Eugenio Menegon (Boston University), « The Early Modern Maritime World and the Missionary Enterprise in East Asia,1550-1840 »

Early modern Maritime Asia was a confusing morass of contested sovereignties and geopolitical rivalries. Yet the seaways of Asia also fostered cultural exchange and economic integration. The liminal maritime zone surrounding China remained a paradox between seas and ports teeming with legal and illegal exchange and governmental policies attempting to monopolize and restrict that exchange. Vast and fluid, maritime China long hindered state control and fostered connections determined as much by bottom-up economic and cultural logic as by top-down official impositions. State control, evasion from that control, and interloping within the interstices of China’s maritime world literally bound an array of actors and locales for distinct but interrelated goals. In maritime China, seen as a social, economic, political, and geographic space, human actors (Chinese and Western merchants and businessmen, navy officers, bureaucrats, fishermen, pirates, missionaries, and so on) productively interacted or experienced conflicts and resisted one another’s control. They did so across oceanic and coastal spaces, administrative boundaries, class lines, bureaucratic institutions, commercial and religious organizations, and competing imperial formations. “Interlopers” within this space advanced their own projects—be they dictated by private profit spiritual calling, as in the case of religious agents, or sheer survival, as with many in the mercantile and piratical worlds— and took full advantage of the established structures of commerce and state control as their own vectors. The economic agents (in early modern parlance called “procurators”) of Catholic orders and organizations in East Asia inhabited the fringes of the Portuguese and Qing Empires, at the intersection of global maritime networks in the Pearl River Delta. They were motivated by religious and spiritual reasons, rather than economic profit, using the logistical infrastructure of global trade and of their host empires to further the religious goals of the Catholic Church, and to connect with and support the largely illegal mission stations in China and Southeast Asia. The procurators were nodes in the financial, material, and information networks both within China and connecting China to the rest of the world. These interlopers could use imperial and commercial formations as means for their own ends, even when their organizations’ goals were subversive of existing laws—as was the case with Catholic activities, forbidden by the Qing government within its borders since 1724.

Tai Li-Chuan (Academia Sinica, Taipei), « Deux musées fondés par les jésuites français en Chine (1868–1952) »

Parmi les nombreuses activités scientifiques menées par les jésuites français en Chine aux XIXᵉ et XXᵉ siècles, leurs réalisations muséales demeurent relativement peu connues jusqu'à une date récente. Cette communication se propose d’examiner deux musées d’histoire naturelle fondés par ces missionnaires savants : le Musée Heude (1868–1952), établi à Shanghai, et le Musée Licent (1914–1947), implanté à Tianjin. Le Musée Heude voit le jour dans un contexte où les savants européens manifestent un intérêt croissant pour la connaissance de la faune et de la flore chinoises. Le Musée Licent, quant à lui, témoigne de l’émergence de l’archéologie de terrain en Chine. À travers l’étude de ces deux institutions, seront abordés des aspects tels que la collecte et l’analyse des spécimens, la formation de dessinateurs chinois pour l’illustration et la publication des résultats, ainsi que les collaborations avec des chercheurs locaux. La communication mettra également en lumière la réception de ces musées dans les milieux intellectuels et scientifiques chinois — notamment par des figures telles que Cai Yuanpei et Hu Shi — ainsi qu’auprès de personnalités internationales telles que le prince suédois Gustave VI Adolphe, l’explorateur et sinologue Paul Pelliot, ou encore le deuxième Shinbashira du Tenrikyō japonais.