Zhong Wen: Xu Guangqi was born in 1562, thirty-two years after the death of the great Ming Confucian Wang Yangming. He was ten years younger than Matteo Ricci. By the time he met Ricci at age thirty-eight (in 1600), Xu had already passed the provincial civil service examination.

His success in the provincial exam was legendary. In 1597, after repeated failures, Xu Guangqi arrived in Nanjing to sit for the examination. His essay did not impress the examiners, but the chief examiner Jiao Hong, while re-checking the failed papers, discovered Xu’s script, admired it immensely, and lifted him directly to first place.

Seven years later, he passed the metropolitan exam and, during the palace examination, placed fourth in the selection for the Hanlin Academy. This was equivalent to becoming a doctoral candidate in the imperial academy. According to tradition, Xu Guangqi needed to spend three years there studying court documents and imperial archives to prepare himself intellectually for future service in governing the empire.

Bo Ya: In the Ming dynasty, there was a saying: “None but a jinshi may enter the Hanlin Academy; none but a Hanlin scholar may enter the Grand Secretariat.” “Upon entering as a Junior Compiler (shujishi), one is already regarded as a future grand councillor.” Thus, entry into the Hanlin Academy was the dream of every scholar. Yet the moment of achieving this dream was difficult and filled with hardship.

Xu Guangqi came from a humble family. His father was an unsuccessful merchant who later farmed near Shanghai. The family was far from wealthy. Before Xu passed the provincial exam, he relied on teaching in private households, following employers from place to place. “He had been a wandering private tutor in the 1580s—a profession often associated with poverty in the Ming dynasty. His examination record was not remarkable: he became a licentiate at nineteen but did not become a provincial graduate for another sixteen years. Without Jiao Hong’s discerning eye, he might never have found a path forward. It then took another seven years for him to attain the jinshi degree.” And even this was not the final challenge. Xu ranked 52nd in the final palace examination—far too low to qualify for the Hanlin Academy. His elderly teacher Huang Tiren, who had also passed in the same year, voluntarily gave up his own chance to enter the Academy and yielded the opportunity to Xu. Thus Xu achieved the great leap that determined his future.

After completing three years of study in the Hanlin Academy, Xu began his official career. By the time of his death, he had risen to Vice Minister of Rites and Grand Scholar of the Wenyan Pavilion—an eminent position. Yet considering his advanced age when he entered high office and the repeated impeachments he faced, his political career was far from smooth.

Zhong Wen: The History of Ming summarizes Xu’s examination life in merely thirty-three characters, and then immediately comments that he “learned astronomy, calendrical calculation, and firearms from the Westerner Li Madou (Matteo Ricci), mastering all his arts. He thereafter studied military strategy, agricultural texts, treatises on salt administration, and works on water management.” This is an astute historical judgment. Without studying Western science from Ricci, Xu Guangqi would have been just another unremarkable official among the tens of thousands in the Ming bureaucracy. It was precisely because he met Ricci around 1600, and because he had access to him during his Hanlin years, that Xu became the leading figure of Western Learning in late Ming China—someone who rose far above his contemporaries.

Xu’s first contact with missionaries occurred in Shaoguan, Guangdong, five years before meeting Ricci. While tutoring there, Xu occasionally visited the local Christian church and met the Jesuit missionary João da Rocha. They maintained lifelong friendship. But Ricci was the true mentor of Xu’s mind and spirit.

Bo Ya: Their 1600 meeting likely took place in spring. According to the Matteo Ricci Journals, it was a brief encounter. Xu mainly asked Ricci about Christian doctrines he had heard earlier from João da Rocha. They did not talk deeply.

By 1600 Ricci was already famous in Nanjing. High officials and renowned scholars all delighted in meeting him. As a high-nosed, deep-eyed “foreign devil,” Ricci—dressed as a Confucian scholar—was called by the iconoclastic thinker Li Zhi “the most handsome man.” He spoke fluent Chinese and wrote elegant Chinese prose—already reason enough for admiration. His diplomatic manner and the Western items he carried, such as clocks and scientific instruments, attracted endless visitors eager to witness these “Western wonders.”

Ricci’s vast learning and prodigious memory left deep impressions. He demonstrated his memory technique by reading a sheet of several hundred characters once and repeating it verbatim. When praised as having a photographic memory, he casually recited the same text backward, leaving the audience stunned.

This miraculous memory was not innate but the result of rigorous training. Jesuit education emphasized mnemonic techniques as a core discipline.

