Ricci Street < Ricci Green < Patron || search | sitemap | help gazette | theater | bistro

|

"Fabulous and Mysterious Information" other pages Who was Matteo Ricci? Why is this web site named after Matteo Ricci? Matteo Ricci on the Web

How do people adopt new ideas? Sometimes they reject them.

What did the Chinese think of Matteo Ricci's new ideas?

A number of Chinese scholars bitterly attacked the Jesuits for misrepresenting the world and China's place in it. According to one Ming scholar, Wei Jun, Ricci's map not only contained "fabulous and mysterious" information that could not be verified, but in locating China to the west of center and inclined to the north, it dislodged the "Central Kingdom" from its rightful position at "the center of the world." How, Wei asked, "can China be treated like a small unimportant country?"

Similarly, the Huangchao wenxian tongkao (The Imperial Dynasty's Comprehensive Examination of Source Materials; 1787) denounced Ricci's account of the world as full of contradictions, misguided statements and "boastful lies" (dankuang). It accused him of belittling China, aggrandizing his own culture, and spreading misinformation in the course of his cartographic work.

Finally, and somewhat ironically, a deep distrust of symmetry and regularity on the part of a number of kaozheng scholars hostile to traditional cosmography led them to reject the notion of a lawful, uniform, and mathematically predictable universe. Thus, for instance, the great Qing intellectual, Wang Fuzhi, dismissed the round-earth concept of the Jesuits out of hand.

Indeed, some Ming and Qing scholars argued that Jesuit-style maps were designed quite deliberately to mislead the Chinese into thinking that the aggressive, avaricious people from "the Great Western Ocean" were farther away than they actually were.

Maps, Myths, and Multiple Realities:
Chinese Representations of the 'Other' in Late Imperial Times

Richard J. Smith, Rice University