RCCHC "China and the World: Historical Interactions" Talk Series 19 - Printing Chinese in Europe in the early 18th century: Paris, Étienne Fourmont (1683–1745) and the buis du Régent

Many attempts to print Chinese were made in Europe since the last years of the 16th century and in the following decades: they were small-sized projects, with a few Chinese characters included in publications in Latin letters. Things changed around 1700, by which time Paris had become an important center for Orientalist studies in Europe. During the first decades of the 18th century, Étienne Fourmont (1683–1745) coordinated the production of thousands of Chinese wooden types, known as the “buis du Régent” because they were made in part during the regency (1715–1723) of Philippe d’Orléans.

Based on Fourmont's archives, manuscripts and books kept at the National Library of France and on the wooden type still preserved at the National Printing House of France, this presentation will explain how Fourmont realized his project and how printing Chinese - for him and his contemporaries, in France and in Europe - was linked to projects of publishing multilingual dictionaries. This would come to a realization only a century later, when a “Chinese-Latin-French Dictionary” was published in Paris (1813), thanks to Fourmont's types.