Johann Grueber
Johann Grueber ( Chinese 白 乃 心 , Pinyin Bái Nǎixīn ; born October 28, 1623 in Linz , † September 30, 1680 in Sárospatak , Hungary ) was an explorer, Jesuit and missionary . He was the first European ever to come to the Tibetan capital Lhasa .
Life
Youth and Studies
Little is known about Johann Grueber's youth. In his native Linz, he attended the Jesuit high school; on October 18, 1641 he joined the Society of Jesus in Vienna . After studying philosophy and mathematics (1644–1647) in Vienna, Leoben and Graz, he held various high school teaching positions as a Magister Artium in Leoben, Graz and Ödenburg before he was ordained a priest in 1655 following a four-year theology course in Graz .
Journey via India to China (1656–1661)
In February 1656, Grueber received the order from Jesuit General Goswin Nickel to research an overland route to China together with his religious brother Bernhard Diestel as part of the Asia Mission . Shortly before Christmas 1656, the two reached Isfahan via Venice , the eastern Mediterranean and Smyrna .
However, they had to give up their plan to travel across Asia from there because of the threat of war. Instead, they moved to Bandar Abbas on the south coast of Persia, took a boat from there to India and went ashore in Surat in the Gulf of Khambhat , where they were initially arrested and imprisoned for ten months. After their release, an English ship finally took them to the Portuguese colony of Macau , where the two arrived in July 1658.
In April 1659 Grueber and Diestel in Macao received from the responsible Vice Provincial of the Jesuits, Simon da Cunha , the order to continue their way to Beijing and then to explore an overland route back to Europe from there. In Beijing, Grueber spent two years at the court of Emperor Shunzhi , who was liberal towards the Christian missionaries, employed in the imperial astronomical office and worked with his German friar Adam Schall von Bell , a close confidante of the emperor. Gruebers travel companion Diestel died in Tsinan in 1660 .
Journey from Beijing via Lhasa to Agra (1661–1662)
On April 13, 1661, two months after Emperor Shunzhi's death, Grueber set off for Europe with the Belgian Jesuit Albert D'Orville . Via Xinan and Xining they left the Chinese imperial territory in mid-July 1661 and moved in a caravan in a south-westerly direction along the banks of the Qinghai Lake , crossed the Tibetan highlands and finally reached the Tibetan region via the Transhimalaya on October 8, 1661, as the first Europeans ever Capital "which the Chinese call Cam, the Tartars Barantola and the foreigners Lhasa".
During his one-month stay in Lhasa, Grueber made numerous drawings, including pictures of the Potala Palace , various prayer wheels and religious cult buildings as well as a portrait of the fifth Dalai Lama , Ngawang Lobsang Gyatsho , based on a depiction at the entrance to the palace. Grueber did not see the Dalai Lama himself because, as a Catholic priest, he did not want to submit to the prescribed ceremonies.
At the end of November, Grueber and d'Orville set out south, crossed the Himalayas in winter , reached the city of Cuthi (Nilam Dzong) in Nepal at the end of the year and, after further stops in Patna and Benares, finally arrived at the end of March 1662 in Agra , the capital of the Indian Mughals , where they were greeted by their friars Johann Busäus and Heinrich Roth . Shortly afterwards, on April 8, 1662, Grueber's travel companion d'Orville, who had already been in poor health upon arrival in Agra, died and was buried (like Roth later) in the Padri Santos chapel in the suburb of Lashkarpur.
Return to Europe (1662–1665)
Grueber continued his return journey together with Roth. On September 4, 1662, the two missionaries set out from Agra and returned to Europe by land via Kabul , Persia and Asia Minor, where they arrived in Rome on February 20, 1664 . Their detailed travel reports, which caused a sensation, were published by the polymath Athanasius Kircher there in 1667 in his encyclopedia China illustrata .
However, when Grueber first saw the work two years later, in a letter to Kircher from Tyrnau on September 20, 1669, “I wish you had at least sent me the headings of the individual chapters before they went to press. I would certainly have given you some information of no small importance. I intend to send these to you in the near future, along with my own notes, which I have not yet been able to complete as a result of my work among soldiers. Certain points in the China Illustrata have to be corrected, especially the drawings. ”This led to an intense correspondence between the two, in the course of which Grueber gave urgent advice to remove a portrait of the Emperor of China from the work. The depiction of the emperor with a stick and a dog, as reproduced in the China Illustrata , would be taken as an insult in China. On Grueber's recommendation that the emperor be represented either standing or sitting at a table loaded with books and mathematical instruments, Kircher reacted offended and there was no further cooperation.
Illness and final years (1665–1680)
As early as May 1665 Grueber was on his way back to China, again together with Heinrich Roth, whom Jesuit General Giovanni Paolo Oliva had commissioned to set up a mission in Nepal. But Grueber fell ill in Constantinople and had to break off the journey to the east, while Roth returned to Agra and died there in 1668. Grueber returned to Central Europe and was assigned to the Hungarian mission after his recovery; unpublished letters indicate that he spent two years as a field chaplain with the imperial troops in Transylvania . From September 1669 he was among others in Tyrnau and Trenčín ; Grueber died on September 30, 1680 at the age of 56 in Sárospatak, Hungary.
