Three scarce Shanghai imprints. English Congregationalist missionary Walter Henry Medhurst (1796-1857) served in Penang and Batavia, where he became fluent in Malay and Chinese, before moving to Shanghai in 1842, where he founded the Missionary Society Press.
The present book combines three rare publications. First is his translation of a late eighteenth-century Chinese traveller’s description of Java and the Malay archipelago; He states in his preface to ‘The Chinaman Abroad’ that his translation “has been drawn up amidst the pressure of many more important duties, and is published with the view of bringing the eastern and western world into a better acquaintance with each other”. The author of the account, Wang Dahai (dates unknown, lit. ‘King of the Oceans’), was a sea trader from Fujian who spent almost 10 years in Java from 1783. He completed his six-volume work on Java and the Malay archipelago, Haidao yizhi, in 1791. It was intended to provide Chinese merchants with much-needed information on South-east Asia, which lay outside the domestic maritime realm of the Qing empire. Medhurst’s abridged translation contains Wang Dahai’s observations about places and ethnic groups, as well as descriptions of natural history including animals, plants and fruit. There are also accounts of different nations (starting with the Dutch), the Spanish in Manilla, Papua New Guinea, the Cape of Good Hope, and Mecca (which is referred to as the residence of Buddha).
The other two works relate to the ’Terms Question“ which occupied Protestant missionaries in the late 1840s: The first is a analytical study of the term ‘shen’ (spirit) as defined in the Kangxi Thesaurus entitled ‘Peiwen yunfu’) which was completed around 1711. The second work is a linguistic study of the Hebrew term ‘ruach’ and the Greek term ‘pneuma’.
Rare.
