Matteo Ricci (Italian: [matˈtɛːo ˈrittʃi]; Latin: Matthaeus Riccius; Chinese: 利玛窦; pinyin: Lì Mǎdòu; 6 October 1552 – 11 May 1610) was an Italian Jesuit who served in the court of Ming dynasty China and one of the founding figures of the Jesuit China missions. He created the Kunyu Wanguo Quantu, a 1602 world map written in Chinese characters. In 2022, the Apostolic See declared its recognition of Ricci's heroic virtue, thereby bestowing upon him the honorific of a Venerable.
Ricci arrived at the Portuguese settlement of Macau in 1582 where he began his missionary work in China. He mastered the Chinese language and writing system. He became the first European to enter the Forbidden City of Beijing in 1601 when invited by the Wanli Emperor, who sought his services in matters such as court astronomy and calendrical science. He emphasized parallels between Catholicism and Confucianism, and he converted several prominent Chinese officials to Catholicism. He also worked with several Chinese elites, such as Xu Guangqi, in translating Euclid's Elements into Chinese as well as the Confucian classics into Latin for the first time in history.
Contents
Life
Ricci was born on 6 October 1552 in Macerata, part of the Papal States and today a city in the Italian region of Marche. He studied the classics in his native hometown and studied law at Rome for two years. He entered the Society of Jesus in April 1571 at the Roman College. While there, in addition to philosophy and theology, he also studied mathematics, cosmology, and astronomy under the direction of Christopher Clavius. In 1577, he applied for a missionary expedition to the Far East. He sailed from Lisbon, Portugal, in March 1578 and arrived in Goa, a Portuguese colony, the following September. Ricci remained employed in teaching and the ministry there until the end of Lent 1582 when he was summoned to Macau to prepare to enter China. Ricci arrived in Macau in the early part of August.
Ricci in China
In August 1582, Ricci arrived at Macau, a Portuguese trading post on the South China Sea. At the time, Christian missionary activity in China was almost completely limited to Macau, where some of the local Chinese people had converted to Christianity. Three years before, Michele Ruggieri was invited from Portuguese India expressly to study Chinese, by Alessandro Valignano, founder of St. Paul Jesuit College (Macau), and to prepare for the Jesuits' mission from Macau into Mainland China.
Once in Macau, Ricci studied the Chinese language and customs. It was the beginning of a long project that made him one of the first Western scholars to master the Chinese script and Classical Chinese. With Ruggieri, he travelled to Guangdong's major cities, Canton and Zhaoqing (then the residence of the Viceroy of Guangdong and Guangxi), seeking to establish a permanent Jesuit mission outside Macau.
In 1583, Ricci and Ruggieri settled in Zhaoqing, at the invitation of the governor of Zhaoqing, Wang Pan, who had heard of Ricci's skill as a mathematician and cartographer. Ricci stayed in Zhaoqing from 1583 to 1589, when he was expelled by a new viceroy. It was in Zhaoqing, in 1584, that Ricci composed the first European-style world map in Chinese, called "Da Ying Quan Tu" (Chinese: 大瀛全圖; lit. 'Complete Map of the Great World'). No prints of the 1584 map are known to exist, but, of the much improved and expanded Kunyu Wanguo Quantu of 1602, six recopied, rice-paper versions survive.
It is thought that, during their time in Zhaoqing, Ricci and Ruggieri compiled a Portuguese-Chinese dictionary, the first in any European language, for which they developed a system for transcribing Chinese words in the Latin alphabet. The manuscript was misplaced in the Jesuit Archives in Rome, rediscovered only in 1934, and published only in 2001.
There is now a memorial plaque in Zhaoqing to commemorate Ricci's six-year stay there, as well as a "Ricci Memorial Centre" in a building dating from the 1860s.
Expelled from Zhaoqing in 1588, Ricci obtained permission to relocate to Shaoguan (Shaozhou, in Ricci's account) in the north of the province, and reestablish his mission there.
Approach to Chinese culture
Ricci could speak Chinese as well as read and write classical Chinese, the literary language of scholars and officials. He was known for his appreciation of Chinese culture in general but condemned the prostitution which was widespread in Beijing at the time. He also called the Chinese "barbarians" in letters back home to his friends, and opposed what he considered to be anti-Black prejudice among the populace. However, he noted this in the context of his function as a slave catcher for the Portuguese and owning African slaves himself.
During his research, he discovered that in contrast to the cultures of South Asia, Chinese culture was strongly intertwined with Confucian values and therefore decided to use existing Chinese concepts to explain Christianity. With his superior Valignano's formal approval, he aligned himself with the Confucian intellectually elite literati, and even adopted their mode of dress. He did not explain the Catholic faith as entirely foreign or new; instead, he said that the Chinese culture and people always believed in God and that Christianity is the completion of their faith, and explained the tenets of the Catholic faith through existing Chinese precepts and practices. He borrowed an unusual Chinese term, Tiānzhǔ (天主, "Lord of Heaven") to describe the God of Abraham, despite the term's origin in traditional Chinese worship of Heaven. (He also cited many synonyms from the Confucian Classics.)
