Matteo Ricci

Matteo Ricci was born in 1552 in Macerata, in the Papal States of central Italy, to a family of local standing. After schooling in his native city he went to Rome, ostensibly to study law, and in 1571 entered the Society of Jesus. At the Roman College he received a rigorous formation in philosophy, theology, and the mathematical sciences, including study under the Jesuit mathematician Christopher Clavius. In the later 1570s he was assigned to the Portuguese East. He sailed from Lisbon, spent time in Goa, and was ordained a priest in India around 1580. In 1582 he reached Macau, the Portuguese enclave on the South China coast, where he began intensive study of the Chinese language and the Confucian classics in preparation for work inside the Ming Empire.

In 1583 Ricci and his fellow Jesuit Michele Ruggieri obtained permission to reside at Zhaoqing in Guangdong, becoming among the first Jesuits to settle in mainland China in the late sixteenth century. Ricci first adopted the dress of Buddhist monks and later, more lastingly, that of Confucian literati, a policy of cultural accommodation that shaped the Jesuit China mission. He used European clocks, prisms, and especially cartography to win the interest of officials and scholars. After years at Zhaoqing and Shaozhou, and further sojourns at Nanchang and Nanjing, he entered Beijing in 1601. Allowed to remain in the capital, he presented gifts including a mechanical clock and a harpsichord in connection with the Wanli court and established a residence that became the center of the Jesuit presence there.

Ricci’s Chinese writings and scientific collaborations were extensive. He produced the world map Kunyu Wanguo Quantu, which presented Chinese readers with a broader geography of the globe, and he composed Tianzhu Shiyi (The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven), a dialogue that set out Christian teaching in language drawn from Confucian moral philosophy while criticizing Buddhism and Daoism. With the scholar-official Xu Guangqi he worked on translations of Euclidean geometry and other Western scientific texts. Prominent converts associated with his circle included Xu Guangqi, Li Zhizao, and Yang Tingyun, later called the Three Pillars of Chinese Catholicism. Ricci held that ancient Confucianism was compatible with Christianity and that customary ancestral rites could be treated as civil rather than strictly religious ceremonies, a view that later stood at the heart of the Chinese Rites Controversy.

Ricci died in Beijing in 1610. The Wanli Emperor granted land for his burial outside the city walls, an unusual privilege for a foreigner; the tomb at Zhalan became the nucleus of a Jesuit cemetery that still exists. He was never a bishop, patriarch, or pope, and as a Jesuit priest he was bound by celibacy and had neither spouse nor children. His cause of canonization proceeded slowly: he was declared Venerable by Pope Francis in 2022 but has not been beatified or canonized, and the Catholic Church has assigned him no universal feast day or official patronages. His historical importance lies in his role as a founder of the Catholic mission in late Ming China and as a principal mediator of scientific and cultural exchange between Europe and East Asia in that period.