Name Christian Herdtrich | Died 1684 | |
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Christian Wolfgang Herdtrich (born at Graz, Styria, 25 June 1625; d. 18 July 1684) was an Austrian Jesuit missionary in China.
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Life
Herdtrich entered the Austrian province of the Society of Jesus on 27 October 1641, and in 1656 was chosen for the Chinese mission. For two years he laboured on the island of Celebes, and after 1660 was in the Chinese provinces of Shanxi and Henan. In 1671, he was called to the imperial court in Beijing as a mathematician, and was one of that group of scholarly Jesuits with whom the Kangxi Emperor surrounded himself. The last nine years of his life were spent as superior of the mission of Kiang-tcheon in Shanxi province. The Kangxi Emperor himself wrote on Herdtrich's epitaph (cf. "Welt-Bott", Augsburg, 1726, Nos. 16, 49).
Works
He professed a profound knowledge of the Chinese language and literature, and was a collaborator in the major work: "Confucius, Sinarium Philosophus, sive Scientia Sinensis latina exposito studio et operâ Properi Intorcetta, Christiani Herdtrich, Francisci Rougemont, Philippi Couplet, PP. Soc. Jesu" (Paris, 1778). This earliest translation and elucidation gave European scholars their first insight into the teachings of Confucius. Herdtrich was also the author of a large Chinese-Latin dictionary (Wentse-Ko), probably one of the first of its kind.