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Because Ricci went by water from Italy to Portugal around Africa to India to China, he was not sure that he found the same place Marco Polo had called Cathay. His reports gave the first reliable glimpse of the geography and history of China and its society. Not until 1607 when De Goes, another Jesuit, retraced Marco Polo's route and made contact with Ricci did they knew for sure.
China, largely Confucian and Buddhist, would not adapt easily to the monotheism of Christianity. Ricci never denied his faith. But he dressed at first like a Buddhist and then like a Confucian scholar. Even though he wasn't free to leave China, he was free to write and publish. We have his journals and his many letters back to Italy. Rather than preach the Bible directly, he wrote Bible truths in traditional Chinese literary forms. The publication dates below are the first official publications in Peking of books that had been circulating for years unofficially.
Ricci's True Doctrine of God (1603) was a little catechism cast as a dialogue between a pagan and a European priest. It refuted the worship of idols and the transmigration of souls. It explained the truths which must be admitted as the necessary preliminary to faith:
the existence and
unity of God
the creation
the immortality of the soul
reward or punishment in a future life
The Twenty-five Words (1605) and The Ten Paradoxes (1608) were collections of practical ideas useful to a moral life. They emphasized "the mortification of the passions and the nobility of virtue." Ricci developed the ideas with examples, comparisons, and extracts from the Bible and from Christian philosophers. These ideas were familiar to Christians but new to the Chinese, who thought Ricci most wise.
When he died, Matteo Ricci left behind about two thousand professing Christians.
Ricci's father, a prosperous merchant, sent his 16-year-old son to Rome to study law. Ricci soon found something far more interesting: the new-fangled ideas and tools of science. He switched to mathematics and astronomy under Father Christopher Clavius. The instruments were clumsy, the theories were faulty, but they brought Ricci to a rational world view based on objective evidence and fair reasoning.
In China in 1600, the written word was the primary source of authority. Visual images were thought to be incomplete. Wang Bi wrote:
Image is what brings out meaning; word is what clarifies image.
Compared to the rest of the world, China was advanced enough in technology and communications to unite the world's largest, most populous country around the world's most civilized city: Peking. China had a carefully preserved historical identity thousands of years old. From our perspective today, Chinese moral teachings and literature are valid and timeless. Chinese science, however, was as faulty and unreliable as the West's.
Compared to Chinese science, Western science had a larger, more accurate view of the Earth and its place in the universe. It had tentative theories about physical phenomena -- theories about light, for example -- that were independent of culture and fascinating to many Chinese.
In China, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia, Ricci and his staff declared:
'that they were religious who had left their country in the distant West because of the renown of the good government of China, where they desired to remain till their death, serving god, the Lord of Heaven.' Had they immediately declared their intention to preach a new religion, they would never have been received; this would have clashed with Chinese pride, which would not admit that China had anything to learn from foreigners, and it would have especially alarmed their politics, which beheld a national danger in every innovation.
Ricci didn't just stuff a backpack and take off for China. He led a group and they brought with them enough baggage and equipment to impress the Chinese.
prisms to break up light
oil paintings drawn to perspective
mathematical and musical instruments
He translated Euclid (1607). He explained what a prism did to light. Leading far more Chinese to science and reason than to religion, he was until the 1900's the best known Westerner to the Chinese -- Li Matou.
The Yutopian Chinese Culture Homepage has this to say
about Matteo Ricci's tomb.
... located two miles from the west gate of the Beijing city. The tomb is of the shape of a small hill. The title on the tomb reads, '1610, Pioneer of Christian Missionary'. There is a cross carved on the tomb with inscription in both Latin and Chinese. ... Due to Ricci's achievements in China, the communist Chinese regards the tomb highly and has been doing a good job in up-keeping it and protecting the tomb from vandalism.
China's Grave
Memories (source of image)
by Ron Gluckman
In the Middle Kingdom, history is all mixed up because of so many periodic revisions, yet a serene cemetery in the center of the city proves that Beijing cannot bury its past.
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