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

2.1 Interest in Chinese Language and Culture

Perny’s correspondence also reveals, very early on, educational projects as well as a remarkable interest in the Chinese language and culture. In 1853, he wrote that “a normal school would be an essential part of this new mission”.⁷ The following year, he pointed out the importance of developing Chinese language teaching for the Chinese: “It’s their language… they need to learn [it] to a passable level”.⁸ A few years later, admittedly for religious reasons, he went even further in affirming the importance of Chinese culture:

our catechists must be well versed in religious controversy. Knowledge of the books of Confucius, the history of China, the history of idols, etc., etc., is just as necessary and just as indispensable for them.⁹

9 Perny, Letter to Albrand (19 February 1860) AMEP Guizhou 6A08/05‑2: Pastorale 544, 906.

More directly, he wrote to a peer:

Do you read Confucius? Have you studied the 4 Choū [Sishu 四書, Four Books]? This is necessary to be [a] good Chinese. You’re not bad already. […] They say you speak the local language well. You have grasped the Chinese way of doing good. But if you haven’t studied Confucius, your education isn’t perfect.¹⁰

10 Perny, Letter to Father Amat (10 August 1863) AMEP Guangdong 6A08/03‑2: Pastorale 555, 639‑47. Charles-Pierre-Anne-Jean Amat (1820‑1863) died a month later.

Moreover, in 1861, after learning of Perny’s intention to leave Guizhou, Faurie commented:

He is currently working on the memoirs of his trip to France,¹¹ and it is always [the] same spirit. Ridiculing France, exalting China. Before his trip to France, he was anti-Chinese, but since his return he has gone to the opposite extreme, I don’t know why.¹²

11 Two notebooks of a Mémoire sur mon voyage d’Europe fragmentaire, including a few pages of Jeunesse de M. Perny par lui-même, are in AMEP Perny file 0532-DG 231.

12 Faurie, Letter to Albrand (15 May 1861) AMEP Guizhou 6A08/05‑2: Pastorale 546‑2, 885‑9.

Perny’s awareness of the ‘Chinese cause’ is announced in several letters, which include criticism of the aggressive policies of the English and Napoleon III, and a denunciation of the 1858 Treaty of Tianjin (allowing missionaries to settle freely in the territory of the Empire) and the Peking Convention: “Should we count on a religious peace won at the sharp edge of the sword and in the name of politics?”.¹³ Apart from Perny’s opinion about French policy in China, his attitude can also be explained by the fear of direct repercussions: violent actions were taking place in the provinces of the Empire, with missionary lands ravaged by a succession of rebellions¹⁴ and, particularly in Guizhou, by anti-Christians persecution.¹⁵ Still in 1861, Faurie accused Perny of “preparing a work to prove the superiority of China over Europe: government, industry, trade”, an “absurd and dangerous” text, which he asked his Parisian colleagues to keep an eye on, so that the book would never be published.¹⁶ Indeed, this point on Chinese superiority would later take shape in Perny’s works, in the opening pages of his Projet d’une académie européenne au sein de la Chine from 1874,¹⁷ and, even more so, in his last book, which he signed with his Chinese name and titled La Chine supérieure à la France (Tong 1905; Charbonnier 2015, 131).

2.2 Mission Projects and Activities

In addition to conversions, the creation of schools and a press, the establishment of rules for new clerics, etc., one of Perny’s priorities was the creation of pharmacies, seen as places of action for ‘baptisers’, whose presence is confirmed in the archives.¹⁸ Meanwhile, he developed an interest in botany and, as early as 1854, he sent plants and silkworms to the Lyon Council.¹⁹ In 1855 Perny was made an honorary member of the Société d’acclimatation (Charbonnier 2015, 114; Launay 2002, 1: 454) and, writing in 1856, he mentions the Société impériale de zoologie.²⁰ The following year, during his trip to Europe (autumn 1857-spring 1859), he visited Lyon and brought the Lyon Faculty of Sciences materials on plants and products from Guizhou²¹ as well as writing a brief description of the province and its products, mainly its plants and fruits (Perny 1859).

