Caspar Castner

Rev. Caspar Castner or Kastner, SJ was a missionary, born in Munich, Bavaria, October 7, 1655; died in Peking, China, November 9, 1709.

He entered the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), September 17, 1681, and studied theology at Ingolstadt where he finished his studies, 22 March, 1694. For a short time he taught logic at the Gymnasium in Ratisbon; after this he devoted himself to the work of missions and sailed in 1696 for China at the head of a company of brother Jesuits from Portugal and Genoa. In China he laboured with great success on the island of Shang-chuen (St. John) and in the city of Fatshan, then a competitor of Canton. In 1702 he went with Father Franciscus Noel to Lisbon and Rome in order, as representative of the bishops of Nanking and Macau, to obtain some settlement of the question of Chinese Rites. In 1706 he returned to China, taking with him a number of missionaries.

Besides his apostolic work, Father Castner worked in the sciences of navigation, astronomy, and cartography. He called the attention of the Portuguese Government to the fact that the voyage to Macau would be much shorter if the vessels followed a direct course from the Cape of Good Hope by the way of the Sunda Islands, avoiding Mozambique and Goa, and the result showed that he was right. He did excellent work in the mapping of the Chinese Empire, and had so great a reputation as a mathematician that he was made president of the mathematical tribunal and instructor of the heir to the throne.

Besides a number of elaborate reports on the question of Chinese Rites which he drew up with the aid of Father Noel, Father Castner also wrote an interesting but rare little work called "Relatio Sepulturæ Magno Orientis Apostolo S. Francisco Xaviero erectæ in Insula Sanciano MDCC." It is an exact description of the island where from March 19 to June 2, 1700, he had been engaged in erecting, at the command of his superiors, a memorial over the grave of St. Francis Xavier. The book was accompanied by a good map. One of the few copies printed in China is in the so-called "Orban'sche Sammlung" of the library of the University of Munich. A translation was published by Father Joseph Stöcklein in his "Welt-Bott" (Augsburg, 1729), No. 309. The title-page and map are reproduced in the work of Henri Cordier, "L'imprimerie sino-européenne en chine" (Paris, 1901), 11-15.

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