BOYM, MICHAEL. — Missionary and Sinologist, born in 1614 (?) at Lwów (Leopoli) in Poland, died on 22 August 1659 in China in the province of Kwangsi. He entered the Society of Jesus in Cracow in 1631, embarked from Lisbon in 1642, and worked first in Tonkin and on the island of Hainan. In 1650 he was sent to Kwangsi, to the court of Yung-li, the last Ming emperor still resisting the Manchu dynasty, which already held the north. Catholic Ming princesses (among them the empress-mother Helena) and the first minister Achille Pang entrusted Boym with letters for the Pope and the Father General of the Society. Travelling via India, Persia, and Smyrna, Boym reached Venice in 1652 and thence Rome, where the Congregation of Propaganda Fide at first viewed him with suspicion. He finally departed from Lisbon in 1656 with the replies of Alexander VII and of Father Goswin Nickel, but found in the East that the Ming dynasty had definitively fallen with the victory of the Manchu Wan-li. He tried to return to Kwangsi via Tonkin, but died of privations before reaching his destination.
Endowed with a solid scientific culture, Boym left important works: a Flora sinensis (Vienna 1656), a Clavis medica ad Chinarum doctrinam de pulsibus (1686, already in 1682 in the Specimen medicinae sinicae [Frankfurt] of the German plagiarist Andreas Cleyer); he supplied the Tabula Sinensis for the Geographia reformata that underpins Athanasius Kircher’s China monumentis illustrata (Amsterdam 1667). A good number of other works remained in manuscript, including a large map of China (Paris, Bibliothèque de la Marine) and an atlas of the Chinese provinces in eighteen coloured maps (Vatican Library).