CARVAGLIO, Valentin.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Lettera della Cina dell'anno 1601. First edition of this letter reporting a landmark in Sino-Western relations: Matteo Ricci's successful 1600-01 embassy to Beijing. Ricci entered the imperial capital on 24 January 1601, becoming the first Westerner to receive this high honour, presented gifts to the court, and received the emperor's leave to remain and preach Catholicism. This rare work is otherwise untraced in commerce.Dated 25 January 1602, the letter was written by Valetin Carvaglio (1560-1631), a Portuguese Jesuit and the rector of the order's university in Macao, from where he administered all Jesuit activities in China. The four parts "concentrate on the Jesuit College of Macau, Ricci's second voyage to Beijing, the Jesuit residences in Nanjing and Nanchang, and the Jesuit residence in Shaozhou" (Xie, p. 67). Carvaglio describes the course of Ricci's embassy in depth, his businesslike prose masking excitement at the order's greatest achievement in China to date. A Milan edition was published in 1604, and a French translation followed in 1605.Provenance: Auguste Fontaine, the 19th-century Bordeaux collector and bookseller, with his name in gilt in the front inner dentelle. This copy sold by Maggs in Catalogue 519 (1929), with the catalogue listing tipped to the front free endpaper verso.

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