MURR, Christoph Gottlieb von.

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Litterae patentes imperatoris sinarum Kang-hi. Sinice et latine. First edition, a sinological rarity owned by the orientalist Silvestre de Sacy (1758-1838): the first appearance in print of the Kangxi emperor's "Red Manifesto", a century after its significant impact on Sino-European relations. We have traced one other copy only in commerce. Institutional copies are concentrated in Germany and otherwise only found at the British Library and the Bibliothèque nationale de France.At the beginning of the 18th century, the Jesuit order was split over the question of whether Confucian rites, such as the worship of ancestors, were compatible with Christian teaching. Despite strong pressure from Jesuits based at the Qing court, Pope Clement XI ruled in 1704 in favour of the hardline view that converted Catholics could not practice Confucian rituals. In response, in 1706 Kangxi dispatched an embassy to the Papal court, headed by the Jesuits Antonio de Barros and Antoine Beauvollier, to make the case for inclusion and encourage further European-Chinese dialogue on the knotty theological question. After a decade without news of his mission's progress and fearing that the Pope was preventing de Barros and Beauvollier from returning to China, the emperor issued the so-called "Red Manifesto" in October 1716. The forceful document, elegantly composed and co-signed by Jesuit missionaries in Beijing, asserted that Kangxi would not heed further Papal rulings until his envoys safely returned. A

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