Boym, Michał (BOYM, MICHAL) - Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. II, p. 1154

Machine translation of the 1948–1954 Italian original. The original text is authoritative.

BOYM, MICHAL. - Missionary and sinologist, b. in 1614 (?) in Lwów (Lemberg), Poland, d. Aug. 22, 1659 in China in Kwangsi. Having entered the Society of Jesus in Kraków in 1631, he embarked from Lisbon in 1642 and worked first in Tonkin and on the island of

Article illustration — (phot. Alimeri) BOZZETTO - B. of Mattia Preti for the paintings in memory of the plague of 1656 - Naples, National Museum.

Hainan. In 1650 he was sent to Kwangsi, to the court of Yungli, the last Ming emperor struggling against the Manchu dynasty, which already held the north. Catholic Ming princesses (among them the Empress-Mother Elena) and Prime Minister Achilles Pang then commissioned B. to carry letters to Rome to the Pope and the Father General of the Society. Traveling via India, Persia, and Smyrna, B. arrived in Venice in 1652 and from there in Rome, where the Congregation de Propaganda Fide initially showed itself distrustful of him. He was finally able to depart from Lisbon in 1656 with the replies of Alexander VII and Father Goswin Nickel, but in the East he found that the Ming dynasty had definitively fallen with the victory of the Manchu Wan Li. He attempted to re-enter Kwangsi via Tonkin, but died of hardship before reaching his destination.

Endowed with a serious scientific culture, B. 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 Cley); he provided the tabula sinensis for the Geographia reformata which served as the basis for Ath. Kircher's China monumentis illustrata (Amsterdam 1667). A good number of other works remained in manuscript, including a large map of China (Paris, Marine Library) and an atlas of the provinces of China in 18 colored maps (Vatican Library).

BIBL.: Streit, Bibl., V, pp. 793-97; L. Pfister, Notices biographiques et bibliographiques sur les Jésuites de l'ancienne mission de Chine, I, Shanghai 1932, pp. 269-76; R. Chabrié, M. B., jésuite polonais et la fin des Ming en Chine, Paris 1933, to be completed with P. Pelliot, M. B., in T'oung Pao, 31 (1934), pp. 93-151.

Edmondo Lamalle