BOYM, MICHAŁ. - Missionary and sinologist, b. in 1614 (?) at Lwów (Leopoli) in Poland, d. on 22 Aug. 1659 in China in Kwangsi. Having entered the Society of Jesus at Kraków in 1631, he embarked at 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 Yungli, the last Ming emperor in struggle against the Manchu dynasty, which already held the north. Catholic Ming princesses (among them the empress-mother Helena) and the prime minister Achille Pang then charged B. with carrying to Rome letters to the Pope and to the father general of the Society. By way of India, Persia and Smyrna, B. arrived in 1652 in Venice and from there in Rome, where the Congregation of Propaganda Fide at first showed itself distrustful of him. He was finally able to set out again from Lisbon in 1656, with the replies of Alexander VII and of father Goswin Nickel, but he found in the East that the Ming dynasty had definitively fallen with the victory of the Manchu Wan Li. He attempted to re-enter Kwangsi by way of 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 Andrea Cley), he provided the tabula sinensis for the Geographia reformata at the basis of the China monumentis illustrata of Ath. Kircher (Amsterdam 1667). A good number of other works remained in manuscript, among them a large map of China (Paris, bibl. of the Navy) and an atlas of the provinces of China in 18 colored maps (Vatican Library).