A Jesuit in Thailand
[CHOISY, François Timoléon, Abbé de.]
Journal ou suite de voyage de Siam. En forme des lettres familieres fait en M.DC.LXXXV et M.DC.LXXXVI par Mr L. D. C. Amsterdam, Pierre Mortier, 1687.
12mo, pp. [4], 377, [3]; woodcut vignette to title, initial, tailpieces; small chip to fore-edge of A4, small wormholes to inner margins, occasional light marks; overall very good in contemporary stiff vellum with title in ink to spine; some loss at head of spine, a few light marks; some near contemporary underlining and marginal marks.
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Journal ou suite de voyage de Siam. En forme des lettres familieres fait en M.DC.LXXXV et M.DC.LXXXVI par Mr L. D. C.
Amsterdam edition, issued the same year as the first Paris edition, recounting a voyage to Siam by the prolific French writer, former cross-dresser, and Jesuit priest, the Abbé de Choisy.
The French mission to Buddhist Siam, modern-day Thailand, was organised in response to a request by the Greek adventurer turned Siamese prime minister, Constantine Phaulkon, who suggested that Siam and its king were ‘ripe for conversion’ (Howgego). Choisy, who was appointed escort and interpreter for the Siamese emissaries, left Brest in March 1685, arriving in September, and returned home in June 1686. His account of the journey, written in the form of a diary, ‘an intimate, facile, and lively book’ (Lach), was published the following year.
Like many of Choisy’s works it proved popular: Hume was known to have a copy in his library (along with Choisy’s best-selling memoir of his time cross-dressing), and John Locke, who frequently cited travel accounts when arguing for the existence of atheism and consequently the nonexistence of innate ideas, cited it approvingly in his An Essay concerning Human Understanding. A second French embassy under Simon La Loubère reached Siam in 1687, although La Loubère was similarly unsuccessful in converting the Siamese to Christianity. The work was reissued the following year. It is often compared, and occasionally printed with the published narratives of two other Jesuits on the voyage, the Relation of Chevalier Alexandre de Chaumont and the Voyage of Guy Tachard.
Cordier, Indosinica 947; Cordier, Sinica 941, 953; Howgego C121; Lach and Van Kley III, pp. 1190–1194.