Establishing Christianity in Mongolia
HUC, Évariste Régis and William HAZLITT (translator).
Travels in Tartary, Thibet, and China, during the years 1844-5-6 … Second edition.
London, Office of the National Illustrated Library, [1852].
2 vols, 8vo, pp. [4], viii, [9]-292, 4 (ads); x, [2 (blank)], [13]-304; frontispieces and additional engraved titles, numerous woodcut illustrations throughout, 1 folding map in vol. 1; somewhat browned, a few spots; good in original orange cloth, spines lettered and decorated in gilt, covers embossed in blind; spines sunned, some marks to covers; bookplates and inscriptions of Stewart Beauchamp Gwatkin (1886), occasional pencil notes.
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Travels in Tartary, Thibet, and China, during the years 1844-5-6 … Second edition.
Second English edition recounting the famous journey of two Lazarist missionaries across China, Mongolia, and Tibet between 1844 and 1846.
When Pope Gregory XVI decided to establish an Apostolic Vicariat in Mongolia, it was unsurprisingly not he who journeyed to this far-flung and little-known location in order to ascertain the nature and extent of his new diocese, but rather two French Lazarists: Joseph Gabet (1808-1853), a fluent Chinese speaker who had been in Macao since 1835, and Évariste Régis Huc (1813-1860), who had arrived in Macao in 1839. Setting out from Peking (Beijing), the missionaries journeyed westwards passing through what is now Inner Mongolia and Gansu province before eventually reaching Tibet: in the process Gabet and Huc may well have been the first Europeans since Thomas Manning in the first decade of the nineteenth century to enter the Tibetan holy city of Lhasa, which they did in January 1846. Huc’s description of this journey, first published in French in 1850, remains a picturesque and valuable source for understanding nineteenth-century European attitudes to Tartar and Tibetan culture and customs. It appears that their journey was also of similar interest to contemporaries: even Lord Palmerston was sent a copy of Gabet’s reports (see preface).
This copy is the second edition of the English translation by the lawyer and author William Hazlitt (1811-1893), son of the famous writer of the same name; it is largely identical to the first, which was published in the same year, and features almost 100 beautiful woodcuts, as well as a map detailing the route the two French missionaries took. It is based on the 1850 French text (a second French edition was published in 1853): the only difference is the English preface, which, while sharing the Lazarists’ enthusiasm for exploration, fails to share their loyalty to the papacy: ‘thus it is’, writes Hazlitt, ‘that to Papal aggression in the East, the Western World is indebted for a work exhibiting, for the first time, a complete representation of countries previously almost unknown to Europeans, and indeed considered practically inaccessible’.
Yakushi H249.