At that time, his relations with Stanislas Julien (1797‑1873), an important member of Parisian institutional Sinology, seemed cordial, since the two had made a deal. In a letter addressed to the person chosen to act as an intermediary, Perny wrote:

Being in Paris, I met quite often with Mr. Stanislas Julien, the famous sinologist, curator of the Chinese library in the rue Richelieu. This library has religious books, which we do not have here, and it often has these Chinese books in two copies. It was difficult for me to have them copied in Paris. So Mr Julien made me this proposal: to send him from here the Chinese works he does not have in the Imperial Library and, for his part, he will give me the religious works that they have in duplicate.²²

22 Perny, Letter to the Director [Albrand?] (20 October 1862) AMEP dossier Perny 0532-DG 231.

Perny, who was ‘hyperactive’ in the 1850s, developed a project for a Mission Library: in 1854, he exposed his idea to François-Antoine Albrand (1804‑1867), director of the seminary in Paris.²³ Two years later, the project was detailed as follows:

We have resolved […] to create a Mission Library. All the books we have here will form the funds of this library, which will gradually be increased by the works of our new confreres and by the annual purchase of some good works in Europe. Knowledge quickly becomes ‘rusty’, especially as most of the young people who arrive at the mission do not have a strong scientific background. To maintain the necessary theological and ascetical knowledge among the missionaries of Kouý-tcheoū, I made this project […] In the future, the new missionaries of Kouý-tcheoū will not bring with them certain basic works that we already have in sufficient numbers, such as the Bible […] [but rather, they] will be informed from you about our catalogue and bring with them only excellent works that would not be found in the Kouý-tcheoū library.

As this passage shows, the collection was to be built up year by year, with books arriving in the luggage of new missionaries. In the same letter, however, Perny also talks about images:

In our Orations, when we display our beautiful images at feasts, the neophytes wonder what kind of saint it is […] This arbitrary variety of images distracts and confuses them.

So, just as the Chinese produced images of divinities and represented them in a recognisable way, whatever their size and the colours used, Perny wanted to have some portraits typified for each saint. For this, he proposed a method similar to the one he devised for the library, i.e. to notify Paris of inappropriate images, so that he would no longer receive them and would only receive ‘useful’ ones.²⁴ Sometimes the requests for books were more specific, as in 1854²⁵ or in 1864, when he had left Guizhou for Sichuan.²⁶

2.3 The Return to France

Sichuan seems to have been a fallback option. On his return to Guizhou in January 1860 (Launay 2002, 1: 483), Perny was confronted by Faurie, who had taken over the mission and was unhappy with Perny’s previous financial management. As a result, Perny quickly decided to leave Guizhou.²⁷ After an abortive attempt to be appointed to Guangxi,²⁸ he spent some time in Canton and then in Sichuan (1862‑69). He returned to France in 1869, the year his dictionary Dictionnaire français-latin-chinois was printed, and was imprisoned during the Commune (1870). He then published a memoir on this experience (1871): the contents of the first version, in which he revealed the inglorious conduct of the vicar-general of Paris, led to his expulsion from the MEP in 1872 and a canonical ban from the archdiocese of Paris.²⁹

As a person with some twenty years of practical field experience, Perny had a difficult relationship with the academic world of Parisian sinology: a militant for the ‘practical mastery’ of the Chinese language (Fabre 2018, 19), he came up against “the first ‘Sinisants’ who occupied institutional positions in Paris conferring sinological authority on them”.³⁰ In France, away from his order, he tried to make a name for himself and was outraged that the positions at Langues O’ were occupied by Julien, who did not speak Chinese, or – even worse – by his pupil Marie Jean Léon d’Hervey de Saint-Denys (1822‑1892) (Fabre 2015, 254). He is said to have run for the Collège de France against the latter, i.e. Julien’s successor, in 1874.³¹ He was certainly found guilty of having ‘defamed’ the elected candidate and his predecessor³² – an event that has been the subject of recent studies (Fabre 2018; Guo 2022). Beyond these facts, this confrontation testifies to the existence of tension between the Parisian ‘academics’ and ‘sino­phones’ like Perny, during the period of formation of the sinological epistemic community – although the conflict faded away over the following decade, as the ‘sinophones’ reconciled with institutional sinologists by adopting some of their methods (Fabre 2015, 255‑7). Regardless, Perny’s candidacy was not taken into account in 1893 either (Cordier 1895, 121‑2),³³ when Éduard Chavannes (1865‑1918), the first academic to also carry out fieldwork, was elected. In his pamphlet against d’Hervey de Saint-Denys, we can read Perny’s views on the Chinese language: that there is no ‘learned’ language, but a spoken language and a written language, and that the latter includes varieties of style (Bertin 1874, 14).³⁴ However, Perny did not support a didactic approach based entirely on practice and developed linguistic tools, such as dictionaries and grammar. In 1861, Faurie asserted that if the new arrivals to the mission wanted to learn Chinese, they should have left their studios and “put aside books, dictionaries, quills, and papers” in order to practice the oral language. In Guizhou, this would have taken the form of learning the local pronunciation, which was different from official Chinese – the need for which was, on the contrary, advocated in Perny’s writings. Faurie’s correspondence also mentions ‘Latin interpreters’, i.e. Chinese polyglots:³⁵ these ‘mediators’ are rarely mentioned and, when they are, remain anonymous in all the writings of Perny that I have been able to check. Despite his professed Sinophilia, local people are not always named in Perny’s correspondence³⁶ and their help with linguistic work is never explicitly mentioned. This does not mean that local intermediaries did not exist, but rather, it shows a certain ‘impermeability’ between networks. Although Perny’s missionary ‘microcosm’ was southern China, surrounded by the ‘barbarians’ who were the focus of his proselytising activities, in particular the ‘Miaôtsè’ (Miaozu 苗族?), Perny as both a teacher and an author had his ‘roots’ in France. He often wrote to the director of the Paris Seminary, sent botanical material to Paris and Lyon, and had books in French bought and sent to him.

