The "taste I have for Chinese literature"
But Delisle's interest in China is older than his correpondence with the Jesuits. In the 1710s, he discovered Chinese astronomy by meeting a singular man who was a pioneer in the diffusion of the Chinese language and culture in Europe.
This young man called Arcade Huang 1, born in the Fujian from Catholic converts, had come to Europe with the missionaries. Abbé Bignon, the king's librarian, hired him as an interpreter in Chinese. They cherished the hope of a Chinese lexicon. For this purpose, Bignon gave Huang a co-worker called Nicolas Fréret, a young student of the Académie des inscriptions.
Huang and Fréret had to cope with the 47 000 Mandarin symbols. They relied on the classification method Emperor Kangxi had just published in 1717. The dictionary which bore its name, the Kangxi zidian (康熙字典), made it possible to simplify those thousands of ideograms to 214 radicals, simple components from which all the others could derive.
Huang's co-worker, Nicolas Fréret, happened to be a friend of the Delisles. Thus, Joseph-Nicolas Delisle took part in the work sessions. Arcade Huang tried to satisfy the newcomer's curiosity in Chinese astronomy and culture. Together, they gleaned the text passages likely to shed light on those issues in the few Chinese classics of the king's library. Huang taught his co-workers the Mandarin symbols referring to planets and comets, as well as the basics of the Chinese traditional calendar.
The fruit of Arcade Huang and Nicolas Fréret's joint effort, this Mandarin-French lexicon is one of the first of its kin
In this passage of the grammar Arcade Huang intended to publish (which also included a small treatise on Chinese culture), the author explains the function of the "mandarins of mathematics", and the role of astronomy in the Chinese world, namely "to observe the stars, warn the emperor of extraordinary signs crossing the sky, register them, predict extraordinary events following the apparition of the stars [...]"
ink drawing of Leo, Ursa Major and other circumpolar stars
Those sudies with Huang and Fréret were a first initiation to Chinese astronomy and culture. Delisle's knowledge grew, thanks to his correspondence with Father Gaubil, which constituted the major part of his Eastern collections. Delisle wrote to Fréret in 1738: "You shouldn't be amazed, Sir, by the taste I have for Chinese literature. You may remember that, 20 years ago, with Mr. Hoang, who dwelled and died in the house adjacent to the one where I was living, I had started gathering knowledge about ancient Chinese astronomy, from the ancient Chinese books, mainly in order to find the observations the Jesuits had talked about. F. Gaubil's research on this topic has only increased my desires [...]." 2
letter of 1738 to Nicolas Fréret where Delisle evoques their former collaboration
1 Born Huang Risheng (黄日升).
2 Letter to Nicolas Fréret on 18th February 1738, kept in Delisle collection, portfolio B2/4, paper 6. 4.