Gaubil, Antoine, French Jesuit missionary, astronomer, and historian at the Imperial Court in Beijing (1689-1759). "Pour le Catalogue des Éclipses de Soleil et de Lune". Autograph manuscript.

€ 30,000.00

Unpublished revision and extension of three tables of solar and one table of lunar eclipses observed in China between 204 BCE and 1627 CE that were originally published in 1732 as part of Gaubil's "Traité de l'Astronomie Chinoise", the third volume of Étienne Souciet's publications of Gaubil's work. This manuscript was part of several documents sent by Gaubil to the French astronomer Joseph-Nicolas Delisle in St Petersburg in 1735 with a request that they be forwarded to his editor Étienne Souciet SJ (1671-1744) in Paris. On 17 August 1736, Souciet added his note of receipt in ink to the first page of the manuscript. Delisle's copy of the manuscript is preserved in the library of the Paris Observatory.

The interesting manuscript consists of four different tables: 1) Solar eclipses from the beginning of the Han dynasty to the end of the Song dynasty: 204 BCE - 1277 CE; 2) solar eclipses of the Yuan dynasty: 1282-1367 CE; 3) solar eclipses of the Ming dynasty: 1370-1621 CE; 4) lunar eclipses: 62-1627 CE. In his unpaginated preface, Gaubil corrects some errors in his tables of pre-Han dynasty eclipses drawn from sources like the "Chunqiu" and the "Shijing" and justifies his decision against their general revision: "The following catalogue has been redone for the reasons I report at the end of the catalogue. In the catalogue of eclipses before the Han dynasty, I have seen nothing that obliges me to redo it [...] In the eclipses that I have calculated according to Riccioli's tables, I do not think I have included the correction that M. Cassini proposes to make in the memoirs of the Académie 1703, but this does not oblige me to redo the calculations. Lacking this correction in the Shijing eclipse, I have set the latitude of the moon a few minutes smaller […]". The announced explanation of the revision follows on the final page of the manuscript: "In the catalogue that RP Souciet has included in his third collection, a few errors have slipped in, which I have corrected, and I have reduced the Chinese time exactly to the European [...] I have added many eclipses of the sun and some of the moon, I have put the Chinese days where I found them, and for the eclipses of the sun I have added the titles of the years of the reigns of the Emperors. I have done all this at the recommendation of several people for whom I am full of esteem".

For his tables, Gaubil relied on various Chinese sources, especially dynastic chronologies. These include the works of the important historian Sima Qian, the astronomer Yi Xing, a biography of the statesman Yelü Chucai, works of the engineer and astronomer Guo Shoujing, and of the lesser known Ming dynasty astronomer Xing Yunlu. For later eclipses, Gaubil profited from the work of the German Jesuit Adam Schall von Bell, who served as the director of the Imperial Observatory and Mathematical Bureau in Beijing from 1644 to 1664: "The calculation and observation of the last ten eclipses are taken from the collection of Fr. Adam Schall. This illustrious missionary examined many old and new eclipses with great care, and a Chinese volume called Gu jin jiao shi kao ['Survey of eclipses of the present and past'] was produced". Concerning the lunar eclipses, Gaubil also records the locations of their observation: Luoyang, Nanjing, Xi'an, Hangzhou, and Beijing. In his extensive notes, Gaubil matches some of the historical Chinese observations to European observations, such as a solar eclipse recorded by the early medieval English chronicler and theologian Bede. Furthermore, he chronicles central events of Chinese dynastic history: "In the year Shi Shu (581) great lord Yang Jian, subject of the Jing princes, dethroned his prince and had himself proclaimed Emperor […] In 589 the Chens lost the Empire". The painstakingly comprehensive work exhibited in these tables was invaluable not only to astronomers and those interested in the history of Chinese astronomy, but also for the European knowledge of Chinese history at large, as they harmonize Chinese and European chronology.

Antoine Gaubil, who arrived in Beijing in 1722 and would remain there for the rest of his life, was the most important astronomer among the French Jesuits in China, and one of the greatest disseminators of Chinese science and wisdom in Europe in the 18th century. His work on astronomy and as a historian and translator of important Chinese texts such as the "I Ching" earned him the praise of Alexander von Humboldt as the wisest of the Jesuit missionaries. Joseph Needham even considers him "the interpreter general and father superior of Chinese astronomy".