3.1 Guizhou and Sino-European Impressions

In his brief article on this topic, Cordier (1905) only provided three titles: Perny’s Vocabularium, an Elementa Grammaticae Latinae (1867) by Faurie and an Alphabetum Lingua Latina typis missionis Kouiy-Tcheou (1856); however, I have been unable to locate original copies of the last two titles. Nevertheless, there is evidence of other publications in missionaries’ correspondence. In 1857 Perny printed the Ki jen che pien (Ji ren shi pian 畸人十篇, i.e. Ten dialogues on religious or moral subjects) by Matteo Ricci and the Pa je me xiang (Ba ri mo xiang 八日默想, i.e. Eight-Day Retreat, a book that was based on the teachings of Saint Ignatius),⁴⁰ for ‘virgins’, catechists and Christians.

After the printing of these two works, Perny remarked, our presses will immediately publish two more, which we owe to the pen of a confrere in Kouy-tcheou. [T]he first is a treatise on the Holy Angels […] written in very simple language, and almost intelligible when read aloud. The second work is a treatise on the festivals of the year according to the order and division of the Chinese calendar, which could be used especially for Sunday reading […] Finally, he envisioned the publication of ‘an apology of Christianity’ in the vein of Tertullian. (Launay 2002, 1: 453‑4)

At this time, Faurie and Perny were not yet in conflict, as printing and publishing activities were still combined. Xylography was used to produce paper sheets with a printed base (often in red) – for example, mission registers –⁴¹ and alternated with elementary typography, which was used to publish the Journal de la mission.⁴² In 1858, a notice on the needs of the Mission of Kouy-Tcheu was printed in France to raise funds: these funds were to be partly used to

help set up the religious printing works of the Mission. The Chinese print by woodblocks. The process is simple and inexpensive. An ordinary volume costs 80 to 100 francs to engrave. With woodblocks, an incalculable number of copies can be printed.⁴³

43 Perny, Notice sur les besoins généraux de la mission de Kouy-Tcheou (Chine) (May 1858) AMEP Guizhou 6A08/05‑2: Pastorale 549D, 21‑4 (page 3: VI of the booklet).

However, Faurie, who in 1856 was in charge of the press, wrote to Albrand:

During the first few years, we have tried to create a small ‘xylographic typography’ [wooden type?] for ourselves, and we are beginning to obtain fairly satisfactory results, when Providence, through the enterprise of Mgr de Sinite [Desflèches?], has provided us with a few kilos of movable type of which you have a sample at the head of this letter. However, as these typefaces are in very small quantities, and cannot be used to compose even 4 pages in 12-point font, this acquisition in no way alters the request for typefaces that we made to you in our previous letters.⁴⁴

44 Faurie, Letter to Albrand (17 August 1856) AMEP Guizhou 6A08/05‑2: Pastorale 544, 528‑9.

Again, a few months later:

The printing type order will be completed when you receive this letter. Please accept my thanks in advance. The small quantity of movable type which arrived so unexpectedly is doing us a great service for the college and the mission. And those which you will send to us, if it has been possible to sort them as we wish, will be of even greater service to us […] I shall send you by mail a copy of our complete works. We have done some marvellous indigenous typography. We will soon be competing with Firmin-Didot.⁴⁵

