Simon Yongjun Zheng 鄭永君, Bringing China Home: Fr. Jozef Mullie — A Flemish Scheutist, Educator, and Sinologist, Leuven: F. Verbiest Foundation, Leuven Chinese Studies 49, 2026.
Jozef Mullie was one of the few Belgian missionaries who devoted themselves so fully to the study of China. During more than two decades in northern China and throughout his subsequent establishment as a scholar in Europe, he combined missionary service with an enduring commitment to Chinese language, literature, and historical studies. He became a prolific scholar, a respected professor, and the builder of a Chinese library that continues to shape research today. Despite the breadth of his achievements, Mullie’s name has largely faded from historical memory, and the documentary traces of his personal history remain scattered across archives in Belgium and beyond.
The present volume, Bringing China Home: Fr. Jozef Mullie — A Flemish Scheutist, Educator, and Sinologist, seeks to restore Mullie to that history and serves as the inaugural publication of the Mullie Studies research programme. Conceived as a long-term scholarly initiative, this programme aims not only to reconstruct Mullie’s life and intellectual legacy, but also to provide a useful lens through which to reconsider Scheut missionary involvement and the development of modern Sinology in Belgium, as well as their place within Sino–Belgian relations. Missionaries, at first glance, are often treated primarily as religious agents. Mullie’s career complicates this distinction. His example demonstrates that missionary work and scholarly inquiry were not separate pursuits but deeply intertwined enterprises, each shaping the other in the production and circulation of knowledge about China.
About the author:
Simon Yongjun Zheng 鄭永君, received his PhD in History from Fudan University in 2021. Since then, he has been an academic researcher at the Verbiest Institute, KU Leuven. His research focuses on Sinology in the Dutch-speaking world, Chinese language education in the West, and Sino-European encounters.
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