julius Klaproth is the next scholar, after Bayer, who contributed to revealing the truth about the fate of Boym’s manuscripts and of the books that helped him write his medical texts. After acquainting himself with the Chinese and Manchu collections of the Great Elector of Bran- denburg, Klaproth prepared a catalogue of them.23 In his preface to it, he writes:

The foundation stone of this collection are the purchases that Elector Friedrich Wilhelm the Great made from the possessions of the Dutch East India Company, especially in Batavia, through the efforts of Georg Eberhard Rumpf and Andreas Cleyer, purchases that were the work of Andreas Müller and especially Christian Mentzel.24

The name of Rumpf, like that of Cleyer, appears in the majority of the publications related to the disappearance of Boym’s works. Rumpf came to the Dutch possessions in Asia much earlier than Cleyer, and it was he who passed on to Cleyer part of Boym’s manuscripts, which Cleyer published in 1682. The conclusion is clear: Boym’s materials (as well as those of other missionaries, such as Aleni, Martini, and Diaz) could reach Bat- avia only on board the ships of Bort and his second Constantijn Nobel’s Dutch fleet, which had been lying off the coast of Fujian for several years, waiting for the return of the Dutch embassy from the capital. Cou- plet was often a guest aboard these vessels (and, for their part, Bort and Nobel had plenty of opportunities to visit the Jesuits in Fujian and Can- ton). Besides, they maintained steady contacts through Chinese Chris- tians faithful to Couplet, who had many more possibilities of passing letters and other items to the Dutch without the knowledge of the Chi- nese authorities. At the end of the 1660s, the Jesuits (and several Do- minicans), who were in a very difficult material situation, sold what they could to the Dutch who were stationed nearby. And Rumpf and Cleyer

23) These were not just the manuscripts and books that reached Berlin via Batavia. Some of them, numbering a hundred and fifty, were in Müller’s private possession, and were later sent by him to the library of the Marienstifts-Gymnasium in Stettin/Szczecin. See D. F. Ebert, Historiam Bibliothecae Templi Collegiati B. Mariae Dicati (Stettin, 1783?), viii-x. 24) Klaproth, Verzeichnis, preface.

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Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 02:41:23AM via free access Michael Boym’s Medicus Sinicus 463 knew via Müller and Mentzel that the Elector had allocated a large sum of money for additions to his Eastern library. Very credible information relating to Couplet’s activities in those years, principally from the archives of the Dutch East India Company in The Hague, was presented by Paul Demaerel at a scholarly symposium in Belgium in 1986.25 From the first appearance of the Dutch fleet in the Fuzhou area, Couplet exerted himself to contact the Dutch command- ers, which may seem odd considering the hostility between the Portu- guese and Dutch at the time, and between Catholics and protestant Calvinists. From the notes in the Dagh-Register Batavia (the day reports of the Dutch East India Company, kept in the Algemeen Rijksarchiv in The Hague) it emerges that Couplet knew Cleyer as early as 1666 and called him his best friend. In February 1669, Couplet sent to Cleyer from Canton what was probably the first “part” of Boym’s manuscripts. There was, among other medical texts, the section of Boym’s work called by himself Medicamenta simplicia, a part of his Receptarum Sinensium Liber. It was a compendium of 289 Chinese herbal, animal, and mineral materia medica,26 which Couplet, Cleyer, and Mentzel would later call the Chinese Herbarium.27 Paul Demaerel discovered in the Dutch archives confirmation of the dispatch of this work of Boym’s by Couplet from Canton to Cleyer. He gives 12 February 1669 as the date of dispatch, and the name of the man who took the package from Couplet, Constan- tijn Nobel, second-in-command of the Dutch military-mercantile fleet that returned to Batavia after their long wait for the return of the embassy after its disastrous trip to Peking.28 The date of the dispatch of part of Boym’s manuscripts by Couplet to Cleyer via Nobel is confirmed by Eva Kraft.29 In a reply dated 28 June 1669, Cleyer sent Couplet 300 Dutch florins and a request to send him more medical writings, showing particular interest in a Latin translation of a text dealing with “Chinese

25) P. Demaerel, “Couplet and the Dutch,” paper read at a symposium organized by the Ver- biest Foundation in Leuven in Belgium, 11-13 September 1986. 26) Ibid., p. 12. 27) Herbarium parvum sinicis vocabulis, qua indici sunt inserta, constans. This was the manuscript of Medicamenta simplicia later printed under Cleyer’s name in Specimen Medicinae Sinicae (without Chinese characters for the names of materia medica). 28) P. Demaerel, “Couplet and the Dutch.” 29) Kraft, “Christian Mentzel, Philippe Couplet, Andreas Cleyer und die Chinesische Med- izin,” 179.

