Zhong Wen: When the Age of Discovery had just begun, Matteo Ricci attempted to open China’s door and transform this unfamiliar society.

During the Tang dynasty, the Nestorian Church (Jingjiao) once flourished; in the Yuan dynasty, Catholicism entered China. But after the establishment of the Ming dynasty, China had essentially no Christians. Ricci can be considered one of the pioneers of Catholic missionary work in China. He successfully “paid court to the Emperor” in Beijing and established a good reputation and personal connections among the scholar-officials. He opened the path for later missionaries to enter China and created the basic model for 200 years of missionary activity: on the one hand, spreading Christianity in the Chinese language—Ricci himself even wore the robes of a Confucian scholar; on the other hand, using scientific knowledge to win favor among the Chinese.

Bo Ya: Generally speaking, such a missionary strategy is more like “lying low.” A true breakthrough would not come until after the Opium War.

Zhong Wen: Ricci, who brought Western learning to China, set off the late-Ming trend in which scholar-officials began to study Western knowledge. From the Wanli reign of the Ming through the Shunzhi reign of the Qing, more than 150 Western works were translated into Chinese.

Bo Ya: Unfortunately these ideas could not shake the fossilized society. Only iron-hulled gunboats could crack the skull of materialist atheism.

Zhong Wen: Ricci’s True Record of the Lord of Heaven and his Chinese translations—together with Xu Guangqi—of Euclid’s Elements brought to China advanced scientific and philosophical knowledge. Many Chinese technical terms—such as point, line, plane, curve, right angle, obtuse angle, acute angle, perpendicular, parallel line, diagonal, triangle, quadrilateral, polygon, center, tangent, geometry, week, etc.—were coined by them and remain in use today.

Ricci’s world map, the Kunyu Wanguo Quantu, was the first world map in Chinese history and was carved and reprinted twelve times in China. Shortly after its publication, it was introduced to Japan in the early Edo period. It caused a fundamental shift in Japan’s traditional Sinocentric worldview. It played an important role in the development of Japanese geography. Terms such as Arctic, Antarctic, Mediterranean, and Sea of Japan all came from this map. To this day, Japan calls 17th–18th century maps the “Ricci school” of maps.

Bo Ya: Unfortunately the Manchu Qing effectively strangled the spread of this knowledge. On the surface it disappeared without consequence—at most seeds were planted. The later growth, flowering, and fruit all came at the cost of the Qing’s gradual demise.

Zhong Wen: After entering China, Ricci praised Chinese civilization highly. He believed that aside from lacking “our holy Catholic faith,” “China’s greatness is unmatched in the world,” and “China is not merely a kingdom; it is in fact a world unto itself.” He marvelled that “the ideal state described theoretically by Plato in The Republic has been put into practice in China.” He also observed that the Chinese were highly learned: “They excel in medicine, natural science, mathematics, and astronomy.” But he also noted, “Science is not generally treated as a serious object of study among them.”

Bo Ya: This is because science was not part of the civil-service examinations and could not help one rise to office or wealth. Meanwhile, China also failed to establish a system of property rights based on private ownership.

Zhong Wen: Ricci was never able to understand China’s political system—a system that Europeans had never encountered. First, he saw that China had an emperor, so he concluded it must be a monarchy. Second, the emperor lived deep inside the palace—did he really govern the people? In practice, the country was run by the scholar-officials; thus China appeared to be an aristocracy. Third, upon closer examination, these “aristocrats” differed from Europe’s hereditary nobility. China’s scholar-officials came from civil-service examinations open to all men. Could China then be a democracy?

Bo Ya: Is this not precisely the “mixed constitution” most admired by Aristotle? No wonder Ricci’s writings set off a wave of “China-mania” in Europe.