The western origin of the early Chinese civilisation II

Yesterday, I read Issac Yue's (HKU) "Missionaries (Mis-)representing China: Orientalism, Religion, and the Conceptualization of Victorian Cultural Identity" in Victoria Literature and Culture (Vol. 37, Iss. 1, pp. 1-10., esp. p. 4 and 9, note 3) in which he reveals that Samuel Kidd (1804-1843), the first Professor of Chinese in England at University College, London, adopted the theory that "the Chinese are descended from the Hebrews" and this supposition was originated by "an unnamed French Sinologue which was then passed along to him (Kidd) via Robert Morrison." (p. 9, note 3).

Could that "unnamed French sinologue" be the French Catholic missionary Jean Basset (c. 1662-1707), who served in Sichuan as missionary of the Société des Missions Etrangères de Paris (Paris Foreign Missions Society) and left his manuscript translation of the New Testament (now called Basset/Sloane manuscript and remained in the British Museum)? Or actually the German Jesuit missionary Johann Adam Schall von Bell (1591-1666), who upheld the same supposition? It forced me to return to the theory of the western origin of the early Chinese civilisation.

Last year, in response to Hon Tze-ki's (SUNY Geneseo) Chinese article "Trials and Tributions of Joining Global Capitalism: The Dixue zazhi (Journal of Earth Studies) in Early Twentieth Century China" in New History (Vol. 19, No. 2 (Jun. 2008), pp. 151-179, esp. p. 167), which claims that Terrien de Lacouperie alledged the western origin of the early Chinese civilisation in 1893 on the basis of his Western Origin of the Early Chinese Civilisation (1893), I drew attention to Lacouperie's early work Early History of the Chinese Civilisation, which was published more than a decade earlier (1880).

As early as 1867, following the Oxford giant in comparative religion and philology Max Müller, Terrien de Lacouperie published Du langage: essai sur la nature et l'étude des mots et des langues (Language: essay on the nature and the study of the words and languages) in Paris and Leipzig, in which he examined the philological structure the Chinese language (which he learned in Hong Kong due to his silk merchant father) and compared it with Indo-European and Dravidian languages. With the introduction written by the French orientalist León de Rosny (1837-1914), professeur to the bibliothèque impériale at the time, who pioneered teaching the Japanese langauge in France in l’Ecole Impériale des langues vivantes (the Imperial School of the living languages), the debut treatise established his fame as a notable comparative philologist.