On November 11, Liber Sinicus Táo Tě Kīm inscriptus, in Latinum idioma Versus: The First Translation of the Daodejing in Transcription was released at the College of Philosophy of Nankai University. The book is a collaborative work by Misha Tadd, Associate Professor at the College of Philosophy and Director of the Global Laozegetics Research Center at Nankai University, and young classicist Zhang Xiaoyuan. Published by Lit-Verlag in Germany, the book provides invaluable documentary materials for global Laozegetics studies, particularly research on early global translations and dissemination of the Daodejing.

The new book focuses on an early 18th-century Latin manuscript of the Daodejing created by Jesuit Figurist missionaries, which is currently recognized as the earliest complete foreign-language translation of the Daodejing. The manuscript, housed in the British Library, spans 245 pages and includes a full translation accompanied by interlinear annotations and marginal notes. The manuscript not only draws on the Chinese commentary tradition; in some of its annotations, passages from traditional Chinese annotated editions are also rendered into Latin with great scholarly rigor. The publication of this transcription brings the earliest foreign-language translation of the Daodejing back into public view. It fills a critical gap in research on the Daodejing’s westward transmission, provides essential first-hand materials for studying the “transmission of Chinese learning to the West”, and offers a unique perspective on how the early 18th-century Western world read and interpreted the Daodejing in Latin.

At the release event, Misha Tadd introduced the book’s main contents and the process behind its publication. In 2017, during his search for the Latin translation of the Daodejing, he traveled to the British Library, where he discovered that sections of the manuscript were obscured due to binding. After expert restoration, a complete scan of the manuscript was eventually obtained in 2022. Because of the manuscript’s age and faint handwriting, the transcription process proved extremely challenging. Tadd spent half a year painstakingly transcribing, comparing, and annotating the text character by character. Following proofreading by Zhang Xiaoyuan, and with assistance from Martin Woesler, Specially-appointed Professor at Hunan Normal University and editor at the European University Press, the book was ultimately published by Lit-Verlag as the inaugural volume in the Bibliotheca Sinica.

In 2023, at the proposal of Chen Guying, a renowned Taoism scholar and Chair Professor in Humanities at Peking University, Nankai University established the Global Laozegetics Research Center. The center is committed to studying the Daodejing and its global dissemination from an international perspective, and to advancing the creative transformation and innovative development of China’s outstanding traditional culture.

（Edited and translated by Nankai News Team.)