The Question of Hu

The Question of Hu reconstructs the journey of Hu Ruowang, a Chinese Catholic who accompanied the Jesuit Jean-François Foucquet from Canton to France in 1722. Recruited as an assistant and guardian of Foucquet’s Chinese books, Hu encountered European travel, worship and social expectations without the linguistic or institutional support needed to explain his own intentions.

Conflict between the two men ended with Hu’s confinement in an asylum near Paris. Using fragmented correspondence and administrative records, Spence examines how contracts, faith, money, behaviour and competing definitions of sanity shaped a case in which neither Chinese nor European assumptions could be translated cleanly into the other culture.