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Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 02:41:23AM via free access 464 Kajdański methods of checking the pulse, if possible with illustrations.”30 One can draw an unambiguous conclusion from this correspondence: Couplet had in his possession a second copy of Boym’s medical work (the first, as we saw, was seized by Maetsuyker, broken up, and parts of it got lost before Cleyer arrived in Batavia). Cleyer must have known about this from his correspondence with Couplet and wished to obtain this copy, or rather buy it from him. It is clear from the Dutch correspondence that as a result of the anti- Christian movement that broke out in Peking in 1664 and extended throughout China, the Jesuits who found themselves in their famous “Canton exile” were, in 1669, in a very difficult financial situation.31 They had to live there with only “rice and firewood” at their disposal, because the Portuguese ambassador and his eighty-person retinue had squan- dered all available money, including the amounts designated for the an- nual upkeep of the Jesuits.32 Couplet turned to the Dutch with a request for a loan of two or three thousand florins, but the Dutch refused. In this situation, Couplet and the other Jesuits undertook to arrange various matters for the Dutch, relating to supplies, payments to the Chinese authorities, and others. For these services, the Dutch paid them in cash, in food, and in cloth for garments. They also bought from the Jesuits various other things, described in the documents as “curiosities.” Appar- ently, Couplet was quick to understand that the interest in China and in Chinese medicine that was felt in Batavia and in Europe might offer an additional opportunity to make some money.33 The florin was a coin containing 3.5 grams of gold, and the three hundred florins that Cleyer sent to Couplet in payment of Boym’s manuscripts constituted at that time a considerable sum (but we know now that the Jesuits needed ten times more for their maintenance). From information in the Dagh-Reg-

30) Demaerel, “Couplet and the Dutch,” 14. 31) Twenty-five missionaries were interned in Canton from September 1667 to September 1671; Demaerel, “Couplet and the Dutch,” 9. 32) Ibid., 12 33) Cleyer was not the only person in Batavia who was interested in Chinese books (including those having belonged to Boym) and sent them on later to Berlin. Another one is the Dutch admiral van Lier (1593-1676), who sold his collection of Chinese books to the library of the Elector of Brandenburg in the period when Christian Mentzel was its curator.

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Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 02:41:23AM via free access Michael Boym’s Medicus Sinicus 465 ister and in Specimen Medicinae Sinicae,34 it appears that Couplet de- layed sending Cleyer the entirety of Boym’s manuscripts, sending them instead in successive installments, accompanied with letters dated 12 February and 20 October 1669, and 5 and 15 November 1670.35 This is not the place to discuss the moral aspects of Couplet’s actions, if only because the gaps in the information we have at present are too many. For example, Demaerel draws attention to the fact that on 18 Jan- uary 1669 Couplet informed the Dutch that a certain Frenchman had to travel from Canton to Tonkin and that he could, in secret from the Chi- nese authorities, take correspondence from them to Batavia.36 Edward Malatesta has also reminded us that information about Boym’s where- abouts immediately before his death, obtained from Andreas Zheng after the Jesuit had died, was brought from China to Tonkin by a Frenchman mentioned in the letters as “Mons. De Berito.”37 I am convinced that this was the person who received from Couplet parts of Boym’s medical works as well as the “anonymous Frenchman” who, back in Europe, published them in Grenoble in 1671. The history of the publication of part of this work in 1682 in Germany under the title Specimen Medicinae Sinicae is much better known thanks, in part, to the writings of Eva Kraft, al- though not all of her information is consistent with what was later discovered in the Dagh-Register.

