Jesuits and staff members work on the Chinese-French dictionary project in their Taichung office. (Courtesy of Taipei Ricci Institute)
By June Tsai
The Taipei Ricci Institute, founded in 1966 to support a huge Chinese dictionary project, has since realized that its mission is inseparable from Taiwan and the island nation’s mixture of cultures and changing social faces.
The institute, officially the Taipei Ricci Institute for Chinese Studies, takes its name from Matteo Ricci, the Italian Jesuit who arrived at the Chinese Ming court in 1583 and planted the seeds of cultural exchange between China and the West.
During the 1940s, as a way to sum up the Society of Jesuits’ 400-year presence in China, a Hungarian Jesuit, the Rev. Eugene Zsamar, gathered a team to compile an encyclopedic multilingual dictionary of Chinese and Hungarian, English, French, Spanish and Latin.
The Chinese civil war disrupted the project in its initial stages, and foreign missionaries were expelled from the mainland when the Communists came to power. Zsamar took refuge in Macau in 1949, and the project officially got underway. More people joined the effort, supported by some 200 dictionaries and related works Zsamar and others had brought with them.
“Two years were spent inventorying all the basic documentation on 8-by-12 centimeter cards, and it ended up with 2 million entries,” the Rev. Jacques Duraud, current director of the institute, told Taiwan Today. He displayed some of the yellowing cards, carefully mounted and preserved. On each card is recorded all possible translations of a Chinese character and related idioms in different languages.
The political situation dictated the project’s relocation from Macau to Taiwan in 1952, first to Taichung, then to Taipei. Under the French priest Yves Raguin, who succeeded the ailing Zsamar, the research institute was established to offer a stable base for the lexicographic work, as well as for the educational and missionary endeavors of the Jesuits in this new location.
Though financial difficulties and lack of manpower slowed the work, lexicographers still managed to produce separate medium-sized Chinese-French, Chinese-Spanish and Chinese-Hungarian dictionaries during the 1970s.
Gradually, only enough Jesuits and coworkers remained in the French section to carry on the lexicographical project.
“Thanks to the advent of the computer, data were processed in a systematic way, facilitating dictionary compilation and future uses.” Duraud, who came to Taiwan in 1986, was able to witness the completion of the seven-volume, 9,000-page Chinese-French dictionary in 2002.
Known as the “Grand Ricci,” it is believed to be the world’s largest bilingual dictionary, containing 300,000 entries.
Through this work the Jesuit lexicographers at the institute developed unparalleled knowledge in specialized fields. The Rev. Jean Lefeuvre, for example, in charge of the dictionary’s etymological section, became expert in oracle bone inscriptions, while Raguin completed books on meditation in the Buddhist and Taoist traditions.
Even more significantly, a library with 50,000 books was accumulated on traditional Chinese studies, religion and philosophy, as well as major fields in the humanities and social sciences.
In addition, a digital version of the “Grand Ricci” was made public in April. According to Duraud, specialized follow-up dictionaries, including one of Chinese medical terms, will also be published.
Although local people may not be aware that Taiwan has played host to such a massive cross-cultural undertaking, during the 50 years of the dictionary project, those at the Ricci Institute have been participatory observers in Taiwan’s passage from its colonial past to its democratic and prosperous present.
“The people of this country have overcome considerable political and economic challenges in the past decades,” said Duraud, who began to live and work in Taiwan in 1986. “I think it is now of great significance for Taiwan to position itself in the world on the basis of its specific achievements, to see the world from Taiwan’s perspective.”
Adopting this view, members of the Ricci Institute, besides serving to bridge cultures East and West, found their own ways of involving themselves with Taiwan.
One of their forms of engagement, according to Duraud, is the magazine Renlai, meaning “the sounds of humanity,” launched in 2004. Published in Chinese, the monthly deals with cultural, social and spiritual concerns. It also introduces European views through collaboration with the Paris-based cultural magazine Etude.
Later on, “eRenlai,” an electronic version, was made available in English and Chinese, to address Chinese communities and interested readers around the world.
“Because of this magazine, the institute began to have regular contact with various sections of the society, including nongovernmental organizations, academic institutes and private companies,” said June Lee, the institute’s executive director, who has worked on Renlai from its inception.
The magazine has initiated symposiums on religion, aboriginal languages and sustainable development. In 2007 and 2008, the institute organized an award for sustainability, conferring prizes on people engaged in grassroots social causes related to community, the environment and nature.
Indeed, the TRI has made a transition toward broader engagement with local society. According to the Rev. Benoit Vermander, who succeeded Raguin in 1996, the concept of Chinese studies referred to in the institute’s publication was static.
“It implies a concentration on the ‘grand narrative’ of the Chinese tradition and pays little attention to the specificities of Taiwan, where the Institute is located,” Vermander wrote in “Communication and Jesuit Mission in Chinese Context,” published in eRenlai in 2005.
Under Vermander, as the dictionary project was brought to completion, the institute set out to “work with the pluralist cultures and peoples within China and Taiwan,” as well as implementing research projects “that purposefully address issues and concerns common not only to China and Taiwan, but to all in the global community,” according to his 2005 article.
In addition to engagement through publications, the TRI supports a primary school in an ethnic minority area of Sichuan Province in the mainland and organizes teams of volunteer Taiwanese, American and French students to work in that area.
Now, it is in the local indigenous cultures that the TRI has found Taiwan’s great relevance to the global community.
Over the last two decades, the institute’s Jesuit priests have been engaged in aboriginal community work and education. The Austrian priest Fredric Weingartner, for example, has helped document 10 aboriginal languages and even published a Saisiyat language textbook in 1998. Duraud, who took over the helm of the institute in 2003, has been organizing activities fostering exchange among youth of different ethnic groups.
“The cultural diversity of the island, rediscovered in the process of the country’s democratization, and its links to the Austronesian world, documented in many studies, tie Taiwan very closely to other Pacific countries,” Duraud said.
“Issues concerning the Pacific in the new century, such as the challenges of climate change, could even highlight Taiwan’s role and efforts,” he stressed.
In view of this, the TRI is expanding its mission to include Pacific studies. In January, its book collection was transferred to the National Central Library, where the Matteo Ricci and Pacific Studies Reading Room opened to the public in April to mark the 400th anniversary of Ricci’s death in May 1610.
According to Lee, the institute will soon establish a center for Pacific studies, engaging researchers from Academia Sinica and National Taiwan University. “The goal is to spearhead international Pacific studies,” she said, adding that the center’s first international conference on Pacific-Austronesian cultures will be held in February next year.
For Duraud, Taiwan’s cultural diversity and tolerance of differences are manifested in many ways. He used a church in Taipei County’s Xindian City as an example. “The congregation of this church is one-third mainland Chinese descendents, one-third local Taiwanese and one-third aborigines,” he said.
Differences between the three groups need to be taken into consideration when it comes to the Eucharist and holidays.
Despite possible problems ensuing from their different identities, they are willing to come together under the same roof, he said.
“For people outside the church, this situation should serve to encourage creativity in finding peaceful and constructive ways of living together,” he said.
“I enjoy the diversity of Taiwanese society, and hope the institute can help nurture peace, understanding and sympathy between different cultures.”
This article is published in Taiwan Today Aug. 31, 2010.
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