45 Faurie, Letter to Albrand (25 February 1857) AMEP Guizhou 6A08/05‑2: Pastorale 544, 539.

But things did not go so well. In October 1861, Albrand in Paris was sent a very miscellaneous list of items required for the mission: books and subscriptions to church periodicals, two clocks, writing paper, and 10 reams of paper, preferably in rolls (the equivalent of about 5000 sheets), vinegar essence, purple cloth for cassocks and, finally,

a printing press. We have a good supply of new types, with which we would like to print our classics. We can’t do it without a press, because the type would degrade too quickly, as happened to us once. As I know neither the price nor the weight of this item, I only ask on condition […] that it is not too great an expense, [and] that it can be transported here.⁴⁶

46 Anonyme, Letter to Albrand (27 October 1861) AMEP Guizhou 6A08/05‑2: Pastorale 546‑2, 871.

We therefore conclude that attempts were made to use the types – probably those that arrived from Sichuan or those requested by Faurie in the letter quoted – but these attempts were unsuccessful and even damaged the types in question. It seems that no press arrived following this request, but further research would be necessary to confirm this point. This is perhaps why the Vocabularium was a xylographic imprint.

3.2 Perny’s Sino-European Printed Works in France: Texts and Typefaces

The Dictionnaire Français-Latin-Chinois was published in 1869 by Didot, but as early as 1864 Perny had begun to work towards its publication, in the hope that this would be done at the highest level. In a letter to his director, he wrote:

You have no doubt become acquainted with the [honorable?] naval captain [?], Mr. De Maisonneuve. He is a friend of Fr. Libois. This excellent Captain is very devoted to the missi(ons). I turned to him to get the emp. Nap. III to print a French, Latin, and Chinese dictionary with characters, etc. You know that letters sometimes get lost. When you have the opportunity to see Mr. de Maisonneuve, would you ask him confidentially how the matter is progressing? He is seeing Mr. Drouyn de Lhuys; it is through him that we must go to the Emperor.⁴⁷

47 Perny, Letter to the director [Albrand?] (15 April 1864), file Perny 0532-DG 231. Édouard Drouyn de Lhuys (1805‑1881) was a French diplomat and politician. Text also mentions Napoléon Libois (1805‑1872).

The Dictionnaire was not an imperial edition, despite its dedication to Napoleon III, and the project even changed publishers between the publication of the dictionary (1869) proper, and the volumes of the appendix (1872) and the grammar (1873‑76)⁴⁸ – as, in the meantime, the days of the Commune and Perny’s removal from the MEP were taking place. Despite these changes, the graphics and composition of the frontispiece of the volumes maintained a formal unity. Moreover, the same graphic design was also used in other of Perny’s publications, such as the Vestiges des principaux dogmes chrétiens tirés des anciens livres chinois avec reproduction des textes chinois (1878),⁴⁹ giving his productions a distinctive visual identity. This last project was probably carried out over many years, as correspondence reveals exchanges between China and France. The preparatory work for publishing the text was complex, involving copyists of Latin and Chinese:

Mgr Faurie wrote asking us to be so kind as to complete the copying of a manuscript by (M.) Prémare [Joseph-Henri Marie de Prémare, 1666‑1736]. The illness I suffered in Paris did not give me time to finish it. I plan to annotate this manuscript, according to the Bull of Benedict XIV, on the subject of rites, and to publish it, if the occasion allows. You will easily find copyists for Latin, but [not for] Chinese! Mgr. D. told me that he had given you the necessary instructions on this subject. It goes without saying that we will pay the expenses. There were five or six Chinese in Paris in my time. I don’t know if there are as many now. I would be very grateful if you could help us to complete this copy. You will at last be doing a valuable act for Chinese belles lettres. We are already making good use of your services. However, I promise not to abuse your kindness. Please send the copy to Libois so that I can receive it wherever I am.

