Catholic medals with Chinese characters: from missionary propaganda to Our Lady of China

• Autores: Pierre Petit, Vanessa Frangville
• Localización: Revue belge de numismatique et de sigillographie, ISSN 0774-5885, Nº. 168, 2022, págs. 220-293
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • For over half a century, Catholic devotional medals inscribed with Chinese characters have attracted the attention of numismatists. Their common argument is that such medals were commissioned in France by missionaries working in China to distribute to the new converts. Recontextualizing these objects characterized by a mixture of sinograms with iconographies of the 19th century is indeed challenging. Based on an extensive corpus of 340 medals from various collections, research in missionary archives in Paris and Rome, and a careful examination of the epigraphy, we argue that most of these medals were not intended for Chinese converts, but to sustain the propaganda of the Holy Childhood Association, a 19th- century French society promoting the missionary cause among children of the Catholic world, reaching eventually millions of members. The society ceased producing these medals at the turn of the 19th century, but other institutions have taken over the minting of Chinese Catholic medals up to the present