Collecting and Transmitting Global Knowledge: Antoine Gaubil’s Life as a Scientist in the 18th-Century Académie des Sciences

Antoine Gaubil (1689-1759) was an eighteenth-century French Jesuit missionary in China. He arrived in China in 1722 and died in 1759 in Beijing. During his almost-forty-years in China, his main work was in the Bureau of Astronomy and his most notable achievements came out with his scientific works. His emphasis and devotion on Chinese science and history was representative among the French Jesuit missionaries and their scientific missions in the eighteenth century. Although previous Jesuit missionaries had gradually demonstrated the success of using scientific knowledge to achieve Christian conversion, these French Jesuits distinguished themselves by their close connection with the scientific communities and developments in Europe.

This paper will look at Gaubil’s life as a scientist in the Académie des Sciences of France. Although in the records of the Académie des Sciences, there is only one line about Gaubil indicating that he was once a member of the Académie, his contribution is more than the few words but has been obscured in history. To recover Gaubil’s scientist life, I will firstly look at his training and education as a missionary-scientist in France before he set sail for China. I will then search for all the publications related to Gaubil’s contributions in the journal of Histoire de l’Académie royale des science. What bridges between the inputs and outputs of Gaubil’s scientific works will be his research and activities in China, for which I will refer to the collection of his correspondence. Piecing the information together I hope to reveal the difference between the scientist Gaubil saw himself as, and that he was received in France, as well as the subtleties it could tell us about the French scientific community and atmosphere. I also seek to better understand the unique value of the global reach of Gaubil and the Jesuits.