This letter should be addressed to Albrand, dated 4 (October?) 1861; in another letter from the following year, still addressed to the ‘director’, Perny wrote: “I don’t know if the manuscript you had kindly copied has arrived, I haven’t seen anything yet”.⁵⁰

The Preface by Bonnetty to Prémare’s work, published in 1878 (Prémare 1878, I-XIV), as well as Perny’s prefatory remarks to the dictionary (1869) and Pauthier’s presentation of it in the Journal Asiatique (1871), provide information on its printing and the phases of preparation required. Although the need to synthesise forced me to shorten my research on Perny’s early stay in France and his second return from China (which turned out to be definitive), I have nevertheless found some interesting archives at the IN. The materials I found there offer additional insights into what is already more well-known information and enable us to understand the different stages in the production of Chinese types in Paris. Thus, we can grasp another facet of the character of Perny – both abbot and sinologist, naturalist and typographer.

First of all, it seems that, at least for the dictionary, publication costs were considerable, “far exceeding the meagre resources of a simple missionary” (Perny 1869a, 3). At the end of his preface, Perny thanks the Presidents and Members of the Central Councils for the Propagation of the Faith, for

their generous and benevolent assistance […] Religion and science will be indebted to them for this service. We would also like to thank our printer, who has shown the greatest zeal in making this Dictionary a model of typographical elegance and accuracy. (8)

This trilingual edition was possible because, as Pauthier (1871, 354) explained, Perny

came to France to have his book printed, after having obtained from the American Presbyterian Mission Press in China⁵¹ a set of Chinese characters called diamond characters, which he had cast again in Paris, and which he composed himself, supplying them successively to the printer with his copy.⁵²

51 Also mentioned by Trujillo-Gonzalez, Walter 2018.

52 “as I did myself to print the first issue of my Dictionnaire étymologique chinois-annamite-latin-français”, Pauthier concluded, explaining that the first issue of this dictionary, comprising the first ten radicals, was the only one published.

The explanation of the affair itself was more extensive in the Preface to the Vestiges (1878?):

The IN did have a collection of typefaces, wooden types that Mr. St A. Julien had sent for. Julien had brought them in. But they were shapeless. There were also those engraved by Mr. Legrand under the direction of Mr. Pauthier, [which were] more graceful, more exact; but they were incomplete and besides these two typefaces, [they] were larger than those of our ordinary printing typefaces.⁵³ So we needed a typeface that would work with the usual [Western] characters. Moreover, the costs of this publication, made by the official printing house, exceeded our resources. Providence provided. The Anglican missionaries had had a very fine typeface engraved in China for the printing of their books. But it had to be brought to France. The IN, encumbered with its shapeless typefaces, had no intention of obtaining them. A simple missionary brought about this reform. With astonishing constancy, Abbé Perny, of the Congrégation des Missions-Étrangères, and a missionary in China for 25 years, came to Europe with the project of filling a gap in the Chinese missions, by providing the missionaries with the books they needed to carry out their apostolate completely and more easily. On his own initiative, with infinite trouble, and in spite of countless obstacles, he brought from China a set of matrices, and it was with the help of characters cast in France on these molds that he became not only the author, but also the material composer of the volumes we will quote below. (Prémare 1878, IV-V)

53 The text includes a note referring to the Annales de philosophie which provided specimens of these characters in their t. XVI, 227 (fourth series) for those of Julien, and t. I, 126 (fifth series) for those of Pauthier.

Indeed, Perny had already written of his dictionary that

I had above all to resign myself to becoming, at my age, the typographer of the whole part of my work in Chinese and to devoting two whole years to this material task. (1869, 3)

From his account of the personal misadventures he experienced under the Commune, we are given to understand that the work was carried out at the press of Adolphe Laîné, 19 rue des Saints-Pères,⁵⁴ who was also the publisher of Deux mois de prison (1871). Here, the worker who helped with Chinese was named Michel: Perny forged such a close relationship with Michel that the latter tried to help the abbot when he was imprisoned during the Commune.⁵⁵ However, as in 1869 Perny also published his work on Chinese proverbs (Perny 1869b) with the same publishers and printers, we do not know whether Michel worked on this last small book, on the large dictionary, or both.⁵⁶ Moreover, at that time, Perny was already preparing the large characters that would be used for Le livre des Cent familles included in the 1872 appendix, so in the Preface to the Dictionary (1869, 7‑8), he stated that “we have chosen and engraved, for these names, a particular form of Chinese characters”. About ten years later, for the Vestiges, it was instead a question of “engraving, at our own expense, the ancient characters so numerous in this work” (Bonnetty’s preface in Prémare 1878, V).

