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Concept
Évariste Régis Huc
Summary
Évariste Régis Huc, C.M., also known as the Abbé Huc (1813–1860), was a French Catholic priest, Lazarite missionary, and traveller. He became famous for his accounts of Qing-era China, Mongolia (then known as "Tartary"), and especially the then-almost-unknown Tibet in his book Remembrances of a Journey in Tartary, Tibet, and China. He and his companion Joseph Gabet were the first Europeans who had reached Lhasa since Thomas Manning in 1812.
Huc was born in Caylus in the department of Tarn-et-Garonne, France, on 1 August 1813. In 1837, at age 24, he entered the Congregation of the Mission (then better known as the "Lazarites") at their priory in Paris. He took holy orders as a priest two years later.
Shortly afterwards, he sought the chance to work at the Lazarite mission in China, which had replaced the Jesuits' in 1783. He studied mission work and Chinese at its seminary on Macao under J.G. Perboyre (later martyred and canonized as a saint) for eighteen months.
When his Chinese was considered sufficient, he disguised himself for work on the mainland by growing out his hair, cutting it into the obligatory queue, wearing loose Chinese garments, and dyeing his skin to a yellower shade. He took a ship up the Pearl River to Guangzhou ("Canton") and oversaw a mission in the southern provinces for a time. He then traveled north to Beijing ("Peking"), where he improved his Mandarin.
He then settled in the Valley of Black Waters or Heishui, north of Beijing and just within the borders of Mongolia. There, beyond the Great Wall of China, a large but scattered population of native Christians had taken refuge from the persecutions of the Jiaqing Emperor ("Kia-king") who had added Christianity to China's list of condemned superstitions and cults, threatening missionaries with execution and converts with enslavement to the Muslims of Xinjiang. Huc devoted himself to the study of the dialects and customs of the "Tartars," for whom he translated several religious texts.
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