In 1577, the Jesuit Priest Matteo Ricci set out from Italy to bring Christian faith and Western thought to Ming dynasty China. To capture the complex emotional and religious drama of Ricci's extraordinary life, Jonathan Spence relates his subject's experiences with several images that Ricci himself [...]

Matteo Ricci (1552-1610), the first of the early Jesuit missionaries of the China mission, is widely considered the most outstanding cultural mediator of all time between China and the West. This engrossing and fluid book offers a thorough, knowledgeable biography of this fascinating and influential[...]

" Here at last is the text that many college teachers of Chinese, Asian, and world history have been waiting for : an accessible collection of primary sources on the life of the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci and the Catholic mission that he helped establish in China. Ricci's missionary career indeed c[...]