Zhong Wen: The reason Matteo Ricci and other missionaries were able to open a “window to the world” for China was that they were all “citizens of the world” dedicated to the Church. This master of cross-cultural exchange was born in Italy, traveled to India and Southeast Asia, and ultimately settled in China, where he spent the latter half of his life. His extraordinary journey left us with several memorable “faces” of different national identities.

Bo Ya: After arriving in China, Ricci always wore monastic robes and claimed he had come from India. Local officials and common people all thought he was a Buddhist monk. Why was that?

Zhong Wen: First, this came from Ricci’s own thinking—he wanted to blend into Chinese culture as quickly as possible. Before coming to China, Ricci had been preaching in India and elsewhere in the East. He discovered that the real situation in Asia was quite different from European expectations, and missionary work was much harder than anticipated. So he hoped to adopt a familiar image that would reduce resistance. Second, Chinese officials suggested this based on their understanding of religion. To the Chinese at that time, it was difficult to distinguish between Buddhist monks and Catholic priests—they both remained celibate, performed ritual ceremonies, and lived in religious compounds. Thus, officials in Zhaoqing, Guangdong, where Ricci first stayed, advised him: if he wished to live there long-term, he should wear local religious clothing—the monk’s robe.

Ricci gladly accepted. Partly, he misunderstood the relationship between religion and politics in China. When first “granted” monastic robes, he was delighted, thinking it a form of honor—because in Europe and India, religious authority was tied to political power.

But as time passed, he realized something was wrong. In China, Buddhist monks not only lacked high status; they were actually marginal to mainstream society. His mask of an “Indian monk” did not bring him the respect he had expected.

Bo Ya: So Ricci transformed himself again, adopting a second “face”—that of a Confucian scholar. He let his hair and beard grow, changed his attire, and remade himself into the image of a Chinese literatus. How did this “scholar” image help Ricci win favor among the Chinese?

Zhong Wen: First, by building extensive friendships. Based on Ricci’s writings and later scholars’ research, we know that he befriended at least 137 Chinese individuals whose names remain recorded—officials, thinkers, writers, historians, scientists, physicians, and more.

Second, by demonstrating astonishing memory skills. Ricci became famous for his prodigious memory and wrote The Art of Memory to explain his method—what we now call the “memory palace.” This amazed contemporary literati and earned him great respect.

Ricci’s disguises all served his true mission. He succeeded in gaining a considerable following. Although Christian missionaries had reached China in earlier centuries—such as the Nestorians of the Tang dynasty—none left a lasting influence. By Ricci’s time, China essentially had no living memory of Christianity. It was Ricci of the Jesuits who reopened the spiritual path. By 1605, Beijing alone already had around 200 Catholic converts.

After Ricci’s death, with the help of missionaries and Chinese friends, he was granted special permission to be buried in Beijing (according to Ming law, missionaries were supposed to be buried at the seminary in Macau). Half a century later, his successors Adam Schall von Bell and Ferdinand Verbiest were buried beside him.

Japanese historian Hirakawa Sukehiro believed Ricci to be the world’s first “citizen of the world”—not only because he traversed many lands and lived many identities, but more importantly because he united Eastern and Western cultural traditions. Faced with immense cultural differences, Ricci displayed sincerity, tolerance, and acceptance—qualities that transcended nationality.

Bo Ya: University of Tokyo professor Hirakawa Sukehiro (1931– ) evaluated Ricci as follows: “Matteo Ricci was the first giant in human history who simultaneously mastered the various arts and sciences of the European Renaissance and the classical wisdom of China’s Four Books and Five Classics. His greatest contribution lay in ‘cultural synthesis.’ By crafting, in Chinese, a coherent system of Christian theological and liturgical terminology, he enabled Chinese people to understand Jesus Christ. Because Ricci so authentically became ‘a Chinese among the Chinese,’ he became a great ‘Sinologist,’ in the deepest cultural and spiritual sense—astonishingly integrating in himself the identities of priest and scholar, Catholic and Orientalist, Italian and Chinese.”

—Of course, the Japanese do not realize that this also made Ricci somewhat “caught between two sides” in later years.