Paper short abstract:

This work focuses on a certain vision of Asia emerging from Loureiro’s Flora Cochinchinensis (1790). Heir to the Humanism and in the frame of the East-West interchange, this Jesuit’s magnum opus symbolises the scientific effort and summarises the cultural remarks of nearly 4 decades in Cochinchina.

Paper long abstract:

The Portuguese maritime endeavour inaugurated, with the sea route to India, a movement of goods and people, as well as a cultural and scientific exchange, connecting Europe and the Far East, later substantiated and cemented by the Jesuit presence in the Levant.

João de Loureiro, a Portuguese Jesuit priest, was, in the mid eighteenth century, sent to Cochinchina, historical region of Southeast Asia with a long bank bathed by the South China Sea. Moved by his acknowledged intellectual curiosity and the difficulties involved with both being accepted as a Christian apostle and accessing European pharmacy, this missionary devoted himself to botanic research, counting on the regular maritime routes to receive western reference works and to dispatch eastern unrecorded specimens and thus increasing the East-West interchange.

As an effect of his scientific effort, he was made a member of the Royal Society and also joined in the Lisbon Academy of Sciences. Furthermore, when, after about 40 years, the Jesuit returned to Lisbon, his Flora Cochinchinensis was published in 1790 at the expense of the Portuguese Academy.

A groundbreaking pharmacognostical work, this Flora included 185 new genera and nearly 1300 Eastern species and their therapeutic applications. Along with that noteworthy scientific enhancement, the work encompasses enriching images of Asian lands and peoples.

Mainly considering its preface, whose translation from Latin and analysis we have done, we intend an approach to the Flora Cochinchinensis, especially within the framework of scientific and cultural exchange between Europe and the East started in the European Humanism.