First world citizen

This year we celebrate the 400th anniversary of the death of Matteo Ricci. Ricci (1552-1610) was an Italian Jesuit missionary who opened China to evangelisation. He was the best-known Jesuit and European in China prior to the 20th century, and has been called the first ‘world citizen of the Earth’.

Matteo Ricci was born in Macerata, in xx Italy on 6 October 1552.As a young man he studied law in Rome and in 1571 he entered the Society of Jesus. He did further studies in mathematics and geography then went to Goa in 1577 and was ordained there in 1580. In 1582 he was dispatched to Macao and started to learn Chinese. He went to Chao-ch’ing, west of Canton in 1583. He studied Chinese, working to understand Chinese culture. While there Ricci produced the first edition of his map of the world Great Map of Ten Thousand Countries, is a remarkable achievement showing China’s geographical position in the world.

When the Chinese governor general ordered the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1589, he moved to Shao-chou and soon established amicable relations with the officials and members of the educated elite. He began to teach the mathematical ideas he had learnt from his teacher Clavius. This is perhaps the first time that European mathematics and Chinese mathematics had interacted and as such was an important event. Ricci attempted to visit Peking in 1595 but found the city closed to foreigners. He went instead to Nanking where he lived from 1599, working on mathematics, astronomy and geography.

Ricci was well received in Nanking and this encouraged him to try again to visit Peking which he did in 1601. This time he was allowed to live in the city and he made this his home from that time until his death nine years later.

By the time he was living in Peking, Ricci’s skill at Chinese was sufficient to allow him to publish several books in Chinese, on theology and on mathematics, particularly on Euclid. His mixing of mathematical cultures must have been a cultural shock to both sides. He was appointed the court mathematician.

Matteo Ricci was a pioneer of cultural relations between China and the West, and his profound appreciation of Chinese cultural and moral values enabled him to make China known to the West and the West to China.

Ricci had to dress in the style of a Chinese scholar and was known under the Chinese name Li Matou. However he became famous in China not only for his mathematical skills, but also his extraordinary memory his knowledge of astronomy. He even became known as a painter and a painting of a landscape around Peking has recently been attributed to him. At the time Ricci’s maps of China were considered more accurate even than the contemporary maps of Europe.

From about 1600 until the suppression in 1773, Jesuits were practically the sole source of Chinese knowledge about Western astronomy, geometry and trigonometry. Appointments in the Astronomical Bureau provided the Jesuits with access to the ruling elite, whose conversion was their main object. Mathematical and astronomical treatises demonstrated high learning and proved that the missionaries were civilised and socially acceptable. While trigonometry became an analytic science in Europe, in the Orient it remained primitive until the Jesuits came.

The prestige Ricci gained in the highest cultural spheres by his wisdom, scientific knowledge, and capacity for philosophical speculation won him a hearing when he spoke of the gospel message. By working out a synthesis of the human and moral values in Chinese culture and of the integral gospel message, his method anticipated the pastoral approach of the Church today.

Many events, especially in China and Italy, are under way or planned to celebrate this great man. An exhibition presented by Ricci’s home region of Marche will be touring China through 2010.