Philippe Avril
title: "Philippe Avril" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["1654-births", "17th-century-french-explorers", "17th-century-french-jesuits", "1698-deaths", "french-roman-catholic-missionaries", "jesuit-missionaries-in-china", "french-missionaries-in-china", "deaths-due-to-shipwreck-at-sea"] topic_path: "people/1650s" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Avril" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0
::data[format=table title="Infobox person"]
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| name | Philippe Avril |
| birth_date | |
| death_date | (presumed) |
| known_for | Exploration |
| occupation | Professor |
| nationality | French |
| :: |
|name = Philippe Avril |image = |alt = |caption = |birth_date = |birth_place = |death_date = (presumed) |death_place = |other_names = |known_for = Exploration |occupation = Professor |nationality = French
Philippe Avril (; 1654 – 1698 (presumed)) was a Jesuit explorer of the Far East. He was born at Angoulême, France on 16 September 1654.
Avril was a professor of philosophy and mathematics at Paris when he was dispatched to the Jesuit missions of China. Following the instructions of Ferdinand Verbiest, another Jesuit, then at Peking, he attempted an overland journey, and traveled for six years through Kurdistan, Armenia, Astrakhan, Persia, and other countries of eastern Asia.
Arriving at Moscow, Avril was refused permission to pass through Tatary, and was sent by the Government to Poland, whence he made his way to Istanbul and from there went back to France. Though exhausted by disease, he set out again on a vessel, which was lost at sea. Avril presumably died in a 1698 shipwreck.
Avril's journal and writings provide a significant amount of useful material for modern historians and demographers.
References
Sources
References
- Cordier, Henri. (1907). "Bibliotheca sinica: Dictionnaire bibliographique des ouvrages relatifs à l'Empire chinois". E. Guilmoto.
- Carhart, Michael C.. (2019). "Leibniz discovers Asia : social networking in the Republic of Letters".
- Vermote, Frederik. (2017). "Travellers Lost and Redirected: Jesuit Networks and the Limits of European Exploration in Asia". Itinerario.
- Love, Ronald S.. (2003). "A Passage to China:A French Jesuit's Perceptions of Siberia in the 1680s". French Colonial History.
::callout[type=info title="Wikipedia Source"] This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page. ::