Jean-Baptiste Régis

Jean-Baptiste Régis (* 11. June 1663 or 29. January 1664 in Istres , Bouches-du-Rhône , France ; † 24. November 1738 in Beijing ) was a French Jesuit and in China active missionary . He was instrumental in the first mapping of China.

Live and act

Jean-Baptiste Régis was accepted into the Societas Jesu on September 13, 1679 or September 14, 1683 . In 1698 he traveled to the Chinese mission, where he worked for forty years in the service of science and the Catholic faith.

Since there was practically no geographical knowledge of China in Europe until the end of the 16th century, the early Jesuit missionaries had already tried to remedy this. The information accessible to them from Chinese geographical descriptions, distance information and even simple maps were supplemented by Father Martino Martini with his own astronomical observations and summarized in the Novus Atlas Sinensis , which was published in Amsterdam in 1655 as part of the Atlas Maior .

The Jesuits' good relations with the Chinese Emperor Kangxi (1654–1722) enabled them to make further additions. Father Ferdinand Verbiest gathered his first impressions of the Tatar region as the emperor's companion on two trips to Mongolia (1682–83). The French Jesuits sent by King Louis XIV in 1687 gave new impetus to geographic work. The new missionaries were equipped with improved instruments and trained in astronomical positioning by the Paris Observatory , so that they could specify the previous location information and convey their observations to the Académie des Sciences in Paris. Father Jean-François Gerbillon was able to collect further geographical information on eight trips to Mongolia (1688–98).

In 1701, Fathers Jean-Baptiste Régis, Antoine Thomas , Joachim Bouvet (1656-1730) and Dominique Parennin began work on mapping the Chinese Empire, initially with a plan of Beijing and the surrounding area including the imperial summer residences and plans of around 1700 towns and villages. Emperor Kangxi was satisfied with the work and agreed to have a map of the Great Wall drawn up . Fathers Régis, Bouvet and Pierre Jartoux began work on June 8, 1708 on the Gulf of Bohai , determining lengths and directions with the help of lines and a compass and regularly recording the position of the midday sun. After two months, the sick Bouvet withdrew to Beijing, but Régis and Jartoux continued the work until they reached the end of the wall at today's Jiayuguan and measured an inner section up to today's Xining . They returned to Beijing on January 10, 1709.

Large map of China, drawn up by d'Anville according to the templates of the Jesuit fathers in 1734.

The emperor then asked that the work be extended to all of China. Régis, Jartoux and Ernbert Fridelli as well as Francis Cardoso, Guillaume Bonjour, Vincent du Tartre, Joseph-Anne-Marie de Moyriac de Mailla and Roman Hinderer traveled the country in alternating groups from the end of 1709 to Lake Baikal on one end and Formosa on the other. For the mapping of Tibet , the Jesuits are said to have trained two lamas , with the consent of the emperor , who were able to travel from Xining to Lhasa and on towards the source of the Ganges in the inaccessible land and to note the corresponding observations. After ten years, the work was completed on January 1, 1717 and all of China was shown in a series of maps.

Copies of these maps were brought to Paris, where they were made into a large map of China by Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville , dated 1734, which Jean-Baptiste Du Halde in his monumental work Description de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise published in 1735.

meaning

The maps of China created by Jean-Baptiste Régis and the fathers who worked with him were the first coherent and largely reliable maps of China. For a long time they were considered to be the basic map series of China. For Tibet they were the only map series until the end of the 19th century.

Individual evidence

^ Biographical treatise by Joseph Brucker: Jean-Baptiste Régis in the Catholic Encyclopedia , 1913
^ Clements R. Markham: A Memoir on the Indian Surveys . (PDF; 60.6 MB) 2nd edition WH Allen & Co., London 1878. Digitized at archive.org
↑ Carte la plus générale et qui comprend la Chine, la Tartarie Chinoise, et le Thibet, dressée sur les Cartes particulières des RR PP Jésuites, par le S. D'Anville, Géographe ord. du Roi, qui ya joint le Pays comprised entre Kashgar et la Mer Caspienne tiré des Géographes et des Historiens Orientaux. MDCC XXXIV . (Comprehensive map including China, Chinese Tartary and Tibet, created on the basis of the individual maps of the Jesuit Fathers of S. D'Anville, geographer of the king, of the lands between Kashgar and the Caspian preserved by geographers and historians of the Orient See added. MDCC XXXIV.)

personal data
SURNAME	Régis, Jean-Baptiste
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	French Jesuit, active as missionary and geographer (China)
DATE OF BIRTH	June 11, 1663 or January 29, 1664
PLACE OF BIRTH	Istres , Bouches-du-Rhône department , France
DATE OF DEATH	November 24, 1738
Place of death	Beijing

[1] Biographical treatise by Joseph Brucker: Jean-Baptiste Régis in the Catholic Encyclopedia , 1913

[2] Clements R. Markham: A Memoir on the Indian Surveys . (PDF; 60.6 MB) 2nd edition WH Allen & Co., London 1878. Digitized at archive.org

[3] Carte la plus générale et qui comprend la Chine, la Tartarie Chinoise, et le Thibet, dressée sur les Cartes particulières des RR PP Jésuites, par le S. D'Anville, Géographe ord. du Roi, qui ya joint le Pays comprised entre Kashgar et la Mer Caspienne tiré des Géographes et des Historiens Orientaux. MDCC XXXIV . (Comprehensive map including China, Chinese Tartary and Tibet, created on the basis of the individual maps of the Jesuit Fathers of S. D'Anville, geographer of the king, of the lands between Kashgar and the Caspian preserved by geographers and historians of the Orient See added. MDCC XXXIV.)