34) Cleyer includes in this book several fragments of letters by Couplet with dates, but without giving their author’s name. 35) The manuscript of Specimen published in 1682, which Cleyer asked for in a letter of 28 June 1669, was sent to him by Couplet on 20 October of the same year. It has been found in the Berlin Library with the original title Praxis explorandi pulsus a Sinensibus, without author’s name. Kraft quotes the Latin titles of individual chapters and tables, from which it is quite clear that the manuscript belonged to Boym: see, for example, the final three chapters of Clavis medica: Caput 18, 19 and Caput ultimum. The remaining seventeen chapters were published in 1686, at last under Boym’s name. Specimen included also his Medicamenta Simplicia, with details of 289 Chinese medicines; two prefaces by Boym were printed in Clavis medica in 1686. See Kraft, “Christian Mentzel,” 179, 189-91. 36) Demaerel, “Couplet and the Dutch,” 11. 37) E. Malatesta, “The Tragedy of Michael Boym,” in Actes du Ve colloque international de sinologie, Chantilly 1989 (Taipei-Paris, 1995), 368. Malatesta refers to the manuscript entitled Relations du Voyage du Tonkin du Mons. De Berito (1669) found in the ARSI in Rome. Unfor- tunately, I was not able to examine this text.

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Boym’s Heritage, Based on the Documents Preserved after WWII in the Berlin Library and in the Dutch Archives Let us now confront Boym’s statement in his preface to Receptarum Si- nensium Liber with the results of Kraft’s research carried out in Berlin in the 1970s. She found that Cleyer sent the first parcel of Boym’s writings to Europe in 1676, to be printed in Amsterdam. However, they remained unpublished until 1681, when Sebastian Scheffer decided to print them in Frankfurt am Main. According to Kraft, the parcel consisted of nine separate items (Stücke), all of which (with the exception of Boym’s Pul- sibus Explanatis Medendi Regula) were those sent in 1663 by Couplet to Cleyer in Batavia.38 Only six items are mentioned on the title page of the Specimen: the remaining three were, in my opinion, the two parts of Re- ceptarum Sinensium Liber, bearing a separate pagination, and a set of forty drawings by Boym, now in the Jagiellonian Library. The second manuscript was, according to Kraft,

sent directly to Christian Mentzel. It had a title: Clavis Medica ad chinarum doctrinam de pulsibus, and was a copy of the translation work (Übersetzungwerk) of Mi- chael Boym. The title-page attached to it neglected Boym, but contained the names of Cleyer and Couplet. The present wording of the title was probably formulated in Nuremberg.

Kraft repeats here Pelliot’s statement that Clavis medica was a translation from the Chinese, which I have discussed in my previous essay in T’oung Pao.39 As for the title of the work, the original title formulated by Boym was in fact: R.P. Michaelis Boymi Poloni, é Societate Jesu, Clavis medica ad Sinarum doctrinam de pulsibus,40 the only change effected by the editors in Nuremberg being to replace “ad Sinarum doctrinam” with “ad Chinarum doctrinam.” I incline toward Kraft’s opinion that Chris- tian Mentzel played a positive role in revealing that Boym was the author of the work, because after receiving the manuscript of Clavis medica on 18 February 1684, he wrote to the publishers that giving the names of Cleyer and Couplet as co-authors and omitting Boym was dishonorable

38) Kraft, “Frühe Chinesische Studien in Berlin,” 121; “Christian Mentzel,” 158-96. 39) “Michael Boym’s Medicus Sinicus,” 181-82. 40) It is found in its original version on p. 19 of Clavis Medica.

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Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 02:41:23AM via free access Michael Boym’s Medicus Sinicus 467 and dishonest, an example of Unehrenhäftigkeit.41 I consider now that it was indeed Mentzel, through his persistence, which Kraft documents, who finally extracted from Couplet the admission that “the whole work was written by Boym.” But it was only three years later that, under the pressure of Mentzel, Couplet finally admitted that Boym was the author of all the medical works published in Frankfurt and Nuremberg:

Everything that the eminent F. Cleyer wrote on pulses and that was for the first time presented in print and spread abroad was sent to him in instalments from China out of Michał Boym’s book, whose father was the first doctor of King Zyg- munt. Unhappily I sent this book from the Kingdom of Siam to New Batavia in the year 1658, and thence it was sent to Europe. But [the Dutch], offended by the failure of their embassy to the Emperor’s Court in Peking, which they ascribed to Fa- ther Adam Schall, destroyed the whole work, of which F. Cleyer gathered together several extracts. However, the whole work, or Clavis Medica ad Sinarum de pulsibus, was written by Boym.42

