Joseph-Gaëtan-Pierre-Maxime-Marie Callery or Giuseppe Gaetano Pietro Massimo Maria Calleri in Italian form (25 June 1810 – 8 June 1862) was an Italian-French Roman Catholic missionary who travelled into Southeast Asia where he studied Chinese and collected specimens of natural history from the region. He published an encyclopedia on the Chinese language and several species of plants have been named after him. Callery was born in

Turin Turin ( , Piedmontese: ; it, Torino ) is a city and an important business and cultural centre in Northern Italy. It is the capital city of Piedmont and of the Metropolitan City of Turin, and was the first Italian capital from 1861 to 1865. Th ...

where his mother Anna Maria Antonia was a tailor and his father Gaetano a silk merchant. He studied the classics in Lyons and worked for a while as a shop clerk. He was ordained priest in 1834 following studies at the Missions étrangères de Paris. He was sent into Southeast Asia, but unable to get to his destination in Korea, he lived in Macau where he studied Chinese under the Portuguese sinologist Joaquim Afonso Gonçalves (1780-1844). In 1841 he published a dictionary of Chinese in Latin. In 1842 he was expelled from the mission and after a return to France he received a new position as an interpreter for Théodore de Lagrené's Embassy in Macao. He helped in the success of the

Treaty of Whampoa The Treaty of Whampoa () was a commercial treaty between Qing dynasty of China and Kingdom of France, which was signed by Qiying and Théodore de Lagrené on October 24, 1844 aboard the warship ''L’Archimède''. It is considered an unequal treat ...

between the

Qing dynasty The Qing dynasty ( ), officially the Great Qing,, was a Manchu-led imperial dynasty of China and the last orthodox dynasty in Chinese history. It emerged from the Later Jin dynasty founded by the Jianzhou Jurchens, a Tungusic-speak ...

and the Kingdom of France.He returned to Paris in 1846 where he lived the rest of his life. Callery collections specimens of natural history during his travels. Some of his bird specimens were presented to the Turin museum. The plants '' Eugenia calleryana'' and ''

Pyrus calleryana ''Pyrus calleryana'', or the Callery pear, is a species of pear tree native plant, native to China and Vietnam, in the family Rosaceae. It is most commonly known for its cultivar 'Bradford' and its offensive odor, widely planted throughout the Un ...

'' were named from among the nearly 2000 species of plants that he collected. He married Henriette-Louise-Clémentine Quelquejeu in 1861 in Lisses and they had six children including the historian Alphonse (1847-1909). He died at the age of 51 and was buried at the cemetery at Montmarte.

References

External links

Archives

Systema phoneticum scripturae Sinicae
(1841) {{DEFAULTSORT:Callery, Joseph Marie 1810 births 1862 deaths French sinologists