Dictionnaire encyclopédique de la langue chinoise, par J.-M. Callery. Tome premier [all published]

265x177 mm. VI, XXXVI, 212 pp. Editor's printed wrappers (worn, rebacked). Some foxing and staining, volume a bit loose.

First edition, rare. Giuseppe Gaetano Pietro Massimo Maria Calleri (also known as Joseph-Marie Callery) was born in Turin in 1810. In 1833, he entered the seminary of the Société des Missions Etrangères in Paris as a deacon. Ordained a priest in 1834 and assigned to the missions in Korea, he set sail from Le Havre in March 1835. Upon arriving in Macao in 1836, he began studying Chinese under the guidance of J.A. Gongalves (1780–1844), a renowned Portuguese sinologist, as well as the Korean language. However, following the deterioration of Anglo-Chinese relations, Callery was unable to reach Korea and was forced to remain in Macao, where he devoted himself increasingly to the study of sinology and the natural sciences. In 1841, he published at his own expense in Macao, under the Frenchified name of J.-M. Callery, the work that brought him to the attention of the then-small circle of Orientalists, the Systema phoneticum scripturae sinicae, and enabled him to work as an interpreter for the French consulate. To raise the funds necessary for the publication of a large twenty-volume dictionary of the Chinese language, based primarily on the “P'eiwen yün-fu”, which he had already begun compiling, Callery left the Société des Missions Etrangères in October 1841 and returned to Paris in April 1842. There he published an essay in French and English on his planned dictionary, titled Dictionnaire encyclopédique de la langue chinoise (Paris, 1842) and The Encyclopedia of the Chinese Language (London, 1842), which secured him a permanent position as an interpreter at the French consulate in China. Having now definitively left the priesthood, Calleri returned to Macao in 1843. His work as an interpreter was highly appreciated; Calleri himself left an account of it in his Journal des opérations diplomatiques de la légation française en Chine (Macao, 1845). Also in 1845, Calleri succeeded in publishing the first volume of his Dictionnaire encyclopédique de la langue chinoise (Macao-Paris, 1845), which was to be followed not by twenty but by only ten more volumes, provided the necessary funds could be secured. This did not happen, but the published portion remains an excellent example of lexicography, all the more remarkable given the time in which it was written, when sinology was still in its infancy. Calleri left Macao in 1846 and, upon returning to Paris, was appointed secretary-interpreter for the languages of China at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a position he held until his death on June 5, 1862, in St. Martin les Boulangis.

Calleri was one of the most renowned sinologists of his time; he had an advantage over his colleagues and rivals due to his long stay in China, which allowed him to acquire a good knowledge of spoken and written Chinese and to build up a rich library - an essential tool for his work at a time when Chinese books were still a rarity in Europe - which he later sold for financial reasons (cf. G. Bertuccioli, Calleri, Giuseppe Gaetano Pietro Massimo Maria, in: “Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani”, vol. 16, Rome, 1973, s.v.).

OCLC, 457239736; Cordier, 1598.

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