Meaning and afterlife
More than three centuries after Odorico de Pordenone's trip to Asia , Grueber was only the second European to reach Tibet, and he was the first European ever to reach the city of Lhasa and the court of the Dalai Lama. Although Grueber himself did not publish any of his notes, his reports, supplemented by a number of letters he had received, represent the first usable European descriptions of Tibet and, in particular, shaped the image of Lhasa in Europe for centuries. In addition, Grueber kept the collected manuscripts of Heinrich Roth, which his companion had entrusted to him when he separated in Constantinople in 1665 (including the first Sanskrit grammar written by a European ), and was thus indirectly involved in his role as a pioneer of modern Indology .
The Austrian writer Franz Braumann used material from Grueber's travelogues and letters in his adventure novel Ritt nach Barantola. The adventures of the Tibet traveler Johannes Grueber (1958), for which he was awarded the Austrian State Prize for Children's and Young People's Literature .
Name spelling
The old Upper German spelling of his name corresponds phonetically to today's dialectal pronunciation "Gruaber" and should represent the hiat (and not the umlaut "ü"). Occasionally in the literature, based on the Latinized form of his name, but also the New High German spelling "Johann (es) Gruber".
literature
Travel reports and letters from Johann Gruebers
- Athanasius Kircher : China monumentis qua sacris qua profanis nec non variis naturae et artis spectaculis aliarumque rerum memorabilium argumentis illustrata. Amsterdam 1667; here p. 91 f. ( Iter ex Agra Mogorum in Europam ex relatione PP. Joh (annis) Gruberi et H (enrici) Roth ) and pp. 316–323.
- Johann Grueber, edited and translated by Franz Braumann: As the Pope's scout to China 1656-1664. The 1st crossing of Tibet. Based on the letters of Johannes Gruebers and the reports of his biographers Athanasius Kircher and Melchisédech Thévenot. Thienemann-Verlag / Edition Erdmann, Stuttgart 1985, ISBN 3-522-60710-4 .
Literature about Johann Grueber
- Cornelius Wessels: Early Jesuit Travelers in Central Asia, 1603-1721 . Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague 1924 (on Grueber: pp. 164–204) . (reprinted several times, most recently in 1999) .
- Cornelius Wessels: New Documents relating to the Journey of Fr. Johann Grueber . In: Archivum Historicum Societatis Jesu, Volume 9, Rome 1940, pp. 281–304.
- Franz Braumann: Ride to Barantola. The adventures of the Tibet traveler Johannes Grueber. Herder-Verlag, Vienna 1958. (reprinted several times)
- Bruno Zimmel: Johann Grueber in Lhasa. An Austrian as the first European in the city of the Dalai Lama. Society of Friends of the Austrian National Library, Vienna 1953.
- Bruno Zimmel: Johann Grueber. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 7, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1966, ISBN 3-428-00188-5 , p. 183 f. ( Digitized version ).
Individual evidence
- ↑ Cf. Cornelius Wessels: Early Jesuit Travelers in Central Asia, 1603-1721 . Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague 1924, p. 159.
- ^ Bruno Zimmel: Johann Grueber in Lhasa. An Austrian as the first European in the city of the Dalai Lama. Society of Friends of the Austrian National Library, Vienna 1953.
- ↑ Cf. Claus Vogel : The Jesuit missionary Heinrich Roth (1620-1688) and his burial place at Agra. In: Lars Göhler (ed.): Indian culture in context. Rituals, texts and ideas from India and the world. Festschrift for Klaus Mylius. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 2005 (Contributions to Indology, Volume 50), pp. 407–412 (English).
- ↑ Cf. Cornelius Wessels: Early Jesuit Travelers in Central Asia, 1603-1721 . Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague 1924, p. 142.
- ↑ Cf. Bruno Zimmel: Johann Gruebers last mission trip. In: Oberösterreichische Heimatblätter, Volume 11, 1950, pp. 162-180, online (PDF) in the forum OoeGeschichte.at
- ^ Grueber's letter to Athanasius Kircher, Tyrnau, September 20, 1669.
- ^ Grueber's letter to Athanasius Kircher, Trenčín May 2, 1671.
- ↑ On the importance of Grueber for the transmission of Roth's works cf. Arnulf Camps / Jean-Claude Muller (eds.): The Sanskrit grammar and manuscripts of Father Heinrich Roth, SJ (1620-1668). Facsimile edition of Biblioteca Nazionale, Rome, Mss. Or. 171 and 172. Brill, Leiden 1988.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Grueber, Johann |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Missionary and explorer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | October 28, 1623 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Linz , Austria |
| DATE OF DEATH | September 30, 1680 |
| Place of death | Sárospatak , Hungary |