3.3 Documents at the IN

The IN has many unclassified archives of its Oriental typefaces. Among them, a quite recent report on IN Chinese characters (1913?) lists four complete series of IN characters, sizes 10, 16, 24, and 40:

of the four series, the most widely used is the 10-point series.⁵⁷ Its engraving is excellent and produces very sharp impressions.⁵⁸

57 These typefaces were reproduced in an IN catalogue, Catalogue des signes chinois: corps 10 (1889).

58  Note for the office of the Under-Secretary of State for Finance (1913?), unclassified archives of the IN, collection of oriental types.

That this last series of types was linked to the typefaces introduced to Europe by Perny cannot be excluded.

In other documents, we read that in 1903, Perny had an intermediary write to the IN proposing the purchase of around 8000 well-catalogued matrices: this figure gives quite a precise idea of the number of different typefaces that were considered sufficient for publication. The reason for this proposal was explained as follows:

Around 1876‑1877 Father Perny […], at the express request [of the IN], allowed a font [of the typefaces] that he had needed for printing his works. I even believe that the IN took advantage of this opportunity to have matrices made from those with which it had been entrusted. In any case, since that time, no one has ever asked Father Perny for any Chinese characters.⁵⁹

59  Letter to the Director of the IN, undeciphered signature, 27 January 1903.

Thinking that, in the long run, he had been injured by this operation, Perny hoped for ‘compensation’ for the losses he suffered because of the low number of requests for use (and rental) of his typefaces from French users, who could instead have turned to IN. Hence, the IN should purchase the original typefaces to compensate. But the IN’s response was negative: they explained that between 1873 and 1883 they had been authorised to cast typefaces from matrices at Perny’s request. Perny had supplied 7725 matrices for this purpose and the matrices with the cast typefaces were returned to him: the typefaces, 9.5-point size, did not correspond to the IN standard.

According to this response, there should have been a document⁶⁰ explaining that the IN had obtained permission to take impressions of the 7725 signs to produce electrolytic matrices, which were completed in 1883: as these matrices were still in good condition for use, the IN could not accept Perny’s proposal.

IN sources from 1890 stated that in exchange for Perny’s provision of 7712 matrices (dated 3 March 1873), he received 1200 kg of cast iron (fused type); and that Perny’s typefaces (the “diamond typefaces” mentioned by Pauthier) were the same ones reproduced in the Price List and Specimen Book of Types, Comprising Chinese, Japanese, Manchu, English, and Music (Shanghai, 1872) of the APMP, American Presbyterian Mission Press (Meihua shuguan 美華書館; cf. Barnett 1971; Drège 1992). The APMP was the press where William Gamble, who applied electrotype to print Chinese texts, worked, and where he established that a set of 8000 characters was sufficient for a newspaper, while less was needed for religious publications, around 6000 in a standard font (McIntosh 1895, 21‑3). Finally, in 1879, the equivalence of typefaces was verified on ‘Chinese groups’ sent from Shanghai by Camille Imbault-Huart (1857‑1897).⁶¹

Some information in the IN archives is contradictory: contrary to what the preceding document attests, elsewhere we read that

M. l’abbé de Perny did not give any matrices; it was with the help of lead types, coming from the cast iron made for the account of [–] Abbé Perny, that IN took electroplated impressions. See the 1878 specimen. A catalogue of these signs was published in 1889 in 8°.⁶²

62 This could be the Catalogue des signes chinois: corps 10 (1889). Handwritten note on the folder containing a dossier entitled “Chinois Corps 10 (Chinese Size 10)”, unclassified archives of IN on oriental typefaces.

In addition to the complete specimen of these typefaces, the IN also holds an annotated version of the specimen, with information on the storage of the types – which were divided into groups according to their graphic components, and with each typeface being assigned a number. However, these documents require verification for the actual presence of these typefaces at the IN, made from those of Paul Perny, and clarification on the related technical issues.⁶³ But it would be especially interesting to understand how they were actually used for contemporary and later works printed by the IN, or by publishers who borrowed the IN types, and to confirm whether or not Perny’s purchase of the APMP types had any concrete effects on the discipline of sinology, given the importance of printing in the dissemination of knowledge. Last but not least, as Zhang Xiumin 张秀民 and Han Qi 韩琦 (2006, 444‑52) explained in their history of printing in China, the French decomposed typefaces of Pauthier and Legrand provided models for the types used by the APMP between 1844 and 1860. As such, a few years later, the story came full circle with the characters being reintroduced to Europe from China by Perny and his contemporaries.