There is an important contradiction in this letter, however. Specifically, Couplet confirms that he sent the text in 1658 from the Kingdom of Siam to Batavia; but at the same time, two lines higher up, he claims that everything that Cleyer printed was sent to him in installments from China. Thus, in its entirety, or in installments? From New Batavia, or from Chi- na? And sent by whom? The documents in the Algemeen Rijksarchiv leave no room for doubt that there were two copies of Boym’s work. One was broken up and scattered in Batavia, while the other was passed on to the Jesuits in Macau after Boym’s death by his companion Andreas Zheng, as can be seen in a letter of the Jesuit superior in Tonkin, F. Ono- frius Borges.43 And so it must have been none other but Couplet himself who sent this version of the text in installments from China to Batavia. Moreover, we can read on the title-page of the 1686 Clavis Medica that “the whole copy of the work” was brought by Couplet from China (Totius

41) Kraft, “Christian Mentzel,” 172. The title page finally decided on in Nuremberg mentions Cleyer as the person who gathered scattered extracts of the work and made them available in Europe (“in lucem Europaeum produciit”), and Couplet as the one who “cleansed them of errors” and took them to Europe. 42) I received a manuscript copy of this letter in 1988 thanks to the kindness of Paul Demae- rel of Leuven. It is kept in the University of Glasgow Library, Hunterian Museum, sygn. U.6.17, fol. 175-180. 43) See Malatesta, “The Tragedy of Michael Boym,” 367.

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Operis Exemplar, é China recens allatum… Procuratore R. P. Philippo Cou- pletio). If a part of this work was sent to Europe from Batavia a few years earlier, then the one brought from China was certainly a different one. From the publications of Kraft, based on materials from German and Dutch archives, a somewhat different picture emerges of the respective roles of Andreas Cleyer, Christian Mentzel, and Phillipe Couplet in the complicated story of the disappearance and breaking up of Boym’s works. Kraft’s arguments convinced me that Cleyer may not have known that Boym was the author of the texts he received from Couplet. In Spec- imen Medicinae Sinicae, he calls the author a “European learned man” (“ab erudio Europaeo conscripti”), and he insists that he himself is only the editor/publisher. Kraft also draws attention to the fact that this is even more emphasized in Cleyer’s foreword, which was not printed by the German publisher. The accusations of plagiarism made by earlier scholars, from Bayer to Szcześniak,44 seem therefore not fully justified. When Andreas Cleyer sent to Europe the manuscript of Specimen Me- dicinae Sinicae in 1676, he was chief doctor of the Company in Batavia. As mentioned earlier, he intended first to have the work printed in Am- sterdam, where the manuscript remained for five years. It was then sent from Amsterdam to Germany thanks to Cleyer’s acquaintance (through correspondence) with Christian Mentzel. Mentzel was curator of the library of the Elector of Brandenburg in Berlin, as well as his court doctor, and for many years he had published his natural and medical observa- tions in the yearbook of the Academia Naturae Curiosum (the predeces- sor of the German Academy of Sciences), which he co-edited. Through Mentzel, Cleyer made the acquaintance of another well-known German doctor from Frankfurt am Main, Sebastian Scheffer, who, in 1681, decided to have the manuscript printed. Kraft, who saw the manuscript in the Berlin Library, mentions Cleyer’s comment written in his own hand (not featured in the printed version), to the effect that he had not altered the text in any way. Cleyer’s afterword, entitled “Eine Zugabe ist ein Elen- chus,” was not printed either.45 Cleyer appears on the title page of the 1682 edition as “editor” (“Edidit Andreas Cleyer”). Kraft is convinced that, as already said, the accusations of plagiarism made for over three

44) Bayer, Museum Sinicum, 26-30; Szcześniak, “The Writings of Michael Boym.” 45) Kraft, “Frühe Chinesische Studien,” 121.

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Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 02:41:23AM via free access Michael Boym’s Medicus Sinicus 469 centuries are not fully reflected in the documents. Still, the question has yet to be answered why Boym’s name figures neither in the title nor in the contents of the book published in 1682. The most important and controversial part of Boym’s works—the second part of Receptarum Sinensium Liber, known either as Medica- menta Simplicia or as Herbarium Parvum Sinensium—was often cited by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors, though the circumstances of its publication in Frankfurt in 1681 and 1682 by two different printers are still not fully explained. All Chinese names in this work were found in Christian Mentzel’s Index Nominum Plantarum as early as in 1682,46 the year when Cleyer’s Specimen was published. As I mentioned in my 1987 essay,47 Mentzel speaks there of a reputed work by Cleyer titled Herbarium parvum Sinicis vocabulis, qua indici sunt inserta, being a separate work published in Frankfurt in 1681.48 The same information concerning two publications of 1681 and 1682 by Cleyer on Chinese medicine can be found in the German edition of J. B. Du Halde’s work.49 Du Halde gives the publisher’s name: August Vindel, 1681. But Specimen Medicinae Sinicae was eventually published in 1682 by J. P. Zubrodt. According to Wolfgang Michel, the explanation of such divergences can be found in the correspondence of Sebastian Scheffer with Cleyer in Batavia. Ac- cording to his information, Scheffer wrote in letters dated 21 May 1681 and 23 July 1681 that the work was still not finished, that the printer had died leaving debts, and that as a result his printing house was closed. A new publisher was finally found, but then the book was printed without Cleyer’s foreword, with many errors, and with wrong page numbers.50 I mentioned in 1987 that many European botanists were interested in the medicinal plants described by Boym in Medicamenta Simplicia, and that the book was widely circulated in Europe in the decades after its publication in Nuremberg.51 Albert von Haller spoke of this Parvum

