Jean-Baptiste Régis

Jean-Baptiste Régis (died 1738) was a French Jesuit missionary in imperial China.

He was born at Istres, in Provence, on 11 June 1663, or 29 January 1664; died in Beijing on 24 November 1738. He was received into the Society of Jesus on 14 September 1683, or 13 September 1679, and in 1698 went on the Chinese mission, where he served science and the Catholic religion for forty years, and took the chief share in the making of the general map of the Chinese Empire.

The early Jesuit missionaries had already endeavoured to make known to Europe the true geography of China, of which at the end of the sixteenth century even the best cartographers were utterly ignorant. Their achievements up to the middle of the seventeenth century are summed up in the "Novus Atlas Sinensis" published by Father Martin Martini (Amsterdam, 1655). He was greatly assisted in this work by Chinese books of geography, where he found a mass of descriptive information, the distances between important places, and even maps which however were very crude, the distances having been measured with little exactitude. These imperfect data he supplemented and completed by astronomical observations made in the chief towns by himself and his associates; hence the positions of his Atlas are remarkably accurate. The favour enjoyed by the missionaries with the Kangxi Emperor (1662–1722) made it possible for them to improve on this. Father Ferdinand Verbiest collected the earliest ideas of 'Tatary' (i.e. the Mongol Empire) during two journeys made to that country with the emperor (1682-3).

The arrival in China in 1687 of French Jesuits sent by Louis XIV gave new impetus to scholarly labours in the mission, especially to geography. Provided with perfected instruments and trained in the methods of the astronomers of the observatory of Paris, the new missionaries were able to determine more correctly locations already calculated. The "Mémoires" and the "Histoire de l'Academie des Sciences" record their observations. Father Jean-François Gerbillion made eight journeys through Tatary and Mongolia (1688–98) acquiring more geographical information concerning them. In 1701 the great work of the general map of the empire, begun by the topographical drawing of the capital city of Beijing and its environs, including the ancient summer residences of the emperors and 1700 towns or villages, was assigned to Father Antoine Thomas, a Belgian of Namur, and three Frenchmen, Joachim Bouvet, Jean Baptiste Régis and Dominique Parennin. Ming Emperor K'ang-hi, who wished to take measures against the periodic overflow of the rivers of Zhili, was satisfied.

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