A Vietnamese Missionary in the West: The Foreign Experience and Observations of Philliphê Bỉnh in the Pre-Modern Era
Abstract
This paper centers on the travel manuscript of Philliphê Bỉnh, a Vietnamese Catholic missionary active from 1759 to 1833, who sought support from the Portuguese court in 1796 for the Tonkin diocese in Vietnam. Stranded in Portugal for over three decades, Bỉnh documented his experiences in the Latinized Vietnamese script (Quốc ngữ) in his work Sách sổ sang chép các việc (Notebook That Transmits and Records All Matters). Through literature review and comparative analysis, this study examines this rare early-19th-century travelogue in Vietnamese vernacular script. It focuses on Bỉnh’s observations and reflections on the European world as one of the first Vietnamese missionaries to reside long-term in Europe, and contrasts his narrative perspective with writings by 19th-century Vietnamese Confucian scholar-officials. The paper argues that Bỉnh’s writings are not only a record of a long-distance ecclesiastical mission but also an important historical source for understanding bidirectional cultural encounters between East and West in the pre-modern era, offering a key case study for examining the early modernity of Vietnam from a global historical perspective.
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