Rémusat,

Rémusat, (JEAN PIERRE) ABEL, Chinese scholar, was born at Paris, 5th September 1788, studied medicine, and took his diploma in 1813; but as early as 1811 he had published an essay on Chinese literature. In 1813 he was compelled to serve as hospital surgeon, but in 1814 he was made professor of Chinese in the Collège de France. Of the numerous works that he wrote subsequent to this period we may mention Recherches sur les Langues Tartares (1820), a work in some sort preparatory to his great Éléments de la Grammaire Chinoise (1822). He wrote also on the origin of Chinese writing (1827), on Chinese medicine, on the topography and history of the Chinese empire, and Mélanges (published in 1843). Rémusat was the first to make known in Europe the life and opinions of Laou-Tsze. In 1818 Rémusat became one of the editors of the Journal des Savants; in 1822 he founded the Société Asiatique de Paris; and in 1824 he was appointed curator of the Oriental Department in the Bibliothèque Royale. He died of cholera at Paris, 3d June 1832, at the early age of forty-four.