How Did Matteo Ricci Get Into the Forbidden City? A Jesuit Who Learned to Think in Chinese

Matteo Ricci reached Beijing slowly, over almost twenty years, by doing something few Europeans of his time attempted: he learned to read, write and argue in Classical Chinese, dressed and behaved like a Confucian scholar, and offered the Ming elite knowledge they valued, above all mathematics, astronomy and maps. In 1601 the Wanli Emperor invited him to court, and he became the first Westerner admitted to the Forbidden City, a breakthrough the Wikipedia article credits largely to his accurate predictions of solar eclipses. Strikingly, he never actually met the emperor. His story is less about one dramatic entry than about a long apprenticeship in another language and culture.

From Macerata to the edge of China

Ricci was born on 6 October 1552 in Macerata, in central Italy. He joined the Society of Jesus in 1571 and studied mathematics and astronomy in Rome under Christopher Clavius, one of the leading mathematicians of the day. That training would later become his passport in China.

In 1578 he sailed from Lisbon for Asia, worked in Goa, and in August 1582 arrived in Macau, the Portuguese trading post on the south China coast. At that time Christian missionary activity in China was almost entirely confined to Macau. Another Italian Jesuit, Michele Ruggieri, had arrived three years earlier to study Chinese and prepare a way into the mainland.

Learning the language first

Ricci threw himself into the language and customs of China and became one of the first Western scholars to master both the Chinese script and Classical Chinese, the written language of the educated elite. This was not a side project. In Ming China, status and trust came from learning, and learning meant books written in an ancient, compressed literary style. A foreigner who could quote the classics and write elegant prose could be taken seriously; one who could not would always remain an outsider.

He and Ruggieri also compiled a Portuguese–Chinese dictionary, the first dictionary of its kind for any European language, using a Latin transcription system they developed for Chinese sounds. The manuscript was lost, rediscovered in 1934 and finally published in 2001. Later, with Lazzaro Cattaneo, Ricci worked on a Chinese–Portuguese dictionary that marked tones with accents; that work has never been found.

Zhaoqing and the first map

In 1583 the governor of Zhaoqing, Wang Pan, who had heard about Ricci's skill in mathematics and map-making, invited the two Jesuits to settle in his city, then the seat of the viceroy of Guangdong and Guangxi. There, in 1584, Ricci produced the first European-style world map in Chinese. No prints of it survive.

The Zhaoqing years ended badly: a new viceroy expelled Ricci at the end of the 1580s (the Wikipedia article gives both 1588 and 1589). He obtained permission to move north to Shaoguan and re-established his mission there. Setbacks like this were part of the pattern. Each move north depended on local officials, permissions and personal connections.

Becoming a Confucian scholar

Ricci's most important decision was how to present himself. With the formal approval of his superior Alessandro Valignano, he aligned himself with the Confucian literati and adopted their dress. He presented Christianity not as a foreign religion that would sweep Chinese tradition away, but as the completion of beliefs the Chinese already held, and he used the term Tianzhu, "Lord of Heaven", for God.

He wrote in Chinese for Chinese readers. His major works in Chinese include On Friendship (1595) and The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, books meant to persuade educated Chinese readers on their own intellectual ground. His tolerance of Chinese ancestor rites later fuelled the long Chinese Rites controversy inside the Catholic Church.

The road to Beijing

In 1595 Ricci reached Nanjing and Nanchang, and in August 1597 Valignano appointed him superior of the whole China mission, a post he held until his death. He first reached Beijing on 7 September 1598, but the timing was bad: China was responding militarily to the Japanese invasion of Korea, and the situation kept him away from the Imperial Palace. After two months of waiting he turned back south.

The breakthrough came in 1601, when the Wanli Emperor invited him to court as an adviser. Ricci was given free access to the palace and a generous stipend, but the reclusive emperor never received him in person. In Beijing he founded what became the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception and built a network of scholarly friends. The most famous was the official Xu Guangqi, who became a Christian and Ricci's closest collaborator.

The 1602 world map and Euclid in Chinese

In 1602, at the emperor's request, Ricci printed the Kunyu Wanguo Quantu, "Map of the Myriad Countries of the World", with Chinese collaborators Li Zhizao and Zhong Wentao. It is a large woodcut printed on six panels like a folding screen, about 1.5 metres high and 3.7 metres wide. It is the earliest known Chinese world map based on European cartography and the first map in Chinese to show the Americas, and it places China at the centre of the known world.

The map travelled fast. Envoys brought a copy to Korea in 1603, Japanese copies followed, and Ricci himself estimated that more than 1,000 copies were reprinted. Only six originals are known today, none of them in China; one was bought in 2009 for US$1 million by the James Ford Bell Trust in Minnesota.

In 1607 Ricci and Xu Guangqi published a Chinese translation of Euclid's Elements, bringing Greek geometry into the language of Chinese scholarship. For language learners, that project is a reminder that translation is also invention: they had to create Chinese terms for ideas that had never been expressed in Chinese before.

Death and legacy

Ricci died in Beijing on 11 May 1610, aged 57. Ming law required foreigners who died in China to be buried in Macau, but his fellow Jesuit Diego de Pantoja petitioned the court, and the Wanli Emperor granted a burial plot in Beijing, which became the Zhalan Cemetery. His journals, completed and translated into Latin by Nicolas Trigault, were published in Augsburg in 1615 as De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas, giving European readers a detailed account of Ming China from the inside.

He was not a simple saint of cultural harmony. In private letters he could call the Chinese "barbarians", even while praising Chinese culture. Yet his method, learn the language deeply, respect local learning and explain new ideas in local terms, still makes him a symbol of cross-cultural understanding. In 2022 Pope Francis recognised his heroic virtue, giving him the title Venerable.

Learn with Matteo Ricci: English phrases about building bridges

Phrase	Meaning	Example
to build bridges	to create understanding between groups	Ricci built bridges between Europe and China.
to get a foot in the door	to get a first chance to enter	Maths helped him get a foot in the door.
when in Rome, do as the Romans do	follow local customs	He dressed like a scholar: when in Rome...
to go the extra mile	to make more effort than expected	He went the extra mile to master the classics.
a steep learning curve	a lot to learn quickly	Classical Chinese was a steep learning curve.

Try this: Think of a time you had to fit into a new culture or workplace. Write three sentences using "get a foot in the door" and "a steep learning curve".