Beyond Their Own : Conflicts between the Papal Envoy Charles-Thomas Maillard de Tournon and the Jesuits in the Early Eighteenth Century over a Real Estate Contract in the Inner City of Beijing (in Korean)

｢오해와 진실 사이 - 18세기 초 북경 예수회 내성(內城) 부동산 계약을 둘러싼 교황 특사 투르농(Charles-Thomas Maillard de Tournon)과 예수회의 충돌｣, 『인문사회과학연구』25-1, 2024, pp.43-73.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/153PcoUlEPSSrKIdvni6yU3KFhL48LCT0/view?usp=drive_link

This article examines a contract for a house in the Inner City of Beijing signed by the Jesuits in 1705 and the subsequent controversy between the Jesuits and the papal envoy Charles-Thomas Maillard de Tournon (1668–1710). The seller of the house was the son of the Governor-General of Guangdong-Guangxi Provinces, a Bordered Red bannerman, who lived in the southwest of the Inner City of Beijing, and the buyers were the Jesuit missionaries of the South Church (nantang), or College of St. Joseph, who were in the service of the Kangxi emperor in Peking. Tournon, who was in Peking at the time to re-investigate the Rites Controversy, denounced the contract as a loan disguised as a sales contract, and the Jesuits responded that Tournon’s understanding reflected his ignorance of Chinese culture.

But the practice called “dian,” which the Jesuits emphasized as “so clearly regarded by Chinese society as a sales transaction,” was in fact ambiguous and indistinguishable from a loan. The variety of debt contracts masquerading as sales contracts that were rampant in Rome at the time—and Pius V’s bull to stop them—would not have been unfamiliar to the Peking Jesuits. Should Tournon’s concern about and investigation into the Peking Jesuits’ contracts, which the Jesuits emphasized as “peculiar to China” but which bore a striking resemblance to the immoral practices of Rome, be dismissed as mere ignorance of another culture?

The specifics of the Jesuit contracts at the time are difficult to uncover at this time, as the Jesuits ultimately withheld them for fear of “giving their opponents ammunition to attack.” However, the image of Tournon as a “self-righteous foreigner ignorant of Chinese culture” depicted in the Acta Pekinensia needs to be reconsidered. The dichotomy of the Jesuits’ “respect for Chinese culture,” versus Tournon’s or anti-Jesuits’ “Eurocentric bias,” which we often too easily assume, also needs to be examined more closely. Behind the Jesuit logic of emphasizing the specificity of Chinese culture, we need to ask whether there is still a universality beyond “East” and “West.”