– Joaquim Magalhães de Castro
I find it strange, now, after all these months, that Professor Yonten Dargye, during our conversation in one of the beautiful halls of the Library of Thimphu, had made no allusion to an evocative coin of the presence of Fr Joao Cabral in Bhutan with the face value of 300 ngultrum issued in 1994 by the authorities of his country. I came across it by chance, while doing a search on the internet. On one side of the said evocative coin we have in the foreground a bearded João Cabral with a stick in the hand pounding stony ground. In the background, another small figure, perhaps the same João Cabral, this time accompanied by a yak with a huge load on the back. As backdrop, a monastery in a series of mountainous peaks in what seems to me to be a representation of the famous “Tiger’s Nest,” the postal card par excellence of the Bhutanese tourism services. Here it says “Kingdom of Bhutan” (in English and Bhutanese) and “1994.”
On the other side, two dragons around a “vajra dorge,” the Tantric double cross also known simply as “Tibetan cross.” As for text, “John Cabral” and the dates of his birth, “1599,” and his passing away, “1669.”
In vain I sought similar currency, but dedicated to the confrere Estevao Cacela… In fact, the performance of the latter, in the specific case of the Bhutan mission, was more relevant than that of Cabral, who would live longer and embrace a greater geography. The history of João Cabral, one of the most traveled and multifaceted Jesuit missionaries in Asia, has yet to be studied properly.
In the course of my fruitless quest, I would nevertheless end up understanding the omission. It turns out that two years before the appearance of the coin, Nancy M Gettelman, a scholar of Buddhism, published in the Kailash magazine – edited in Kathmandu, Nepal – the translation of the letter that João Cabral wrote of Xigatsé in October 1627, which refers to his departure from Bhutan to the kingdom of Utsang in central Tibet, a letter accompanied by a very brief introduction where, moreover, I detected some inaccuracies. Kailash: Journal of Himalayan Studies is an academic publication printed on rice paper born in 1973 and dealing with themes of the history and anthropology of the Himalayan region. It is very difficult to find and only a handful of university libraries have copies of all the issues.
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