in Town Hall on Ricci Green,
the public square on Ricci Street

Matteo Ricci

Who was Matteo Ricci?

This Italian Jesuit missionary (1552 - 1610) was the first Westerner into China since Marco Polo three centuries before. Full portrait (128K) from which I cropped the head shot on the right.

What did he do?

Matteo Ricci brought Western mathematics and science -- and some religion -- to the closed Chinese society of the Ming Dynasty. When Matteo Ricci arrived in China in September 1583 carrying a copy of Euclid's Elements, he wrote:

In China, the penalty for studying mathematics without the Emperor's authorization is death. However, this law has fallen into disuse.

While he was forbidden to leave, he had a quarter-century career ahead of him. Matteo Ricci was the first ...

official Westerner to get deep into China since Marco Polo in the 1200's. Learn more
Roman Catholic missionary in China. Learn more
person to expose the Chinese to Western science. Learn more

How to pronounce Ricci

Of the three ways -- Reech-y, Reesh-y, Reek-y -- take your pick. As long as English speakers use Florence instead of Firenze and switch from Peking to Beijing, none of these three Ricci pronunciations is incorrect. Personally, I use the first: Reech-y. Similarly, the c followed by a vowel in cello, the Italian musical instrument, is chello, not kello; the c followed by an h in Pinnochio, the Italian folktale, is a hard k, not a soft ch.

When did he do it?

1552born October 6 at Macerata in the Papal States
1568studied law in Rome
1571studied mathematics and astronomy under Clavius
1577asked to be sent to the missions in farthest Asia
1578arrived at Goa on India's west coast
1580ordained in Goa
1582arrived at Macao; settled in Canton Province
1595moved to Nanking (Nanchang)
1601settled in Peking (Beijing)
1610died May 11, Peking

Learn more

Why is this website named after Matteo Ricci?

To the other Jesuits back in Europe as well as to his Chinese hosts, Matteo Ricci was an evangelist, gadfly, maverick, and trailblazer.

Matteo Ricci on the Web

Some people claim that the World Wide Web is the biggest library ever. For current hi-tech knowledge, that is certainly true. But what about for an obscure historical figure such as a 16th Century Jesuit missionary in China?

Building the palace: excerpt from The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (Jonathan D. Spence, Viking, 1984)

"In 1596 Matteo Ricci taught the Chinese how to build a memory palace." Sounds a lot like the World Wide Web, too. While reading this opening page of Spence's biography in 1994 a couple of months after I first browsed the Web, I made the connection between memory palaces and web sites.

Fabulous and Mysterious Information - How did the Chinese react to Matteo Ricci's new ideas about their place in the universe?

In the time of Matteo Ricci - What else was going on around 1600?

Matteo Ricci maps - Maps by Matteo Ricci as well as those showing his travels. Mappaemundi: World Maps - Forget Rand McNally. What about the maps inside our heads, sometimes called mental maps or concept maps?

Excerpts from the journals of Matteo Ricci. Hear in his own (translated) voice what he thought about the Chinese.

What's a religion? - Matteo Ricci adapted Christianity to Chinese reality. It took a couple of centuries for the Church to figure out whether his converts were really Christians.

Clavius, teacher of Matteo Ricci

By the middle of the 16th century, it was clear to Europeans that the calendar they'd been using since Roman times (and borrowed from the Egyptians) was out of whack. In fact, it was losing a little over 11 minutes per year. Eventually, that would put Easter around the time crops were harvested in Western Europe, which made the Pope Gregory XIII very uneasy.

Clavius, a German Jesuit, proposed our leap year system, which will hold us for many centuries. To switch systems, he proposed that Wednesday, October 4, 1582 in the old calendar system be followed by Thursday, October 15, 1582 in the new system. Both his calendar and switching method drew criticism for robbing the people of eleven days, but Pope Gregory so decreed it.

Known more for his teaching in Rome than for any original advances in mathematics, Clavius was the first mathematician to use the decimal point.