Perhaps the most astonishing thing about Hu is that we
know anything about him at all. The Chinese biographical
tradition is rich in the materials it has preserved on scholars
and statesmen, philosophers and poets, men of unusual
moral rectitude and recluses distinguished by their eccentricity. Even merchants might be recorded if they were both
wealthy and charitable, and soldiers if they guarded the borders with valor or suppressed indigenous revolts. But Hu
was none of those things. He was an exasperating and apparently unprepossessing man, who had very little money,
no distinguished relatives, and only a perfunctory education
that left him equipped for nothing except the copying of
other people’s texts. He had courage, but no skills in warfare. A convert to Catholicism, he never rose high in the
ranks of the Church. And though he did travel once to Europe, in 1722, and stayed there over three years, much of the
time in a madhouse, he wrote only two brief letters about
his experience, and one of those was lost in transit.