A Brill Calendar: October 6

Matteo Richi and China

Few Renaissance Europeans immersed themselves totally in Chinese culture.

One of these rare ‘early birds’, and a crucial one according to many a sinologist, is Matteo Ricci, born October 6th 1552 in Macerata, then a prosperous small town in the Papal States. Ricci died May 11th 1610 in Peking, where he spent the final nine years of his life; an exceptional one by any measure.

By then his distinguished hosts called him ‘Li Ma-tou’ (in Wade-Giles romanization; Pinyin ‘Li Madou). Ricci was the first outsider to the ‘Realm of the Middle’ – as China refers to itself – who wrote scholarly books in Chinese characters, and was truly appreciated by the Mandarin elite of the Ming dynasty. He joined the young religious order of the Society of Jesus when he was 19; it was apostolic zeal that originally brought this Jesuit to the Forbidden City.

Previous efforts to convert imperial subjects to Christianity had failed. The ancient civilization had earlier made short shrift with ‘Barbarians’ trying to impose strange customs on them in strange language. But Ricci presented himself to the Imperial Court not in a Western priestly robe like his predecessors, but correctly dressed as a Mandarin scholar. His charm, empathy and grandiose intellectual power, blessed by an extraordinary capability to memorize and retain information, were keys to his success.

It is seldom that a main branch of the Tree of Knowledge stems from one individual only; to all practical purposes from scratch, (‘n’en déplaise’ Marco Polo a few centuries earlier). Sinology, the lore of Chinese civilization & culture, owes Matteo Rici a unique debt. “He treated the affairs of our fathers as if they were his own and our fathers in turn treated his as if they were ours.”