Matteo Ricci

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Matteo Ricci (left) and Xu Guangqi (徐光啟) (right) in the Chinese edition of Euclid's Elements (幾何原本).

Map of the Far East by Matteo Ricci in 1602.

Matteo Ricci.

Matteo Ricci (October 6, 1552 - May 11, 1610) (Traditional Chinese: 利瑪竇; Simplified Chinese: 利玛窦; pinyin: Lì Mǎdòu; courtesy name:西泰 Xītài) was an Italian Jesuit priest.

Matteo Ricci was born in 1552 in Macerata, then part of the Papal States. Ricci started learning theology and law in a Roman Jesuits' school. In 1577, he filed an application to be a member of a Missionary to India, and his journey began in March 1578 from Lisbon, Portugal. He arrived in Goa, a Portuguese Colony, in September 1578, and four years later he was dispatched to China.

In 1582, he started learning the Chinese language and customs in Macao, a Portuguese trading post in Southern China, and became a rarely seen Western scholar who mastered Chinese classical script.

The next year saw Ricci move inland and, after a visit to Canton, settle in Zhaoqing in Guangdong Province. Ricci moved there after receiving an invitation from the governor of Zhaoqing at the time, Wang P'an, who had heard of Ricci's skill as a mathematician/cartographer. Ricci stayed there from 1583-1589 before having to leave after a new viceroy decided to expel him. It was in Zhaoqing that Ricci drew up the first ever map of the world in Chinese in 1584.

There is now a memorial plaque in Zhaoqing to commemorate his six-year stay there as well as a building set up as a 'Ricci Memorial Centre' although the building itself does not date back to the time of the priest as it was built in the 1860s.

Further travels in China saw Ricci reach Nanjing and Nanchang in 1595, Tongzhou (a port for Beijing) in 1598 and then first reached Beijing on the 7th September 1598. However, because of a Korean/Japanese war at the time, Ricci could not reach the Imperial Palace. After waiting for two months he left Beijing first for Nanjing and also stopped at Suzhou in Jiangsu Province.

In 1601 he returned to Beijing but was not granted an audience with the emperor but after he presented the emperor with a chiming clock, Ricci was finally allowed to present himself at the Imperial court of Wanli thus becoming the first Westerner to be invited into the Forbidden City. Although Ricci was given free access to the Forbidden City, he never met the Wanli Emperor.

Not only could he write in ancient Chinese, he was also renowned for his great understanding of Chinese culture. Unlike South Asia, he found that Chinese culture was strongly tied to Confucian values and concluded that Christianity had to be adapted to Chinese culture in order to take root.

In his early life in China, he referred to himself as a Western Monk, a term relating to Buddhism. He later discovered that Confucian thought was dominant in the Ming dynasty in China. Ricci became the first to translate the Confucian classics into a western language, Latin; in fact "Confucius" was Ricci's own Latinisation. He came to call himself a "Western Confucian" (西儒). The credibility of Confucius helped make Christianity take root.

Ricci also met a Korean emissary to China, Yi Su-gwang. Ricci taught Yi Su-gwang the basic tenets of Catholicism and transmitted western knowledge to him. Ricci gave Yi Su-gwang several books from the west, which became the basis of Yi Su-gwang's later works. Ricci's transmission of western knowledge to Yi Su-gwang influenced and helped shape the foundation of the Silhak movement in Korea.

Ricci lived on in China until the end of his life. He died in Beijing on May 11th 1610.

The following places and instituations are named after Matteo Ricci:

Ricci Hall, a dormitory at The University of Hong Kong
Matteo Ricci College, Kowloon in Hong Kong
Matteo Ricci College at Seattle Preparatory School and Seattle University
Sekolah Katolik Ricci in Pancoran, Indonesia
Ricci Institute in Taipei, Taiwan
Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History at the University of San Francisco.

[edit] Further reading

Vincent Cronin, The Wise Man from the West: Matteo Ricci and his Mission to China (1955) ISBN 0-00-626749-1
Jonathan D. Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (1985)
"Madness of the Wise : Ricci in China", an article by Simon Leys in his book, The Burning Forest (1983), is an interesting account, and contains a critical review of Spence's book