The oldest items in the archives date back to the 1640s and consist in letters exchanged between the founding fathers of the MEP before going to Asia (1658) and creating the Paris seminary (1663). All the documents relating to the creation of the MEP, whether they concern exchanges with Rome, foundation acts in Paris, or reports written by the first missionaries who went abroad, have been carefully preserved up to this day.

The documents kept in the MEP archives in Paris dating from the seventeenth to the twentieth century are all of a similar nature. They can be reports sent by the missionaries to their local bishop, to the supervisors of the Paris seminary and to the Holy See; letters from the missionaries to their family and their brothers; administrative and accounting documents issued from the procuracies, especially those of Paris, Rome, and Macao/Hong Kong; reports of the decision-making bodies’ meetings; archives of the establishments that come under the MEP like seminaries, parishes, etc. But the MEP archives also hold a host of documents produced directly in the field in Asia, like manuscripts and transcripts of linguistic works; ethnographic notebook records; diaries and journals; documents written in Asian languages concerning liturgy, religious education, the construction of buildings, and daily life.

In fact, the collection does not exclusively contain documents produced or received in Paris: a large part of the archives produced in Asia was also gradually added to it through collection campaigns. In 1877, for example, the Seminary of Paris repatriated the archives of the general procuratorate of Hong Kong. Twenty years later, it was the turn of Fr. Adrien Launay, archivist, to collect the archives of the MEP vicariates of India and China, during a trip to Asia. Several other mission collections were repatriated in the 20th century and continue to be so.

When consulting these documents, written on European papers or locally produced, it is sometimes necessary to imagine the context of their production and the material difficulties to which their writers were subjected: “The great concern of the missionaries, especially during the first two centuries, was to ensure recruitment and to transport people, funds and correspondence, at a time when the round trip of a mail between Indochina and France took between 3 and 4 years in the 17th century, a little less in the following century thanks to the presence in Canton of the French India Company” (F. Mantienne).