46) Ch. Mentzel, Index Nominum Plantarum Multilinguis (Berlin, 1682). 47) “Michael Boym’s Medicus Sinicus,” 178-79. 48) Ibid., 179. 49) J. B. Du Halde, Ausführliche Beschreibung des Chinesisches Reichs und der grossen Tartarey (Rostock, 1747), vol. 2, p. 55. 50) W. Michel, “Ein ‘Ostindianisches Sendschreiben’ – Andreas Cleyers Brief an Sebastian Scheffer vom 20. Dezember 1683,” offprint from Doku-Futsu bungaku kenkyū (Studien zur deutschen und französischen Literatur) 41 (1991). 51) “Michael Boym’s Medicus Sinicus,” 179.

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Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 02:41:23AM via free access 470 Kajdański herbarium vocabulis Sinicis constans as a libellus (printed in 1680!), not a liber, and said he could not find a copy of it.52 James Cunningham, an English physician and botanist, had the booklet with him and used it to identify Chinese medicinal plants during his stay in Macau, Canton, and the Chusan (Zhoushan) islands near Ningbo at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.53 My personal opinion is that it is possible that some copies of Medicamenta Simplicia were printed already in 1680 or in 1681 and sold by the inheritors of the deceased printer to re- duce the losses, so that it became the best known among all of Boym’s writings. It is difficult to define Philippe Couplet’s role in the whole affair. We know from Boym’s own account that, being compelled to travel by land through India, Persia, Armenia, and Turkey to reach Europe, he left in Goa part of his manuscripts and the majority of his Chinese books, which he retrieved from there in 1657 on his return trip to China. Once again, he left part of them at the Jesuit Mission in Kecho (today’s Hanoi) when he set off for the Chinese province of Guangxi with Andreas Zheng and two Christian Chinese as bearers, whence he planned to reach Yunnan, which was at that time still in the hands of Ming forces. He died from the effects of his travails and exhaustion in the province of Guangxi, somewhere on the “Royal Road” used by the kings of Tonkin when travelling to offer tribute to Peking. He had with him copies of at least some works on Chinese medicine, since, as we have seen, he wrote in the foreword to Receptarum Sinensium Liber that it was still unfin- ished and “if God permits, I will complete this work.”54 We know from his writings that he had contacts with Christian doctors at the court of Yongli. Boym calls them “Christian mandarins.” (He obtained from one

52) Ibid. See also A. von Haller, Bibliotheca Botanica (2 vols., Zürich, 1771-1772), 1: 585. 53) A Book of Chinese Plants with the Chinese Names and their Explication in Latin Sent by Mr. Cunningham to Mr. Petiver, British Library, Additional MS no. 5292. In his letter from Chusan to the Royal Society in London he says, for example, that Hu-chu-u (heshaowu, Polygonum multiflorum), no. 84 in Medicamenta Simplicia, “prolongs life and turns grey hair to black.” 54) See the preface to Receptarum Sinensium Liber, entitled Alia praefatione ante Recepta- rum Librum Ponenda, and its supplement Annotatio ad hanc praefationem de receptarum liber. See E. Kajdański, Sekrety chińskiej medycyny: Medicus Sinicus Michała Boyma (Secrets of Chinese Medicine: The Medicus Sinicus of Michael Boym) (Warsaw: Neriton, 2010), 210-13; pp. 55-59 include the complete text of Boym’s foreword addressed to European doctors.

