“Confessionario em Lingua Mandarina” by Fr. Francisco Varo: An Unknown Manuscript of the Renowned Dominican

Abstract

The Oriental Department of the St Petersburg University’s library has a unique manuscript “Confessionario em Lingua Mandarina”, a handbook for confession, compiled by Dominican father Francisco Varo (1627-1687) for use in his (and his confrères) missionary work in earlier Qing China (sec. half of the 17th c.). The manuscript, seven folios altogether, bound into a dictionary (Dictionario Lusitanico Sinico Tartaro Historico Mathematico Latino for Congregação da Missão Portugueza), amidst its main body, is a precious gift to all researchers in the field, for it is, by all accounts, a unique exemplar of this kind of text by the famous missionary. Varo’s written legacy has received special attention from historians of Catholic missions in China and researchers on the Ming and Qing Chinese language. However a Confessionario is not traced in Varo’s bibliography. The undenied value of the text is its bilingual contents: the confessor’s questions in the Portuguese language translated into the earlier Qing Mandarin (southern guanhua). Documents, codifying the main Chinese dialect of the 17th c. are rather rare, although a number of elaborated descriptions of variant systems of guanhua romanization by Western missionaries provide us with all necessary instruments to analyse the transcription method, used by Varo in the Confessionario. The author of the article attempts to implement the existing methodology to identify the place of this piece of Varo’s work in the Chinese romanization mosaic. Being Portuguese-based, the transcription of the Confessionario differs significantly from Varo’s Spanish-oriented system in Vocabulario de la Lengua Mandarina (1670) and Arte de la Lengua Mandarina (1682–1703), naturally demonstrating more in common to the earlier systems by Ricci, Trigault and Martini. A few peculiarities of the romanization used in Confessionario are revealed in the article.