Even among Jesuits, Ricci’s memory was exceptional. In his view, such skill should serve the mission: he believed Chinese scholars would be drawn by his feats and thereby engage him in discussions about religion—perhaps thinking such powers came from divine assistance.

His memory demonstrations were widely admired. When Ricci later preached in Nanchang, the provincial governor Lu Wangai showed great interest and requested Ricci to write a manual on memory techniques for his three sons.

Zhong Wen: It was this intellectual brilliance and personal charm that drew Xu Guangqi to him.
Undoubtedly, meeting Ricci in 1600 was a turning point in Xu’s life.

In their first conversation, Ricci spoke particularly about the conflict between Chinese officials’ practice of taking concubines and Christian doctrine. As the only son in his family, Xu Guangqi and his wife Wu had only one child, a son named Ji. When he met Ricci, Xu was considering taking a concubine to ensure more offspring. After returning to Shanghai from Nanjing, he dropped the matter entirely.

After parting from Ricci, Xu spent two to three years studying Christian doctrine and reflecting on his own path. In 1603, he again set out to find Ricci, but by then Ricci had moved from Nanjing to Beijing. Xu instead met the Jesuit Lazzaro Cattaneo and held long discussions with him. After deep consideration, Xu was baptized and became a Christian.

Bo Ya: This decision arguably changed Chinese history and made Xu Guangqi a figure no one could match for the next three hundred years.

Zhong Wen: In modern Chinese history books, Matteo Ricci is almost always mentioned together with Xu Guangqi. But in fact, the time they spent together was not long.

Xu entered Beijing for the 1604 metropolitan exam and soon joined the Hanlin Academy. From then on, he lived in Beijing. It was during this period that he interacted closely with Ricci and began their collaboration translating Euclid’s Elements in 1605. In 1607, when the Elements was completed and printed, Xu’s father died. Xu returned home to inter the coffin and, according to custom, observe a three-year mourning period. By the time his mourning ended and he prepared to return to Beijing in 1610, Ricci had passed away.

Thus, their close association lasted only from 1604 to 1607—barely three years. Yet these three years shaped the rest of Xu’s life and, to a large extent, changed Chinese history.

Bo Ya: Some argue that Xu Guangqi and the other Christian scholar-officials of his time remain an enigma in Chinese intellectual history. Even by traditional Confucian moral standards, many were exemplary. Precisely because of this, the religious choices made by these elite thinkers of the 16th–17th centuries continue to intrigue China’s atheists today. They believe Xu’s conversion was complex, shaped by both personal conviction and broader economic or political factors.

Zhong Wen: In 1600, the year Xu first met Ricci, the Ming economy was at a historical peak. China may have had sixty or seventy million people—or as some estimate, as many as one hundred million. According to the Millennium Economic History of the World, China’s GDP at the time was unquestionably the world’s largest, accounting for more than 39% of global production—ten percentage points higher than the combined total of all Western European nations.

Yet politically, the late Ming was deeply corrupt. From the Jiajing reign onward, the emperor was either weak or absurd, allowing ministers or eunuchs to dominate affairs.

Although the civil service examination system remained a model admired by Europeans even into the 18th century, eunuch power increased dramatically in the later Ming. Under the Wanli Emperor, who refused to meet officials for more than twenty years, the imperial government ran only on inertia. Eunuchs outnumbered civil officials. High ministers tried repeatedly to resign but were forbidden; some even “hung up their seals and left,” quitting office without imperial approval. Such chaos revealed the approaching collapse of the dynasty.

Xu’s home region—the Su-Song area (modern southern Jiangsu and northern Zhejiang)—was both a major coastal trading zone and a key center of cotton production. It had twenty thousand female weavers and produced enough cloth for both domestic and foreign markets. Taxes from this region accounted for one-quarter of the empire’s total. Heavy taxation made people keenly aware of the consequences of political corruption.

Bo Ya: The more prosperous society became, the darker its politics grew. In this sense, late Ming China resembles China in the 21st century—precisely the opposite of Marxist theory. This sharp contrast fostered a sense of decline among the educated elite. Some fell into decadence; even upright officials like Xu Guangqi became demoralized. The imperial ideology, Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucianism, began to falter. From the middle Ming onward, Wang Yangming’s teachings spread widely, especially in Jiangnan by Xu’s time. Their emphasis on inner awakening and openness in belief created a more relaxed environment for the spread of the Christian faith as the empire moved toward its final century.