Joseph Hager

He was born in Milan from Giuseppe and Marianna Tyher from a family of Viennese origin, at the age of ten was sent to Vienna to study Oriental languages at the K.k.

Akademie für Orientalische Sprachen, founded in 1754 to prepare diplomatic personnel to be sent to the East.

He then continued his studies at the University of Pavia where, in 1783, he obtained a doctorate in Theology, joining the Friars Minor Reformers and moving to Rome at the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, where he began to interest and study the Chinese language.

In 1788 he was called to settle the dispute over some documents forged by the monk and scholar Giuseppe Vella [it].

There followed an intense period of his life where he traveled moving between Leipzig, Hamburg and Berlin.