Hu Ruowang

Hu Ruowang was a Chinese Christian convert who travelled from Qing China to France in the 1720s in connection with Jesuit missionary networks. He accompanied the missionary Joseph de Prémare to Europe and became one of the comparatively few Chinese visitors whose presence was recorded in early eighteenth-century France. His experiences reveal both European curiosity about China and the unequal personal relationships that could develop within missionary patronage.

Hu’s stay in France became troubled when disputes arose over money, behaviour and authority between him and his missionary associates. He spent time confined at Charenton, an institution used for detention as well as medical care, before eventually returning to China. Much of what is known about him comes through European records written by people who judged him from their own cultural assumptions. His case has therefore attracted historians interested in cross-cultural misunderstanding and the human consequences of early modern global contact.

Jonathan D. Spence’s The Question of Hu reconstructs Hu Ruowang’s extraordinary journey from Canton to France as companion and assistant to the Jesuit Jean-François Foucquet. Hu is entrusted with Foucquet’s Chinese books but enters Europe without the language or institutional support needed to explain his expectations, conduct or grievances. Their deteriorating relationship ends in Hu’s confinement in an asylum, allowing Spence to examine cultural translation, contracts, religion and competing definitions of sanity through the surviving records of a man whose own voice is only partially recoverable.