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Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 02:41:23AM via free access Michael Boym’s Medicus Sinicus 471 of them a manuscript relating to examining the sick by inspecting the condition and color of the tongue, which Cleyer later placed in the Spec- imen Medicinae Sinicae.) The commissioning of Andreas Zheng by Yong- li to be Boym’s companion on his journey to Europe was very important for his mastering of the theory of traditional Chinese medicine and Chi- nese medical philosophy. Boym went through a great deal with Zheng, and they were joined in friendship for the next nine years, right up to the time of Boym’s death. But Boym left little information about Zheng. We know only that he came from the family of “a Christian Mandarin,” that he possessed the military title of youji 游擊 and that after his arrival in Europe he had acquired a complete mastery of Latin (it is possible that he knew Portuguese too). Edward Malatesta has provided some intrigu- ing information about Zheng. He writes that, according to letters of the superior of the Jesuits in Tonkin, Onofrio Borges, and of the Vicar Gen- eral Bishop of Tonkin, François Deydier, after Boym’s death Andreas buried him and carried off Papal letters and other important items; and that “after losing Boym, he was compelled to find some means of living, traveling from village to village and curing the sick who wanted to be cured by medicines prepared with his own hands.”55 At the news of Boym’s illness, Father Borges sent three of his servants to him, with whom Andreas was supposed to return to Kecho. “What became of An- dreas,” writes Malatesta, “remains a mystery.”56 I am convinced that he managed to return to Macau, something attested to by Couplet’s subse- quent possession of a copy of Boym’s medical works. We know however, thanks to Kraft’s research, that Cleyer did not sim- ply give to the Elector Chinese manuscripts and books, but that he also sold many of them to the library.57 Among these manuscripts and books were items relating to the history of China, such as a chronology of Chi- nese emperors, the Chinese language (including dictionaries prepared

55) Malatesta, “The Tragedy of Michael Boym,” 353-70. I would not exclude the possibility that since he was healing people and preparing medicines, he could be the son of that “Chris- tian mandarin” from whom Boym received the text mentioned above about making diagno- ses by observing the state of a patient’s tongue. (Doctors in China at that time usually prepared their sons for their profession from childhood.) 56) Ibid., 366. 57) As noted above in n.33, a second major supplier of Chinese books to the library of Fried- rich Wilhelm was the Dutch admiral van Lier of the East India Company, probably Bort’s subordinate while his ships lay off the coast of China.

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Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 02:41:23AM via free access 472 Kajdański by the Jesuits, and their prayer books), and the philosophy of Confucius. By chance, or perhaps not, the chronology of Chinese emperors, which Boym prepared before his arrival in Rome, as confirmed by both Kircher and Martini, appeared later in print under the names of Müller, Couplet, and Mentzel.58 Indeed, it is difficult to see it as “chance” that the beginning of Couplet’s chronology (the year 2697 BCE, that is, the beginning of the rule of the Yellow Emperor) is exactly the same as that calculated many years earlier by Boym. I am not ready to judge Couplet’s behavior in simple terms, as have, for example, Scześniak and Demaerel. Demaerel came to the conclusion that Couplet worked “as a political and trade informant of the Dutch.”59 Recent publications on the subject rarely raise the problem of the political situation both in China and in Europe, or of the schism in the Je- suit Order itself at the same time. Boym, just like his superior Andreas Koffler (who died at the hands of the Manchus shortly after Boym had left China) and Alvaro Semedo (who died in China before Boym’s return), was loyal to the end to the Christian court of the southern Ming emperor Yongli. The Peking Jesuits, in contrast, quickly went over to the Manchus. For example, Martino Martini agreed at his first meeting with a Manchu officer to “transfer his loyalty” to the occupiers, which was confirmed by the agreement to immediately shave one’s head and wear the pigtail. For fear of being accused of supporting the Ming court, the new Provincial and Inspector forbade Boym to travel to China via Ma- cau, and Boym himself began to be treated as a renegade, damaging the interests of the Order and its relations with the new authorities in Chi- na. Couplet had above him superiors who were manifestly hostile to Boym, and this certainly had some influence on his later actions. In any event, it is obvious that we still lack much of the information that would make us certain that everything about these matters has at last been cleared up.

58) A. Müller, Basilicon Sinense (Berlin (?), 1679); P. Couplet, Tabula chronologica monarchae sinicae (Paris, 1686); Ch. Mentzel, Kurtze chinesische Chronologia oder Zeit-Register aller chinesischen Kayser (Berlin, 1696). 59) Demaerel, “Couplet and the Dutch,” 8.

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