Ricci took an accommodating approach on various Chinese practices, including rituals such as ancestor worship.Dominican and Franciscan missionaries considered this an unacceptable accommodation and later appealed to the Vatican on the issue. This Chinese rites controversy continued for centuries. In 1721, fallout from the controversy led the Kangxi emperor to expel the Jesuits. The Vatican's most recent statement on the Chinese rites controversy came in 1939. Some contemporary authors have praised Ricci as an exemplar of beneficial inculturation, avoiding at the same time distorting the Gospel message or neglecting the indigenous cultural media.
Like developments in India, the identification of European culture with Christianity led almost to the end of Catholic missions in China, but Christianity continued to grow in Sichuan and some other locations.
Xu Guangqi and Ricci became the first two to translate some of the Confucian classics into a Western language, Latin.
Beatification process
The cause of his beatification opened in 1984, was reopened on 24 January 2010, at the cathedral of the Italian diocese of Macerata-Tolentino-Recanati-Cingoli-Treia. Bishop Claudio Giuliodori, the apostolic administrator of the Diocese of Macerata, formally closed the diocesan phase of the process on 10 May 2013. The cause moved to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints in 2014. Pope Francis issued a decree on 17 December 2022 that Ricci had lived a life of heroic virtue, thus conferring on him the title of a Venerable.
Commemoration
Ricci is often commemorated as a symbol of cross-cultural understanding, particularly in the Sinosphere. The following places and institutions are named after Ricci:
Matteo Ricci Pacific Studies Reading Room at The National Central Library of Taiwan
Ricci Hall, a dormitory at The University of Hong Kong
Ricci Building, a building at Wah Yan College, Kowloon in Hong Kong
The Matteo Ricci Study Hall, at the Ateneo de Manila University
Matteo Ricci College, Kowloon in Hong Kong
Matteo Ricci College, at Seattle University
Colégio Mateus Ricci, Macau
Sekolah Katolik Ricci 1 and 2 in Jakarta, Indonesia
Taipei Ricci Institute, Taiwan
Macau Ricci Institute, Macau
Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History at Boston College.
The Matteo Ricci Seminar and Matteo Ricci Award at Fordham University
Centro Matteo Ricci, a centre for refugees and asylum seekers run by the Italian branch of the Jesuit Refugee Service in Rome, Italy
Matteo Ricci Hall-"R" Hall, Ricci Hall Annex-"RA" Hall, two buildings at Sogang University in Seoul, South Korea
Works
The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven
The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven (天主實義) is a book written by Ricci, which argues that Confucianism and Christianity are not opposed and in fact are remarkably similar in key respects. It was written in the form of a dialogue, originally in Chinese. Ricci used the treatise in his missionary effort to convert Chinese literati, men who were educated in Confucianism and the Chinese classics. In the Chinese Rites controversy, some Roman-Catholic missionaries raised the question of whether Ricci and other Jesuits had gone too far and changed Christian beliefs to win converts.
Peter Phan argues that True Meaning was used by a Jesuit missionary to Vietnam, Alexandre de Rhodes, in writing a catechism for Vietnamese Christians. In 1631, Girolamo Maiorica and Bernardino Reggio, both Jesuit missionaries to Vietnam, started a short-lived press in Thăng Long (present-day Hanoi) to print copies of True Meaning and other texts. The book was also influential on later Protestant missionaries to China, James Legge and Timothy Richard, and through them John Nevius, John Ross, and William Edward Soothill, all influential in establishing Protestantism in China and Korea.
Other works
Ricci translated various European scientific works into Chinese. Other works by Ricci include:
De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas: the journals of Ricci that were completed and translated into Latin by another Jesuit, Nicolas Trigault, soon after Ricci's death. Available in various editions:
Trigault, Nicolas S. J. "China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Mathew Ricci: 1583–1610". English translation by Louis J. Gallagher, S.J. (New York: Random House, Inc. 1953)
On Chinese Government, an excerpt from Chapter One of Gallagher's translation
De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas, full Latin text, available on Google Books
A discourse of the Kingdome of China, taken out of Ricius and Trigautius, containing the countrey, people, government, religion, rites, sects, characters, studies, arts, acts; and a Map of China added, drawne out of one there made with Annotations for the understanding thereof (an early English translation of excerpts from De Christiana expeditione) in Purchas his Pilgrimes (1625). Can be found in the "Hakluytus posthumus". The book also appears on Google Books, but only in snippet view.
An excerpt from The Art of Printing by Matteo Ricci
Ricci's On Friendship published in Chinese in 1595, translated to English in 2009.
Ricci's World Map of 1602.
Rare 1602 World Map, the First Map in Chinese to Show the Americas, on Display at Library of Congress, 12 Jan to 10 April 2010
The Chinese translation of the ancient Greek mathematical treatise Euclid's Elements (幾何原本), published and printed in 1607 by Matteo Ricci and his Chinese colleague Xu Guangqi