Perny’s Imprint: Knowledge of China and Printing Chinese, Between Guizhou (1861) and Paris (1869-1872)

Paul Perny, a missionary in China and an antagonist of the Parisian academic sinologists, was also a botanist and author of linguistic works, which he often edited himself. Archives illustrate how he constructed his knowledge of China and how his specific skills operated in circuits of different scales, sometimes overlapping and permeable, sometimes instead mutually impermeable. His printing activities demonstrate that the dissemination of knowledge (in this case of the Chinese language) required technical and material support, which were all circulating on a global scale at that time. This paper therefore portrays printing presses as ‘spaces of circulation’, where information and materials converge, and people of different statuses interact.