The Borg.tonch Collection, housed in the Library of the Vatican Apostolic Library and digitized in recent years through the Vatican Digital Library, represents an important effort to preserve forty-one manuscripts relating to the history and culture of the Vietnamese Catholic laity in both the missionary territories of Đàng Trong (Cochinchina) and Đàng Ngoài (Tonkin). The collection’s designation, Borg.tonch, is an abbreviation of its full Latin name, Borgia Tonchinensis. “Borgia” refers to the individual who devoted considerable effort to collecting these manuscripts, while Tonchinensis refers to the language identified as Tonkinese - variously known as the language of Đàng Ngoài, Annamese, or Vietnamese. 

The collection takes its name from Cardinal Stefano Borgia (1731–1804), an Italian theologian, archaeologist, historian, and collector. He was a descendant of the illustrious and wealthy Borgia family, best known for Pope Alexander VI and his children. Drawing on the family’s considerable financial resources and his position as Secretary of the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (Propaganda Fide) at the Holy See, a position he held for nineteen years, Cardinal Borgia spent substantial sums acquiring thousands of manuscripts in numerous languages from around the world. During this period, the manuscripts now comprising the Borg.tonch Collection came into his possession through the scholarly and transcriptional efforts of Dominican missionaries and members of the Paris Foreign Missions Society (Société des Missions Étrangères de Paris) in Annam, as well as through the contributions of Father Philiphê do Rosario Nguyễn Văn Bỉnh and his companions in the Garasa mission in Lisbon. Following Cardinal Borgia’s death, manuscripts relating to Catholicism were incorporated into the Borgia Collection and displayed at the Borgian Museum in the Vatican. By the mid-nineteenth century, the manuscripts held in the museum had been transferred to the ownership of the Vatican Apostolic Library, where they remain preserved today. In 2021, all of the manuscripts in the Borg.tonch Collection were digitized and made available through the Vatican Digital Library, allowing readers and researchers free access to the materials. 

The Borgia Tonchinensis Collection can be further classified according to several dimensions. Linguistically, it comprises not only works written in Vietnamese but also numerous manuscripts containing Portuguese and Latin, sometimes interspersed within the same works. In terms of script, the majority of the manuscripts are written in the Latin alphabet, while approximately ten manuscripts are written in Nôm. With regard to authorship, a substantial proportion of the collection consists of works produced by Father Philiphê do Rosario Nguyễn Văn Bỉnh (1759–1833) and his three companions in the Garasa mission in Lisbon, Portugal - the final representatives of the Catholic literary tradition associated with the Jesuit mission in Vietnam. The remaining manuscripts were contributed primarily by missionaries of the Paris Foreign Missions Society in Vietnam and by Dominican missionaries in Eastern Đàng Ngoài, corresponding roughly to the area east of the Red River today. In terms of subject matter, the manuscripts encompass a remarkably diverse range of genres and themes, including historical narratives concerning missionary activities in Vietnam, lives of Catholic saints, catechisms, prayer books, works of Catholic devotion, biblical narratives, dictionaries, correspondence between clergy and lay Catholics, poetry, biographies, and memoirs. From the perspective of their material and publishing history, most of the manuscripts are handwritten copies produced by Father Bỉnh, although a considerable number were printed in Vietnam and subsequently transported to Rome through arrangements made by the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. 

The manuscripts of the Borgia tonchinensis Collection offer striking evidence of the connections between Vietnamese culture and the wider world during the eighteenth century, a period marked by profound global transformations associated with the maritime age. Within these manuscripts are accounts of Vietnamese individuals who found themselves living in exile abroad, efforts by Western missionaries to establish connections between Annam and the wider world, and episodes of Vietnamese history narrated from the perspectives of people living at a time when Annam remained divided between Đàng Trong and Đàng Ngoài. The collection is also of exceptional value for preserving the memoirs and writings of Philiphê do Rosario Nguyễn Văn Bỉnh, whom many scholars regard as one of the earliest Vietnamese writers to compose literary narratives in Quốc Ngữ. His numerous Nôm works likewise provide valuable evidence for the study of the development of Vietnamese writing practices during this period. Several other notable works of Vietnamese Catholic literature survive only through their preservation in the Borgia tonchinensis Collection, including Dũng Lý Hộ Thần by the missionary Girolamo Maiorica and Truyện Evangelio cùng Actum, attributed to priests of the Paris Foreign Missions Society. 

With the Borgia Tonchinensis Collection once again introduced to readers through the Digitizing Việt Nam platform under the title Early Vietnamese Catholic Manuscripts and Printed Works, we hope that researchers and scholars in Vietnamese studies will draw on this valuable resource across a wide range of fields, including further exploration of the place of the Vietnamese within the far-reaching processes of globalization during the early modern period. 

Check out the Early Vietnamese Catholic Manuscripts and Printed Works collection on Digitizing Việt Nam:

https://www.digitizingvietnam.com/en/our-collections/the-borgia-tonchinensis-collection

This collection and accompanying article were made possible by Nguyễn Nam, an undergraduate researcher at Centre College in Kentucky who specializes in East Asian history and linguistics. His research focuses on Vietnamese Catholic literature written in chữ Nôm and the historical relationship between Portugal and Annam, particularly as shaped by Jesuit missionary activities.