Fan Shouyi - Life

Life

Fan was born in Pingyang, Shanxi Province in 1682. Little is known of his early life and family, but at some point he appears to have met the Piedmontese Jesuit missionary, Antonio Francesco Giuseppe Provana, who converted him to Roman Catholicism and baptised him as 'Luigi'. When the Kangxi Emperor decided to send Provana as part of his second embassy to Pope Clement XI in 1708, Fan went with them; he and the ambassador party left Macau aboard the Bom Jesus in January, 1708 bound for Lisbon. The journey allowed Fan to observe Batavia, Malacca, and even Bahia in Brasil (probably making him the first Chinese person to return to China and write about the Americas, as well as Europe). He arrived in Lisbon in September 1708, and met King João V of Portugal soon afterwards. During his eleven-year stay in Europe, he met the Pope, toured Italy, studied Latin and theology, and was able to make many first-hand observations of aspects of eighteenth century Europe, which very few Asians had had the opportunity to do before him. In 1717, he was ordained as a priest.

In 1718, Pope Clement XI decided to send Provana back to China, so on May 19, 1719, Provana and Fan boarded the Francisco Xavier in Lisbon and set sail once again. Provana died during the voyage, and Fan returned to Macau alone. From Macau, he travelled north to Beijing for an audience with the Kangxi Emperor that was held on October 11, 1720. No account of his meeting with the emperor has survived, but Fan wrote a short report of his experiences in Europe, the Shen Jian Lu (身見錄), which may have been created to complement the information he gave the emperor in person.

For the rest of his life, Fan worked as a priest and missionary in China, and apparently as an interpreter for the emperor; the Italian missionary Matteo Ripa mentions a ‘Louis Fan’ in the book he published on his experiences in China. Fan died in Beijing on February 28, 1753.