14 - Robert Morrison at the End of the Enlightenment: Collecting Books in Early Nineteenth-Century China

Summary

ON 23 MARCH 1824, after serving seventeen years as a missionary in China, Robert Morrison returned to England on leave. With him aboard the ship Waterloo were 10,000 fascicles of Chinese books, compris-ing over nine hundred titles. Morrison estimated the value of the works, ‘many of which were obtained with great difficulty, as the Chinese govern-ment make it illegal for the natives to sell their books to foreigners’, and many of which ‘were scarce and expensive’, at ‘upwards of £2,000’. Hoping to alleviate his countrymen's ignorance of a country that was becoming increasingly important to Britain, Morrison planned to donate his collec-tion to Oxford or Cambridge in return for a commitment to establish a professorship in the Chinese language ‘for the instruction of individuals desirous of studying it, for religious, or other purposes’.

Neither Cambridge nor Oxford was interested. Unable to find a taker, Morrison deposited the collection at the London Missionary Society before he returned to China the following year. His collection languished there for more than ten years, until – finally – in 1837, three years after Morrison's death, the newly established University College London grudgingly agreed to establish the professorship in Chinese in return for the collection. The professorship was allowed to lapse after only five years, however; and there is little evidence to suggest that the collection was put to use in any system-atic teaching of Chinese or about China until late in the century.

Here, appropriately, perhaps, in the last chapter to this volume, we seem to have come to the end of the Enlightenment. We are clearly in a very different time and a very different place from late seventeenth- and eight-eenthcentury Europe, when readers (particularly French readers) eagerly snapped up the Jesuits’ latest accounts of China; when Jean Baptiste Boyer could, in 1741, dedicate his Lettres chinoises to Confucius, ‘the greatest man the universe has produced’; and when interest in China (and other ‘Ori-ental’ countries) was strong enough, as described earlier in this volume, to propel the decision, in the early 1780s, to publish Barthélemy d’Herbelot's Bibliothèque orientale in an edition for ‘the general public’.