Chong Hai lai xin: Yesuhui dangan zhong de wan Qing Zhongguo difangshi 崇海来信 - 耶稣会档案中的晚清中国地方史 (Letters from Chongming and Haimen: Chinese local history in the Jesuit archives)

Abstract

The fame of letters written by Jesuit missionaries in China is due largely to the significance of those letters as sources of knowledge of China for Europeans in seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This essay introduces unpublished letters from a later period of history, held in the Jesuit Archives in Vanves. The letters selected for this study were written by missionaries active in Chongming and Haimen counties, Jiangsu province, in the middle of the nineteenth century. Through transcription, translation, and interpretative commentary, the essay demonstrates the value of these materials as sources of local history, arguing that the very fact of their “strangeness” helped make the mi..