Matteo Ricci in China (1582-1610): The Jesuit Who Reached Beijing

Matteo Ricci was an Italian Jesuit missionary who lived in China from 1582 until his death in Beijing in 1610. By learning classical Chinese, adopting the dress of a scholar and sharing European mathematics, astronomy and geography, he won the respect of Ming officials and became the first Western missionary allowed to settle in the imperial capital. His approach shaped Catholic missions in China for more than a century and opened one of the most important cultural exchanges between Europe and East Asia.

Background: Europe reaches the edge of China

Ricci was born on 6 October 1552 in Macerata, in the Papal States of central Italy. That same year the Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier died on the island of Shangchuan, off the southern Chinese coast, while waiting for a chance to enter the country. After his earlier mission to Japan, Xavier had become convinced that China was the key to Asia.

In 1571 Ricci joined the Society of Jesus, the religious order founded by Ignatius of Loyola, described in Founding of the Jesuits. At the Roman College he studied theology and philosophy, and mathematics and astronomy under the German Jesuit Christopher Clavius, one of the architects of the Gregorian calendar.

Ming China at the time strictly limited foreign contact. Portuguese merchants had been allowed to settle at Macau from 1557, but foreigners could not normally travel or live inland. Previous attempts by missionaries to stay on the mainland had failed.

Arrival in Macau and the accommodation strategy

Ricci sailed from Lisbon in 1578 and reached Goa, the Portuguese base in India, later that year. He taught there and at Cochin, where he was ordained a priest in 1580. In 1582 the Jesuit Visitor to Asia, Alessandro Valignano, called him to Macau, where he arrived in August.

Valignano believed that missionaries in China and Japan must first learn the local language and customs and present Christianity in a way that respected the culture. This approach is known as accommodation. Ricci and his fellow Italian Michele Ruggieri began by studying written Chinese intensively.

Zhaoqing and Shaoguan, 1583–1595

In September 1583 the governor of Guangdong allowed Ruggieri and Ricci to settle in Zhaoqing, then the provincial administrative seat. They first dressed as Buddhist monks, assuming this was the proper role for foreign religious men.

In Zhaoqing they built a residence, showed visitors European books, clocks, prisms and a map of the world, and began work on a Portuguese-Chinese dictionary. Ricci’s first Chinese world map was produced there in 1584 at the request of a local official.

In 1589 a new governor expelled them from Zhaoqing, and Ricci moved to Shaoguan in northern Guangdong. There he met Qu Taisu, a scholar who studied mathematics with him and advised him that educated Chinese held Buddhist monks in low regard. In 1595, with Valignano’s approval, Ricci adopted the silk robes of a Confucian literatus and presented himself as a “scholar from the West”.

Towards the capital: Nanchang and Nanjing

In 1595 Ricci travelled north. Unable to stay in Nanjing at first, he settled in Nanchang, where he wrote On Friendship, a collection of sayings about friendship drawn from European classical and Christian authors. It became his first widely read Chinese book.

He also became known for his feats of memory, using the European technique of the “memory palace”, in which items to be remembered are placed in imagined rooms. Chinese scholars preparing for the civil service examinations were keenly interested. In 1596 he wrote a short Chinese treatise on the method, dedicated to the governor of Jiangxi and his sons.

Ricci’s growing fluency allowed him to read the Confucian classics in the original. He prepared a Latin paraphrase of the Four Books, the core texts of the examination curriculum, for the use of new missionaries. Through this work and his letters, European readers gained some of their earliest detailed knowledge of Confucian thought.

In 1599 Ricci finally established a residence in Nanjing, the southern capital, where he debated with Buddhist and Confucian scholars and gained powerful friends.

Beijing, 1601–1610

Ricci set out for Beijing in 1600 with gifts for the Wanli Emperor. At Tianjin he was detained for months by the eunuch Ma Tang, who confiscated some of his belongings. Eventually the emperor learned of the foreigner’s gifts, especially the striking clocks, and ordered him brought to the capital.

Ricci entered Beijing on 24 January 1601. His gifts included two clocks, a clavichord, religious paintings and a map. The emperor never received him in person, as he had largely withdrawn from court, but he allowed Ricci and his companions to stay in the city with a stipend. Ricci was sometimes summoned to the palace to wind and repair the clocks, and taught some eunuchs to play the clavichord. He composed a set of eight short songs with Chinese lyrics for the instrument.

