ИСТИНА

Antoine Gaubil (1689-1759), a French Jesuit and missionary to China where he resided since 1722 until his death, was one of the most outstanding scholars of his time. He published a number of works on the history of Chinese astronomy and chronology, translated the classical Book of Documents (Shu jing 書經), actively corresponded with a number of prominent European scholars, and was a member of the French Academy of Sciences and of Royal Society of London. In 1739 Gaubil was elected a foreign member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences of Russia. The details of the election of Gaubil to the Russian Academy membership remain unknown. It appears plausible to suggest that his election was somehow related to the materials brought in 1734 to St. Petersburg by the Swedish engineer Lorenz Lange (or Lorents Lange, Russian Лоренц or Лаврентий Ланг or Ланге) (c. 1690 – 1752) to the French astronomer Joseph-Nicolas Delisle (1688 – 1768) who worked in Russia from 1725 to 1747. During his stay in Beijing in 1732 Lang contacted with Gaubil who promised to provide him with these materials while his next mission to Beijing in 1735. We assume that Gaubil passed over his materials to Lang in 1732 rather than in 1735 or 1736 and his election in 1739 was related to his work on cartography of China and of Eastern part of Russian Empire. The achievements of Gaubil in this field are also well known: he, for instance, drafted a Chinese-style map of China and Russia extending up to St.-Petersburg on request of Chinese Emperor. Even though there are some published documents that support this hypothesis, our attempts to substantiate it so far were not successful. However we were able to find an additional clue that is the draft of a letter written in 1761 by Gerhard Friedrich Müller (Russian Фёдор Иванович Миллер, 1705 – 1783) to another Jesuit expert in astronomy, Ferdinand Augustin Haller von Hallerstein (1703 – 1774) who worked in China since 1739 and also was elected a foreign Academy member in 1765. It is possible that some information could be found in the letters passed over by Müller to Jesuits in Beijing; these letters were supposed to be delivered by two Russian explorers, N. I. Popov (Н.И. Попов, 1720–1782) and S. Ya. Rumovskii (С.Я. Румовский), who conducted astronomical observation in Siberia in 1761.