By Angelo Paratico
While living in China, I read everything I could find about Eugenio Zanoni Volpicelli, Italian Consul in Hong Kong from 1899 to 1919. I often encountered travel accounts by Italian travellers that mentioned this mysterious polyglot of Neapolitan origin. The same was true of texts on the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 and 1901, where his name appeared occasionally.
I managed to find some of his books and essays, but biographical information about him was scarce, despite his being an extraordinary figure. This morning, when I opened the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani – Volume 100 (2017) – in its online edition, published by the Fondazione Treccani, I discovered an exceptionally detailed profile written by Federico Masini, a distinguished sinologist, who must have conducted meticulous research on him, uncovering many details previously unknown to me. I take the liberty of reproducing the results of his research here (omitting the bibliography and notes for reasons of space), hoping not to do an injustice to either the author or the esteemed Treccani Foundation.
ZANONI VOLPICELLI, Eugenio Felice Zanoni Maria (Chinese name Fóbìzhílǐ)
He was born on 12 April 1856 on the island of Jersey – close to the French coast but belonging to Great Britain – to Eugenio Lodoski and the landowner Enrichetta Federica Hinde, as Eugenio Felice Zanoni Maria Hinde Lodoski.
On 14 January 1891 (when he was nearly 35), he formally acquired the surname Volpicelli, following his adoption by Ferdinando Volpicelli (1826–1891), a descendant of a wealthy Neapolitan family, who in 1850 had married Maria Teresa Hind(e), a relative of Zanoni’s mother (State Archives of Rome, Italian Civil Registry, Rome, Births 1891, nos. 1–156, vol. 1, part 2, series A, f. 5). However, he had been using the surname Volpicelli even before the adoption, probably because he was already living in Naples with Ferdinando Volpicelli’s family, who had no children from his marriage.
His third given name, Zanoni, may have been taken from the title of a novel (Zanoni, London 1842) by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. The confusion regarding his real name, which persists to this day, arises both from the fact that he signed his works – as well as, on two occasions, under the pseudonym Vladimir – as Eugenio Volpicelli, Eugenio Zanoni Volpicelli (with ‘Zanoni’ as part of his surname), or Zenone Volpicelli, and from the fact that he is referred to by one of these three names, at different times, in the works of others or in official documents.
In Naples, Volpicelli first attended the Technical Institute and then, thanks to a scholarship, the Asian College, formerly the College of the Chinese – later the Oriental Institute, now the University of Naples L’Orientale – where he studied Arabic, Persian and Chinese. After graduating in 1881, in April of that year he applied – together with his former classmate, Onia Tiberii – for a post with the Chinese Imperial Customs Service, entrusting the request to Ferdinando De Luca, the first representative of the Kingdom of Italy, who was about to depart for China.
The application was immediately accepted, and Volpicelli and Tiberii were among the first Italians to be hired by the Imperial Customs Service, whose head, the British Sir Robert Hart, was well aware that Naples, thanks to the presence of Chinese converts, was home to one of the few schools of spoken Chinese in Europe.
Volpicelli left Naples for China on 23 August 1881, after meeting the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Pasquale Stanislao Mancini, who asked him to send reports to Rome on the situation in that country. On 1 September 1882, he was appointed a fourth-rank official (Si deng bangban) of the Imperial Customs Service, based in Amoy (now Xiamen), on the south-eastern coast of China.
In 1884, aboard the Italian ship Cristoforo Colombo, he travelled to Korea to accompany De Luca to the signing of the first Treaty of Friendship, Commerce and Navigation between the Kingdom of Korea and Italy, which was signed on 26 June that year.
On the recommendation of Zhang Zhidong, a senior Chinese official – then Governor-General of the provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi – he accompanied the Chinese imperial envoy Sun Hongxun on the mission which – in accordance with the peace protocol signed in Paris on 4 April 1885, at the end of the Sino-French War – was to inform the Chinese troops in Tonkin (northern Vietnam) of the evacuation plans. The mission departed from Canton on 18 April and returned there on 20 May 1885.
This episode would later be recalled by Volpicelli in an extremely self-congratulatory manner: ‘I took part in the Chinese imperial mission to secure the armistice in Tonkin in 1885, contributing to France’s acquisition of the Tonkin region’ (Curriculum vitae, dated Rome, 10 January 1925, typescript p. 2, now in the Historical Diplomatic Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation (hereinafter MAECI), ref. IX-V2, f. 41).
However, following this mission, the weekly magazine L’illustrazione Italiana published an article on Volpicelli, accompanied by a photograph of him; he was also awarded the Double Dragon (Shuanglong baoxing) honour by the imperial court, and even hoped, though in vain, to receive the Legion of Honour from the French government.
In the years that followed, while continuing to serve with the Chinese Customs Service, he travelled several times to China, Japan and Russia. In addition to his prolific work as a contributor to foreign newspapers published in China (in particular the British weekly in Shanghai, *The North-China Herald*), between 1888 and 1893 he published several articles in the *Journal of the North-China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society*—the leading British journal on Sinology – on subjects as diverse as they were rarely covered.
He introduced Chinese chess (Weiqi or Wei-ch’i, better known in the West by the Japanese term Go) to the European public for the first time, described the use of steam for propulsion in ancient China, and compiled a summary of relations between Portugal and China. During a trip to Italy, on 14 February 1891 he married Iside Minetti in Milan, the daughter of Clementina Pandiani and a member of a wealthy family of Milanese intellectuals, related to the Maraini family from whom the famous orientalist Fosco and his daughter, the writer Dacia, would later descend.
On his return to Shanghai, in 1892 he was appointed honorary secretary of the Chinese branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, the leading scientific society for Chinese studies. In 1896, he published in London, in English, *The China-Japan War…*, a reportage – signed under the pseudonym Vladimir – on the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895, which ended with the defeat of the Chinese Empire; in this text (translated into Korean in 2009), Volpicelli drew on sources in Chinese, Japanese and various European languages, succeeding in offering a highly comprehensive account of the war.
During those years, he also devoted himself to the study of Classical Chinese phonology and to methods for reconstructing the ancient phonological system and rhymes, being among the first to employ dialectal pronunciations as a useful tool for reconstructing the most ancient forms of speech; he devoted his monograph *Chinese phonology…* to these topics, published in Shanghai in 1896—and fully translated into Chinese in 2003—which Luo Changpei, the most distinguished modern Chinese scholar of classical phonology, considered one of the first scientific works on ancient Chinese phonology.
Also in Shanghai, in 1897 Volpicelli published a pamphlet (*The silver question in China…*) on the circulation of silver in China and the dynamics of its fluctuations in value.
