PALLU François Relation abrégée des missions et des voyages des évesques françois envoyez aux royaumes de la Chine, Cochinchine, Tonkin & Siam.

Cordier, Bibl. Sinica, 826 ; Löwendahl, 138 ; not in Chadenat.

First edition, very rare, of this important account written by Mgr François Pallu (1626-1684), one of the founders of the Société des Missions Étrangères. It bears witness to the renewed influence of Jesuit missionaries in Asia during the second half of the 17th century.

François Pallu was one of the main founders of the Paris Foreign Missions Society, along with Monsignor Lambert de La Motte and Monsignor Cotolendi. Appointed canon at a very young age, he quickly became friends with the Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes, a missionary in Tonkin and Cochinchina, who at that time had returned to Europe to ask the Pope to appoint bishops in the country he was evangelising. In 1659, Pallu was appointed Vicar Apostolic of Tonkin, administrator of the provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou, Hou Kouang, Sichuan, Guangxi in China, and Laos.

After organising his journey as best he could, Pallu left Paris on 8 November 1661 and embarked at Marseille on 2 January 1662. He landed in Alexandria, travelled to Isfahan, and from there set off for Bender-Abbas-si, at the tip of the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea. From there, he reached the trading post of Surat, crossed India, and finally arrived in Juthia, capital of the kingdom of Siam. It was there that he decided to establish a seminary where the indigenous clergy of the missions would be trained. To overcome the formidable opposition they faced, the missionaries needed more extensive powers than those they enjoyed. Pallu then set off for Europe again in 1667, and it was on his return to Paris that he published this account.

Pallu spent his life travelling between Asia and Europe. From Siam, he left for China in 1683. Arrested at sea by defenders of the Ming dynasty, he was held prisoner in Formosa for several months. Finally, in January 1684, he arrived in China, in Zhangzhou, Fujian, as general administrator. Weakened by his travels, François Pallu died of catarrh on 29 October 1684 in Moyang, Fujian. He was buried near the village, in a place known to Christians as the Holy Mountain. In August 1912, with the authorisation of the Foreign Missions Seminary and the Apostolic Vicar of Fujian, Mgr Aguirre, his ashes were transferred to Hong Kong, to the retirement home called Nazareth, and then brought back to Paris on 4 March 1954.

“First edition of the account of the voyages made to East Asia in the early 16660s by Pallu, Pierre Lambert de la Motte and Ignace Cotolendi, sent there by Pope Alexander VII as vicars apostolic. A second edition appeared in 1682 and an Italian translation in 1669.

François Pallu belonged to the so-called ‘Les bons amis’, a group of French Jesuit priests whose activities were ultimately responsible for the formation of the Société des Missions Étrangères. Disenchanted with the achievements of the Propaganda in the mission to Asia, Pallu and his colleagues in ‘Les bons amis’ had travelled to Rome in 1657 to present Pope Alexander VII with their case for increased missionary activity in the Far East, while also seeking to dispel the Propaganda’s suspicions of French involvement in the field. Their petition was evidently successful and the Pope divided the Far East in three vicariates apostolic – Tongking, Cochin-China and China – while also giving the new bishops th right to found a seminary in Paris, which, after one or two set-backs, became the Société des Mission Étrangères in 1660. The function of the Société, as regulated by the Propaganda, was to promote missionary activity and specifically to work for the formation of indigenous clergy and churches. In the first forty years of its history, the Société sent one hundred missionaries to Asia” (Löwendahl).

Very good copy albeit small worming in the white inner margin to first third of the book, occasional foxing.