The Jesuit residence in Beijing became a meeting place for curious scholars and officials, who came to see European books, globes, prisms and the clocks. Ricci received a steady stream of visitors and wrote that the social obligations of these visits took up much of his time. Christian worship was conducted quietly, and Ricci was careful not to provoke the authorities.

In Beijing Ricci built a network of friendships among officials and scholars. His most important converts and collaborators were Xu Guangqi, baptised in 1603 with the name Paul, and Li Zhizao, baptised in 1610.

Science, maps and books

The world map. In 1602 Ricci and Li Zhizao printed the Kunyu Wanguo Quantu (“Map of the Myriad Countries of the World”) in Beijing. Made of six large panels, it introduced Chinese readers to the Americas and to European knowledge of the globe, with notes on many countries. Ricci placed China near the centre of the map, rather than at the eastern edge as on European maps, to make it acceptable to his audience.

Mathematics. With Xu Guangqi, Ricci translated the first six books of Euclid’s Elements, published in 1607 under the title Jihe yuanben. Many of the Chinese mathematical terms they coined, including the word for geometry, are still used.

Theology. Ricci’s main religious work, The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven (Tianzhu shiyi), printed in 1603, was written as a dialogue between a Western scholar and a Chinese scholar. It argued that the ancient Chinese classics already contained the idea of a supreme God and criticised Buddhism and Neo-Confucian philosophy.

Key people

• Matteo Ricci (1552–1610): the Italian Jesuit at the centre of the mission, known in Chinese as Li Madou.
• Michele Ruggieri (1543–1607): Ricci’s first companion in China, who returned to Europe in 1588.
• Alessandro Valignano (1539–1606): the Jesuit Visitor who designed the accommodation policy.
• Xu Guangqi (1562–1633): a scholar-official, later a Grand Secretary, who collaborated with Ricci on Euclid and became one of the “Three Pillars” of early Chinese Catholicism.
• Li Zhizao (1565–1630): an official and geographer who helped produce the 1602 map.

Death and legacy

Ricci died in Beijing on 11 May 1610, aged 57. At the request of his friends, the Wanli Emperor granted land for his burial outside the city walls, an unprecedented honour for a foreigner. His grave in the Zhalan cemetery can still be visited. It lies today in the grounds of the Beijing Administrative College, beside the graves of later Jesuits such as Schall von Bell and Verbiest. The tombstones were damaged during the Boxer Uprising of 1900 and again in the Cultural Revolution, and were restored in the late 1970s.

By the time of his death, there were roughly 2,000 to 2,500 Chinese Catholics, a small number, but they included influential officials. Ricci’s journals, edited and translated into Latin by the Jesuit Nicolas Trigault, were published in 1615 and gave Europe one of its most detailed accounts of Ming China.

Ricci’s successors, such as Johann Adam Schall von Bell and Ferdinand Verbiest, served the Ming and then the Qing court as astronomers and directors of the imperial calendar. Jesuit artists, including Giuseppe Castiglione, worked for later emperors.

His policy of accommodation also caused lasting controversy. Ricci regarded rites honouring ancestors and Confucius as civil customs that Chinese Christians could keep. Other missionary orders disagreed, and in the Chinese Rites controversy the papacy banned these practices in the early 18th century, damaging relations with the Kangxi Emperor. The ban was largely lifted in 1939.

In 2022 Pope Francis declared Ricci “Venerable”, a step towards possible beatification. He is honoured in both Italy and China as a pioneer of cultural exchange.

Timeline

• 1552, 6 October: Matteo Ricci is born in Macerata.
• 1571: He joins the Society of Jesus in Rome.
• 1578: He sails from Lisbon and reaches Goa.
• 1582, August: He arrives in Macau.
• 1583, September: Ricci and Ruggieri settle in Zhaoqing.
• 1589: Ricci moves to Shaoguan.
• 1595: He adopts the dress of a Confucian scholar and settles in Nanchang.
• 1601, 24 January: Ricci enters Beijing.
• 1602: The Kunyu Wanguo Quantu is printed.
• 1610, 11 May: Ricci dies in Beijing.

Why it matters

Matteo Ricci was the first European to engage Chinese scholars on their own terms, in their own language. His work brought European science and geography to China and Chinese thought to Europe, and his debate about how far faith should adapt to culture still shapes discussions of mission and intercultural dialogue.